24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Elements of Humanity's Future
The next hundred years will be a period of transition between the metal-and-silicon technology of today and the enzyme-and-nerve technology of tomorrow. The enzyme-and-nerve technology will be the result of combining the tools of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. We cannot hope to predict the concrete forms in which a mature enzyme-and-nerve technology would express itself. When I think of the space technology of tomorrow, I think of three concrete images in particular. First, ... 1 
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notes22 JUL 2014 by ideonexus
Human Respiration is Carbon Neutral
The very first time you learned about carbon dioxide was probably in grade school: We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Any eight-year-old can rattle off this fact. More specifically, the mitochondria within our cells perform cellular respiration: they burn carbohydrates (in the example shown below, glucose) in the oxygen that we breathe in to yield carbon dioxide and water, which we exhale as waste products, as well as energy, which is required to maintain...
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1 We exhale carbon and that carbon is sequestered in the next plant we eat.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Many Factors Combine to Allow Life on Earth
As we look at planet Earth and the factors that enabled us to be here, we quickly realize that our planet is very special. Here’s a short list: the long-term existence of a protective and oxygen-rich atmosphere; Earth’s axial tilt, stabilized by a single large moon; the ozone layer and the magnetic field, which jointly protect surface creatures from lethal cosmic radiation; plate tectonics, which regulates the levels of carbon dioxide and keeps the global temperature stable; the fact that our...Marcelo Gleiser's argument that the many favorable factors that produce life on Earth mean life could be very rare in the Universe.
10 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Vitamins Come from Living Things
Every vitamin is made by living cells — either our own, or in other species. Vitamin D is produced in our skin, for example, when sunlight strikes a precursor of cholesterol. A lemon tree makes vitamin C out of glucose. Making a vitamin is often an enormously baroque process. In some species, it takes 22 different proteins to craft a vitamin B12 molecule.
While a protein may be made up of thousands of atoms, a vitamin may be made up of just a few dozen. And yet, despite their small size, vit...They are part of our universal chemistry from our common origins.
13 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
When Humanism Comes into Conflict With Naturalism
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the co... 1 notes
notesReducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a naturalist position, but the trade-off is lowering living standards for many people in the world, which goes against the humanist position.
13 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Global Warming is a Land Management Issue
One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas. To understand the movement of carbon through the atmosphere and biosphere, we need to measure a lot of numbers. I do not want to confuse you with a lot of numbers, so I will ask you to remember just one number. The number that I ask you to remember is one hundredth of an inch per year. Now I will explain what this number means. ... 1 notes
notesWith proper land management, we can pull the excess carbon from the atmosphere and into biomass.
23 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Why You Lose Weight While You Sleep
Here's a simple question: Why do you weigh more when you go to sleep than when you wake up? Because you do... You can check this yourself. Somehow, while doing absolutely nothing all night but sleep, you will wake up lighter.
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All night long, every time you breathe out, a bunch of carbon atoms, formerly inside your body, leave your insides and take off into the night air. You breathe in oxygen, O2. You breathe out carbon dioxide, (two oxygen atoms with a carbon atom attached), so there...Over the course of the night, through respiration, you lose a pound of weight to the carbon atoms in Carbon Dioxide.
23 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
An Elegant Complex Description of Fire
The atoms like each other to different degrees. Oxygen, for instance in the air, would like to be next to carbon, and if they get near to each other, they snap together. If they’re not too close though, they repel and they go apart, so they don’t know that they could snap together. It’s just as if you had a ball, it was trying to climb a hill and there was a hole it could go into, like a volcano hole, a deep one. It’s rolling along, it doesn’t go down in the deep hole, because if it starts to...From Richard Feynman, making the process of burning wood seem wondrous.
13 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Dyson Tree
Many species of terrestrial plants, including the skunk cabbage that sprouts in February in the woods of Princeton, New Jersey, where I live, are warm-blooded to a limited extent. For about two weeks the skunk cabbage maintains a warm temperature by rapidly metabolizing starch stored inside the part of its anatomy known as the spadix, which contains the hidden flowers with their male and female structures. According to folklore, the spadix is warm enough to melt snow around it. The evolutiona...Folksonomies: biology speculation
Folksonomies: biology speculation
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notesA plant that grows a greenhouse to sustain itself in persistently cold climates.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Externalities
In every economic transaction there is a willing buyer and a willing seller. and they agree on a price that benefits both. But there are spillover effects in many economic transactions—costs and/or benefits that are transferred to third parties. Friedman called these spillovers "neighborhood effects." Today, most economists call them "externalities.
At their most basic, externalities don't have to involve buying and selling. If you smoke in a restaurant instead of stepping outside it's easi... 1 notes
notesExamples of externalities, public side-effects, good and bad, of our personal actions that impact the commons.
