A friend sent me a link to a Wired article with photos of the Human-Powered Vehicle Challenge at the NASA-Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, April 13-15, 2007. The event was a contest for college engineering teams sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

I sent the link to Mary Arneson, who runs velomobiling.com, and she posted some comments regarding the event, including this one:

Disappointingly, for those of us who are trying to raise awareness of velomobiles, the whole event seemed to pass without the word “velomobile” ever coming up. The mechanical engineering students could probably learn something from the velomobile industry, and human-powered vehicles have a lot to gain from new technology and insights, but the two worlds seem to run on parallel tracks and never to meet.

This separation isn’t limited to the United States; European educational institutions also sponsor HPV challenges and projects without seeming to notice a thriving velomobile industry under their noses.

Paul Douglas, the senior meteorologist at the WCCO television in the Twin Cities, continues to impress me with his scientific take on global warming. See his comments on last year’s weather and warming trends in his StarTribune weather column today:

Wednesday will be the 34th day in a row of above average temperatures in the Twin Cities. The last 3 weeks of December ran 17 degrees above average in the metro area, a premature taste of March in January. The NCDC, the National Climatic Data Center, just announced that December was the warmest on record for Minnesota and 4 New England states…NCDC just revised their numbers and it now looks like 2006 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S., edging out the previous record in 1998. The data comes from a network of 1200+ climate stations around the nation, all rural, to minimize the risk of warm air blowing in from nearby cities, tainting the data record. “The past 9 years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record,” according to NCDC. They add “the rate of warming has accelerated over the last 30 years, increasing globally since the mid 1970s at a rate approximately 3 times faster than the century-scale trend.” To paraphrase: it’s not a typical, cyclical blip. It’s a spike.

Warming is happening, and the culprit is likely created by us humans. Denial of this fact will lead to needless death and suffering. Let’s pin that reality on the conscience of anyone who advocates a do-nothing approach to global warming.

I’ve discussed research on biofuels in earlier posts, including one from last summer. Now Prof. David Tilman at the University of Minnesota and others have published another study that demonsrates the advantages of prairie grass over corn as a crop for producing ethanol. Here are some quotes from a December 7 StarTribune story, “Grass beats corn in ethanol study“: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a chance to read the Centers for Disease Control press briefing transcript that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. The briefing explains that the CDC study on chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which used data from patients in Wichita, Kansas, resulted in 14 scientific articles published simultaneously in the journal Pharmacogenomics (April 2006 edition). It used new approaches in integrative biology and genomics and represents a new field called public health genomics. (CDC has actually created a new Office of Public Health Genomics.) It involved researchers from the fields of medicine, molecular biology, epidemiology, genomics, mathematics, engineering, and physics. The leaders of the research feel it can be used to study other complex diseases such as autism.

Read the rest of this entry »

About twelve years ago I experienced a debilitating illness that lasted about nine months, the main feature of which was profound fatigue. One doctor diagnosed it as postviral fatigue, and I came to think of it as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). I also experienced depression and anxiety in conjunction with the illness. Read the rest of this entry »

David A. Wharton’s book, Life at the Limits: Organisms in Extreme Environments (Cambridge University Press, 2002), contains an interesting observation about temperatures on our planet. It shows that cold temperatures are the norm, not the exception, for the planet as a whole:

What are normal temperatures? The Earth is, on average, a cold place. More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean and the temperature of most of the ocean stays close to 2 °C. Including the ocean depths, the polar ice caps and the land, four-fifths of the planet is below 5 °C all the time. What we might think of as “normal” temperatures, say 10 °C to 30 °C, are really not normal at all but occur only in restricted parts of the world. Abundant life is associated with the warmer parts of the Earth (but not too warm!).