We’ve all got our favourite radio shows that play all those old and new classics that get us going. And whilst it’s true to an extent that the delivery of our most-loved tracks is largely becoming achieved through the algorhythmic learning of online services like Pandora, the old skool way still rules the roost, for example, in our cars.
One side effect of this is that clever boffin types at Stanford have built a special cardiac implant which runs on radio waves. This was previously thought unlikely due to the low power of the waves, but scientists and engineers have enticed deeper penetration by alternating electric and magnetic field waves, increasing deliverable power – regardless of orientation – by a factor of ten. So last night a DJ may well actually have saved someone’s life.
Nice planet, let’s contaminate it
We’ve also learned this week that there may be life on Mars after all. Problem is, humans probably put it there. The rover, Curiosity, is currently beaming back some well ace pics of the Red Planet, but due to a daft engineer opening a previously-sterile box of drills, it’s entirely possible that some Earth-originating microbes have contaminated said drill mechanisms. This means that should Curiosity find water or ice, we could start a whole new civilization of microscopic critters. Well done, humans! Sometimes we really do despair.
Ah well, back to earth and climate change has garnered a recent boost by the news that global warming is being affected positively by the actions of sea otters.
Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz studied data from 40 years on otters and kelp blooms up in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Because the otters graze eat sea urchins, the urchins don’t eat the kelp and destroy it. Kelp, they said, can absorb 12 times its own weight in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. So as the planet gets a little hotter, we’re gonna get help from a little otter.
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