Author: Adam Clare

The Story of Electronics

The Story of Electronics is brought to us by the same woman who made The Story of Stuff.

There is also a section on action that you can take and it’s already made a differnece!

From their blog:

Inspired by The Story of Electronics, hundreds of people sent letters to Lenovo President and CEO Rory Read yesterday, telling the company to green its products and “Make ‘em Safe, Make ‘em Last, and Take ‘em Back.” Within hours,Read got back in touch to say he “could not agree with [us] more.”

We’re excited that Lenovo wants to do better, but with their weak track record on responsible recycling and failure to follow through on a commitment to get PVC and brominated flame retardants out of their products, we’re not ready to take them at their word just yet.

The Story of Electronics

Carbon Cloth to Wipe Away Toxic Stuff

This is a pretty neat reuse of knowledge of material science from one of violence to one of saving the environment. Carbon cloth meant for the battlefield can be used to clean up toxic spills.

The textile is composed of tiny pores that adsorb organic molecules through weak Van der Waals forces. By adding ozone to the process, the fabric becomes even more effective at catalyzing the conversion of unwanted content into smaller molecules—or even carbon dioxide and water. In other words, the activated carbon cloth breaks pollutants down into less-harmful compounds.

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Science is Great!

publicscience.ca is designed to educate the Canadian population about how great science and knowledge is. This a direct reaction to the direct attacks that research, science, and innovation have been under since the Conservative government took power. It’s really good to see scientists taking a stand and promoting all the reasons that science and research makes the world a better place!

It can also highlight important work that is already on the public record but may not be getting the attention it deserves. Of course, scientists who work for the Canadian people must be answerable for the dollars they spend. But too often, critiques of government science begin and end with knee-jerk scoffing when the topics seem frivolous to the ill-informed layman. A study on bird habitats, for example, might teach us something important about the environmental impact of public policy.

Ottawa is a government town. Part of what that means — although Ottawans themselves are prone to forget this — is that it’s a research town. Citizens have a duty to be informed about the world around them. Government has a duty to, at the very least, not get in their way.

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Out my Window Documentary

Out my Window is NFB online documentary that is really great! It provides a 360 degree view of a person’s apartment in an urban centre from around the world. It’s really neat to see how so many people live and how similar and different a lot of things are.

Cizek says in her Director’s Statement: “To be human in this century is — more than ever before — to be urban.” There is a strong social justice message in the piece, in particular, highlighting how the peripheries where many highrises are built are too often ignored by downtown politics. Out My Window, and the larger multi-year Highrise project by the NFB that it is part of, might be one way to bridge realities between suburban and urban and raise awareness, but Cizek also insists that the periphery needs to be physically brought back into the fabric of the city. “In some places it may mean proper access to public transit (Toronto), in other places it might mean other forms of infrastructure like water, roads, electricity (Istanbul). We also need to link these realities culturally, in both directions (Amsterdam [as depicted in Out My Window] is a great example of doing this right).”

In terms of doing it right, the highrises have lessons to teach planners and politicians, if they are listening, in terms of local needs. The informal and illegal economies of the highrises are often harmless, quotidian services like barbers, and fresh vegetable delivery. Cizek says that these local entrepreneurs “…are technically illegal due to zoning and permits, but are vital to the communities: halal meat distributor on the third floor, daycare on the seventh, etc.” In Toronto, the Tower Renewal project aims to address and foster some of this entrepreneurial spirit.

Read more here and see Out my Window

Turing Skin into Blood

Researchers have found a way to get blood from skin cells, no not by cutting people. More specifically they can use skin cells to produce blood – something that was thought impossible. This will have huge positive effects on people requiring blood treatments.

Among the first applications McMaster will pursue is to eliminate the need for bone-marrow registries that seek to match cancer patients to donors against very long odds. Instead, the new process could turn patients into their own ideal donors, said McMaster vice-president and dean of health sciences John Kelton, himself a hematologist.
…
The director of Canada’s Stem Cell Network said the McMaster discovery is significant and could soon lead to what called “personalized blood cells”.

It is also important because it suggests skin cells can be converted into other types of cells, such as muscle or pancreatic cells, said Michael Rudnicki.

Read more at TheSpec.com