UCLA researchers use bacteria to convert carbon dioxide to isobutanol fuel using solar photosynthesis. Isobutanol can be used as tranportation fuel using the existing gasoline infrastructure. …
… “In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. ” …
Via UCLA: Bacteria to liquid fuel
Q: I just broke up with a Hoosier a few months ago, and I am sad I won’t be getting a slice of Sugar Cream Pie he used to bring back for me during the holidays.
Do you have a great recipe for one so I can make it myself?
Sent by Becky
Greece, Europe | Micro-Nations
Holy Mountain of Athos is a place out of time, a slice of history that might have never existed. Here, even the calendar is different from one used by the rest of the Greece.
For most of its existence this tiny peninsula was an island of tranquility in the turbulent sea of everyday life. It is a spiritual sanctuary and one of the holiest places within Orthodox Christianity.
Holy mountain of Athos, is a monk republic, autonomous within the borders of Greece and administered directly by the Universal patriarch of Constantinople.
The oldest monastic settlements on Mount Athos date back to early 900s. However, the region itself rose to prominence during the last years of Byzantine empire and the beginning of Ottoman rule, when the conquering Ottoman armies and bands of freelance marauders ravaged the Balkan peninsula.
Christian monks seeking refuge found shelter in the steep cliffs and dense forests of Mount Athos. The community grew quickly, becoming in the process one of most important centers of Orthodoxy in Europe. It served as a beacon for seekers of spiritual enlightenment from as far a way as Russia and Georgia. While over the years the monk population was slowly declining, the population underwent a recent upswing after the fall of communism, with an influx of new arrivals from Eastern Europe.
Today there are twenty monasteries scattered over a 60km long peninsula and the current population is around 2200. Some of the monasteries belong to distinct national churches, i.e. Hilandar to Serbian, Zograf to Bulgarian and Ivrion Georgian. Some of the monks have opted to live in even greater isolation, living in sketes, small communities which consist of a common prayer area, a chapel or a church and a number of individual huts. There are currently twelve sketes on Mount Athos.
The town of Karyes serves locally as an administrative center of the region. It is also a home to about 2000 additional lay workers hired by the monasteries. Mount Athos is a closed community. Visits by tourists are tightly controlled, as not to disturb the peace and piety of the residents. There is an age old ban on visitation by women, which according to the monks, is a prohibition imposed not out of feeling of male superiority, but one born out of weakness of human spirit.
Although technically part of Greece and the EU, Mount Athos is said to be exempt from most of the EU treaties.
Seattle, Washington | Outsider Architecture
Exploring the woods inevitably involves detritus – a broken branch decaying on the ground, leaves slowly turning to dust, pine cones gone to seed. Perhaps you’ve stumbled across a behemoth of a once-tree, felled by lightning or creeping, internal rot.
In the Olympic Sculpture Park of Seattle, you’ll find sculptures by modern masters like Claes Oldenburg and Richard Serra, but you’ll also find another more unusual work of art: a rotting tree. It’s slowly rotting, in a controlled environment called the Nekoum Vivarium. (Vivarium means “a place of life” in Latin.)
The tree in the sculpture park is not entirely sculpture nor nature, but is perhaps a mixture of both – natural decay under the careful gaze of the artist. This Western Hemlock lived its life in the Green River Watershed and was brought, with permission of the State, to the Olympic Sculpture Park in 2006. This vivarium was the vision of artist-cum-arborist Mark Dion. As he puts it:
“In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem—a dead tree, but a living system—and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we’re building around it. And we’re pumping it up with a life support system — an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement — to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does—emphasizing how, once that’s gone, it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system—to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it. So this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system it’s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense we’re building a failure.”
The display includes magnifying glasses to examine the rot and a chalkboard for lessons on trees. The room is open whenever a volunteer staffer is there.
The vivarium is in a 9-acre park on Seattle’s waterfront, adjacent to Myrtle Edwards Park.
For fun, I asked my @skinnyjeans Tweeties what was the modern day version of getting a fruitcake for Christmas? I was more curious to know if people thought the fruitcake still reigned supreme or if something new had taken its place. Here’s some of the funny responses.
If someone got me a Chia pet, I would think that they thought of me as a fruitcake kind of friend…lol!
Happy Hanukkah! Here’s a little treat from Jake and Micah to celebrate the Festival of Lights. A pair of Hanukkah fortune cookies, perfect for the season.
And just so no one is left out, they also have some Christmas theme fortune cookies, too.
$4.99 each or $9.95 for a pair.
Dutair aluminium side channel blowers are robust units used for versitile applications. These blowers stand out for their durability, due to the robust aluminium design, which makes them highly resistant against corrosion. Other advantages of Dutair side channel ventilators include:
lightweight due to use of aluminium
compact size for building into machines
corrosion-proof aluminium
contact free operation eliminating wear
oil-free so no maintenance
feature noise-dampers as standard, for low noise levels
universal gas pipe connection at inlet and outlet
vibration-free and pulsation-free operation
versatile use for pressure and vacuum
The use of Dutair aluminium side channel blowers is common in machine-building as high pressure ventilator, vacuum pump, air pump, booster, low pressure compressor and oil-free compressor. The applications are unlimited like aireting, dust cleaning, vacuum lifting, vacuum tables, blowing off, pneumatic transport, cooling and vacuum molding.
