Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace on kottke.org

Being the Result of One Man’s Fed-upped-ness With ‘How to Write’ Books Not Actually Showing You How to Write.

Potentially Universal Mechanism Of Aging Identified

Sirtuin genes have two functions: repair damaged DNA and regulate gene activity in cells. As DNA damage accumulated over time, however, the sirtuin became too distracted to properly regulate gene activity, and as a result, characteristics of aging set in.

“For ten years, this entire phenomenon in yeast was considered to be relevant only to yeast,” says Sinclair. “But we decided to test of this same process occurs in mammals.”

From Science Daily

House on Hydraulic Legs (video)

“It’s interesting how artists - once they have an idea like this - they have to almost become engineers to make it happen.”

From Scientific American.

From Technology Review: Sun + Water = Fuel

With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into
hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a
dominant source of energy.

Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something
scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s. In particular,
they have tried to replicate the way green plants break down water.
Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has
required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and
expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an
inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room
temperature and without caustic chemicals–the same benign conditions
found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another
that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and
produce hydrogen gas.

From Scientific American: Does Consumerism Make Us Crazy?

The term ecopsychology, first coined by writer and theorist Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book, Voice of the Earth, is loosely defined as the connection between ecology and human psychology. Roszak argues that humans can heal what he calls their “psychological alienation” from nature and build a more sustainable
society if they recognize that we all have an innate emotional bond with the natural world.

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv, argues that kids are so plugged into television and video games that they’ve lost their connection to the natural world.