• Sandia Labs has invented a way to extract metals from coal ash, including rare-earth metals used in batteries and electronics. Furthermore, they do this using food-grade citric acid, which is relatively benign from an environmental standpoint. The treatment makes the coal ash residue much less toxic, and thus easier to dispose of.
• It took a few ( Read more... )

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Whoa. I'm about to do something I've never done before--and yes, I have drunk both whisky and black coffee--that makes me a hair uncomfortable: I'm about to recommend a book I haven't even finished yet. And therby hangs a tale.

Back in 1991 or 1992, I noticed that a new Niven/Pournelle book ( Read more... )

• Our pool cover kept the pool at tolerable temps ( Read more... )

• In response to numerous queries: QBit is still alive, and still pretty frisky, considering that our vet suggested he would be gone by now. Yes, his lymph nodes are still swelling, and we won't have him for a whole lot longer, but he's fighting lymphoma pretty well. We're giving him a supplement called Apocaps, that supposedly accelerates apoptosis ( Read more... )

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• Grocery conglomerate Kroger is testing a driverless robot cart for grocery delivery here in Scottsdale. The service uses robots made by Nuro. (Watch their videos to get a sense for the ( Read more... )

• Wanna know why I'm an optimist? This is why I'm an optimist. (Among other things.)
• NASA says that cosmic rays are bad and getting worse, which has consequences in several areas, from heart health to manned spaceflight to climate. Cosmic rays seed clouds, increasing the Earth's albedo and cooling the planet. Weirdly, cosmic rays are linked with ( Read more... )

Very late Tuesday night (in fact, just before dawn on Wednesday morning) we're going to have us a super blue blood lunar eclipse. If that sounds peculiar, it's because it is--and rare. The last one, in fact, happened in 1866. The key facts about the eclipse are these:

• It's a "blue moon" eclipse. A blue moon isn't about color; it's ( Read more... )

• I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He's best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he's also written several books on astronomy ( Read more... )