Introduction of Centrifugal Slurry Pump –ELM Series
The ELM(R) series Centrifugal slurry pumps are cantilevered slurry pumps, horizontal, centrifugal slurry pumps. They are suitable for delivering less abrasive, low dense slurry. The ELM(R) series centrifugal slurry pumps have a high rate of revolution and small volume saving floor area.
The features of this kind of Centrifugal slurry pump
The frame plates of ELM Series Centrifugal slurry pump have changeable, wear-resistant metal liners or rubber liners upon request and the impellers are made of wear-resistant metal or rubber. And the discharge branch can be oriented to any of the eight different positions for installation and application upon request. The shaft seal is adopted both gland seal and centrifugal seal.
Main application of this kind of Centrifugal slurry pump
This kind of centrifugal slurry pump mainly applies in the metallurgical, mining, coal and construction material industry etc.
We are leading manufactuer of producing the low weight loss Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnets.
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This range of prices for Twelve Nights In Hollywood: Ella Fitzgerald feels historic …
List price CD: $70
Amazon CD: $56
iTunes AAC (256 kpbs, AAC encoded*): $40
Amazon MP3 (256 kpbs, LAME encoded): $34.31 (why the 31 cents?)
The Amazon MP3 is less than half the cost of list price CD.
A fun and cute Christmas craft, plus a beautiful little coconut cake in today’s Delicious Links.
Big shocker here: Joe Lieberman, the former VP candidate of the Democratic party, appears set to knife his old pals in the back.
NYT: In a surprise setback for Democratic leaders, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said on Sunday that he would vote against the health care legislation in its current form.
The bill’s supporters had said earlier that they thought they had secured Mr. Lieberman’s agreement to go along with a compromise they worked out to overcome an impasse within the party.
But on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman told the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to scrap the idea of expanding Medicare and to abandon the idea of any new government insurance plan, or lose his vote.
If Lieberman does, ultimately, prove to be the stick in the healthcare craw, maybe history will look on Ned Lamont, and his 2006 primary run (which prompted Lieberman to go independent), as the Ralph Nader spoiler character of healthcare. After all, if Lieberman had gotten to keep his party affiliation, maybe he wouldn’t be such a pain today.
Meanwhile, as the NYT goes onto note, Harry Reid is trying desperately to hold his ship together on another issue: abortion. The conservative Democrats think the only way they’ll get re-elected is if the final bill includes some kind of anti-abortion measures to guarantee that government money doesn’t go towards it.
Bottom line: there’s a long way to go before this bill (or something similar to it) gets through the Senate.
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I was curious if any one else has seen a link with panic attacks and spikes in BG? I hear that BG can mess with your body chemistry, and I noticed today that after some fruit my BG spiked and I started to feel a little anxiety.
anyone have any info?
These rather rotund Christmas cats are waiting to bring some holiday cheer to you and your guests. Use them to decorate a tree, mantel, or tabletop. Handpainted mercury glass with flocked stripes and a little holiday wreath for a collar.
On sale now for $11.99 US at SmithsonianStore.com
I also had to share this little guy who was available at CB2, however it looks like they already sold out.
“Everything you see I owe to pasta.” – Sophia Loren
“I do love Italian food. Any kind of pasta or pizza.” – Jennifer Love Hewitt
“I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.” – Bernadette Peters
“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” – Federico Fellini
“You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” – Yogi Berra
“The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 a.m.” – Charles Pierce
“Life is too short, and I’m Italian. I’d much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0.” – Sophia Bush
“We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.” – Jeff Marder
“No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.” – Christopher Morley
“And I don’t cook, either. Not as long as they still deliver pizza.” – Tiger Woods
Fresh data on corporate sentiment out of Japan is mixed — basically confirming that the country remains mired in an anemic zombie state.
Bloomberg: The Tankan index of sentiment among big makers of products including cars and electronics climbed nine points to minus 24 in December, the Bank of Japan said in Tokyo today. The median forecast of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was minus 27. A negative number means pessimists outnumber optimists.
Stocks fell as the report showed large companies planned deeper spending cuts to protect earnings that are under threat from a currency that climbed to a 14-year high against the dollar last month. Sony Corp., forecasting a second straight annual loss, said last month that it will eliminate jobs, close a factory and transfer some touch-panel production to China.
You can find the complete survey results at the BoJ, in English, here.
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I am sure my Bg was high at doc and at check in at hospital because I had eaten just before I went to the doctor. Drank a soft drink with the meal and another on the way to the doctor.
