Balafon

A research team at Yale has successfully grown rat lungs in a vat, and implanted them in rats which then used them to breathe.

Since my lights are powered by nuclear fusion¹, I will not be turning them off tomorrow night.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

Read a great article this morning on the dangers of scientific consensus. The Royal Navy had established in the 18th century that lemon juice cured scurvy. But in the second half of the 19th century, when steamships’ fast travel times had mostly eliminated the danger of scurvy, scientists enamoured of the new germ theory of disease hypothesized that scurvy was in fact caused by bacteria.

Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes.

On Scott’s Antarctic expidition they made sure to boil all their fresh food extra long (in the process destroying all its vitamin C), and immediately began getting scurvy. They switched to freshly-killed seal while they stayed on the Antarctic coast, which cured them, but on their final push into the interior had to make do with processed food, with fatal results.

Some guys at Intellectual Ventures scrounged up some parts on eBay, and invented a laser mosquito-zapper.

If you can’t drug ‘em, fry ‘em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Thankfully, contrary to the fears expressed in my last post, the Copenhagen conference did not finally end up with a substantive deal.

The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.