Month: January 2015

Direct Electron Transfer

“It shouldn’t be possible. Those things just keep growing on the electrode, and there’s no other source of energy there.” Growing on the electrode. It sounds incredible. “It is kind of like science fiction”. To a biologist, finding life that chugs along without a molecular energy source such as carbohydrates is about as unlikely as seeing passengers flying through the air without an airplane.

2016-06-22: Now with a mechanism

one of the most exciting possibilities is finding life-forms that might survive in extreme environments. Mars, for example, is iron-rich and has water flowing beneath its surface. If you have a system that can pick up electrons from iron and have some water, then you have all the ingredients for a conceivable metabolism. Perhaps a former mine 1600m underneath South Dakota won’t be the most surprising place that researchers find electron-eating life. The microbes’ apparent ability to ingest electrons — known as direct electron transfer — is particularly intriguing because it seems to defy the basic rules of biophysics. The fatty membranes that enclose cells act as an insulator, creating an electrically neutral zone once thought impossible for an electron to cross.

The Cobweb

The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser. You can’t search it the way you can search the Web, because it’s too big and what’s in there isn’t sorted, or indexed, or catalogued in any of the many ways in which a paper archive is organized; it’s not ordered in any way at all, except by URL and by date. To use it, all you can do is type in a URL, and choose the date for it that you’d like to look at. It’s more like a phone book than like an archive. Also, it’s riddled with errors. One kind is created when the dead Web grabs content from the live Web, sometimes because Web archives often crawl different parts of the same page at different times: text in one year, photographs in another. In October, 2012, if you asked the Wayback Machine to show you what cnn.com looked like on September 3, 2008, it would have shown you a page featuring stories about the 2008 McCain-Obama Presidential race, but the advertisement alongside it would have been for the 2012 Romney-Obama debate. Another problem is that there is no equivalent to what, in a physical archive, is a perfect provenance. Last July, when the computer scientist Michael Nelson tweeted the archived screenshots of Strelkov’s page, a man in St. Petersburg tweeted back, “Yep. Perfect tool to produce ‘evidence’ of any kind.” Kahle is careful on this point. “We can say, ‘This is what we know. This is what our records say. This is how we received this information, from which apparent Web site, at this IP address.’ That this happened in the past is something that we can’t say, in an ontological way.” Nevertheless, screenshots from Web archives have held up in court, repeatedly. And, as Kahle points out, “They turn out to be much more trustworthy than most of what people try to base court decisions on.”

SkyMall

one of america’s greats. snif.

The SkyMall catalog has always been good for a chuckle when you have absolutely nothing else to read during a flight and you just can’t sleep. Some people have presumably even bought stuff through the publication, as it’s difficult to sustain a business if the only revenue is punchlines. But apparently not enough of us are doing our inflight shopping through SkyMall, as the company has filed for Chapter 11.

The rise of fake engine noise

this is so dumb, but how else can you be sure you’re compensating properly for your penis? reminds me of Rolling coal

Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.