I know that an A1C of 8 is high. My question is, could my A1C have been that high just because of my BAD eating habits? I think my doctor is just quick to prescribe medication. I have taken myself off of both medicines and have seen no changes in my BG readings. He told me that there is no way I can control this with diet. I have read otherwise. Just wondering if I am crazy for wanting to control this beast by eating right. Thanks for reading and any replies, positive or negative.
Faithful readers will know that I’m very fond of what used to be called “B movies,” so it should be no surprise that I also love movie trailers. The otherwise forgettable 1998 remake of Godzilla featured one of the best theatrical trailers I’ve ever seen: old guys are fishing off a East River pier in Manhattan, one hooks something big, his pole bends, the camera moves to the water where a huge wake is forming, and Godzilla’s head emerges. Fade to black with this in gigantic type across the screen: “SIZE DOES MATTER.” The theater audience went wild. Too bad the actual movie was awful, but I still remember the trailer!
The question of size in grant writing was posed by one of our readers in a comment on Health Care Reform Means Green Grass & High Tides for Grant Writers. Michael Leza wrote:
I’ve seen you say before that a good way to get into grant writing is to volunteer to write grants for small local non-profits. Do these kind of non profits have a realistic chance of getting funded or is this more of an exercise in going through the motions and learning the process? Would some of these big health care reform/stimulus bills be a more likely source of grants for these kinds of organizations, or would it be easier to try and apply for a more established grant (be it federal or otherwise)?
Michael is wondering if it is worth volunteering to write proposals for a small nonprofit in hopes of becoming a paid grant writer. Since only small nonprofits are likely to take him up on his offer, he probably doesn’t have any choice. But his question suggests the larger issue of whether the size of the applicant organization, and by extension the age and experience of the applicant, matters in applying for grants. While, like most questions regarding grant writing, quantum effects cloud the answer, in most cases size doesn’t matter, and it often helps if the applicant for a grant program is new and/or has no track record, as long as the applicant meets basic eligibility criteria. How is this possible?
Let’s take a real world example of a tiny faith-based nonprofit organization in Watts that came to us about 10 years ago for help in writing a LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) proposal to provide services for students at Jordan High School, which more or less is the definition of a high-risk high school. What made this interesting is that DCSF was re-bidding a contract it had had for years with an extremely well-known and very large nonprofit in Watts that has been scooping up city, county, federal and foundation grants since the Watts Rebellion in 1965 (those readers who know South Central will know which agency I’m writing about).
Our prospective client, a minister, asked if I thought he could compete for this grant against the local heavyweight champ of nonprofits. I told him that he was man of faith, and if he had faith in his organization, so did we, and we could write a competitive application that would put him in the ring, a nonprofit Rocky against a nonprofit Apollo Creed. Like Rocky, our client won the grant. While we wrote a great proposal (shameless plug here), the most likely reason it was funded was that the incumbent large organization probably thought they had the grant in the bag and threw together a lame proposal. Also, DCFS may have been tired of funding the same organization. Over the years, grantees that get repeated grants often end up becoming lazy, don’t file reports on time and/or start fighting with the funding source. In other words, they act like a typical teenager. This opens up opportunities for new and frisky applicants to successfully compete for grants. The punch line is that once this small nonprofit got their DCFS grant, they used our grant writing skills to develop into a large, multi-program agency with lots of grant funds.
The same principle that size doesn’t usually matter in applying for grants is also true regarding small public agencies. Two examples will demonstrate this. I’ve already mentioned one before in Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later, which involved us writing a funded $250,000 Department of Education Goals 2000 proposal for a tiny school district with just over 100 students in rural Oklahoma. We were able to make the client competitive against giant applicants like Chicago Public Schools by emphasizing the oddity of their situation: the District wanted to implement bilingual education because of an avalanche of immigrant workers arriving in the community for jobs at an about to open industrial-sized hog farm.
This year, we wrote a funded $1,500,000 HUD Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) program grant for a small, rural city in California that caters to thousands of seasonal tourists. We usually write LBPHC proposals for much larger cities like Boston, but HUD apparently bought our argument that this city, although small in comparison to most LBPHC grantees, has a big lead problem and could implement a believable abatement program. We amped up the proposal by tying the lead problem to the current foreclosure mess (it never hurts to play up any related media-inspired hysteria you can find in a proposal). It also helped that our client had never before had a direct HUD grant, since all of their previous HUD awards were passed through the California Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Small Cities Program. I think HUD is always looking to fund new applicants for LBPHC and other long-in-the tooth grant programs and was pleasantly startled to get a credible proposal from an unlikely applicant.
As long as your organization meets basic eligibility for a given grant competition and avoids the “silly factor” that Jake wrote about last week in So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?, get busy and write. As with many things in life, it doesn’t much matter how big the applicant is, as long as the grant writer knows how to use his skills to craft a compelling argument. With luck, the funder will see the application as an opportunity to fund someone new, while using grant funds to meet a real local need.
We love to play with the fillings in our favorite thumbprint cookies (membrillo, anyone?) This time, we tried one of the recipes from our 10 things to do with a can of pumpkin roundup – pumpkin marmalade with apricots and ginger.
