I’m taking the Chris route in not setting resolutions. I’ll call them I’ll tries instead. Last spring I started going to sangha on Sundays, but then there was a series of unfortunate events and I stopped going. I keep saying that I’ll go back, but so far I haven’t been able to take the leap. I’m not very good at joining in with new groups. My sangha isn’t very big, but I’m the youngest member and I really don’t know any of these people outside of sangha. In the new year I will try harder to attend sangha on Sundays.

I will also try harder to finish projects that I started last year like the family photo album. I will try to finish scanning all the pictures into iPhoto and maybe even have an album printed up. I will also try harder to scan in some of the yoga routines that come in my Yoga Journal and make an at-home-practice book.

So there’s my list of I’ll tries for the year. Have a safe and happy New Year!

I have nothing to blog about. NOTHING! I have very little to do at work until tomorrow when I have time on the microscope, but even then I only have about half the samples I had planned to look at. I’ve started a new book that’s not very good. There are things that need to be done at the house that I don’t feel like doing. Instead I wander from room to room usually following Chris around. I’m probably driving him mental by now.

I finally broke down and cleaned our living room yesterday. I don’t know why I was putting this off because it only took about twenty minutes (we have a very small place). I need to dust and vacuum the bedroom today (if I had done it yesterday, I wouldn’t have anything to do today). I haven’t been to the gym all week and will not go all next week because I’m going out of town. I’m just one giant slug.

I think I’m anxious. I’m ready for the New Year to start. I have all these plans for a new and improved me in the next year and a voodoo belief that next year will be way better than the Crappy Year of 2005.

Yep, that’s about it. To top it all off, I left my iPod at home today. I guess I’m listening to NPR all morning.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone.

The race to end our dependence on fossil fuels is on. With the cost of heating our homes and driving our cars at an all time high, I think people are finally ready for the change. But how close are we? Scientists have been arguing for a long time that hydrogen would make an excellent alternative fuel.

Todd Livingston, an electronics technician from Boston, plans to use lasers to capture lightning bolts and then channel them through large tanks of water to produce hydrogen. Sounds like a novel idea, but knowledgeable scientists say that it probably won’t work because so far lasers can’t capture lightning.

The problem with hydrogen is that it’s a gas, which means it has less energy per volume as liquid fuels. You’d need a lot of it to run a car and probably need a tank four times the size of you vehicle to store enough hydrogen to get any where. The key to caging hydrogen lies in metallic-organic framework compounds (MOFs). MOFs are nano-porous materials that consist of metal-oxide clusters and organic compounds arranged in a chicken wire scaffolding structure. Tamer Yildirim and Michael Hartman from the National Institute for Standards and Technology’s Center for Neutron Research have found that MOF-5 can hold up to 10% of its weight in hydrogen at very cold temperatures (-200 degrees C). MOF-5 has a framework consisting of zinc-oxide clusters linked to benzene rings. Yildirim and Hartman observed that hydrogen molecules pack themselves into the lattice of oxygen and zinc atoms much like the way apples fill a bowl. They know they can store the hydrogen; the next step is finding a way to release the hydrogen.

So what about fuel cells you ask? Well, fuel cells run on oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is easy to get, but the hydrogen is not so easy. Most fuel cells use something called a reformer which turns hydrocarbons or alcohol fuels into hydrogen. So instead of carting around a giant tank of hydrogen, you’re making your own as you drive along. The problem is reformers generate heat and the hydrogen it produces is not so pure and lowers the efficiency of the fuel cell.

We know how to make hydrogen. We’re learning better ways for storing it and we know how to convert it to make energy. Now if we could just get all this combined together we could have one cool hydrogen-powered car.

Last week all the local news channels did some kind of story about the whole Christmas vs. Holiday debate. Fox news even used The Death of Christmas for a headline. I hate to tell these people this, but Christmas died a long time ago. One guy was complaining because his town Christmas parade was now being called the Holiday Parade. I remember hearing him say “I could see this happening in some place like San Francisco, but not here”. Because, you know here we don’t tolerate people of religions other than Christian.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most major religions celebrate something around this time of year? Last I remembered Hanukah was celebrated during the month of December. Buddhists celebrate Bodhi Day on the eighth. African-American’s celebrate Kwanzaa, which isn’t so much about religion as it is about respecting and learning about African-American history. The point is that the month of December holds a number of Holidays, not just the Christian ones.

The thing that kills me is the stupidity of Christmas vs. Holiday issue. Who really gives a rat’s ass? The debate is a time waster. Those people are sitting around complaining about semantics when they could be doing something useful, like helping out a homeless shelter, donating food to the local food bank, or helping the little old lady next door by taking her trash out on a freezing day.

Bah-humbug!

I finished my first knitting project today! Of course, last week it was butt-ass cold here, but now that I finally finished my scarf it’s like sixty degrees outside. Go figure. I chose yellow to match my new Navy pea coat. I had been looking for a pea coat for forever, but I could never seem to find one that fit right, or didn’t cost a bazillion dollars. I found this at a thrift store in Tulsa for $15.00. Woot! It still has its rank on the sleeve. I’m a Petty Officer Third Class with a rating of Boiler Technician. How cool is that?!

My next plan is to knit me up some matching mittens. I’m still a little confused about how to go about that, so we’ll see.

Researchers led by Gabor Forgacs, University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor, have engineered bio-ink and bio-paper that would allow us to print out new organs. Yes, I said print. They use a special 3-D printer that has two positive displacement devices. One contains a cartridge made of a micropipette filled with tiny spheres of bio-ink and the other cartridge prints the bio-paper.

The research team has been able to print sheets of heart muscle cells and tubes resembling blood vessels. The printer prints a small sheet of bio-paper that’s made up of a sugar-rich gel. The bio-ink spheres, which consist of cellular material, are printed down on top of this sheet. The process is repeated in layers until the sheet is the right thickness. Then the sheet has to be incubated in a bioreactor so that the cells inside the spheres can fuse together. It may take minutes to print up a new sheet of skin or heart muscle, but it can take up to a week for the cells to fuse together.

There are many limitations the team faces. They need to understand how blood vessels form in the skin because implanting them may not be optimal. But it sure is a big leap forward. Who knows what organs they can start printing up next?!?

Sounds like something from a bad science fiction movie on the SciFi channel. The parasitic hairworm, Spinochordodes tellini, develops inside grasshoppers or crickets, but is an aquatic worm in its adult stage. How to get from the grasshopper gut to body water, you ask? Brainwash the grasshopper into committing suicide.

The hairworm produces proteins that interfere with the grasshopper’s nervous system. These proteins mimic certain molecules of the grasshopper. The researchers found that grasshoppers carrying the worm expressed different proteins in the brain than uninfected grasshoppers and that some of these proteins were linked to neurotransmitter activities.

Crazy and creepy.

Isn’t he cute?!? You can feed him puppy treats.