(Source: invaderxan)

Device Uses Sewage Bacteria to Make Electricity

Scientists created a new and more efficient version of an innovative device the size of a home washing machine that uses bacteria growing in municipal sewage to make electricity and clean up the sewage at the same time. Their report at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, suggested that commercial versions of the two-in-one device could be a boon for the developing world and water-short parts of the U.S.

“Our prototype incorporates innovations so that it can process five times more sewage six times more efficiently at half the cost of its predecessors,” says Orianna Bretschger, who presented a report on the improved technology at the ACS meeting.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Device-Uses-Sewage-to-Make-Electricity-Clean-the-Sewage-033012.aspx

(via invaderxan)

the-star-stuff:

Neil deGrasse Tyson is behind the only major technical change in theTitanic re-release

It took James Cameron 60 weeks to prepare Titanic for its rerelease, but apart from remastering the original at 4k resolution and converting it to stereoscopic 3D, nothing about the movie has really changed.

Well, almost nothing.

According to Cameron: “Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year [April 15, at 4:20 am], in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen.”

“And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.’”

So Tyson did just that, and Cameron re-shot the scene. According to the Telegraph , it is the only major technical change in the film’s re-release.

(via fuckyeahtheuniverse)

(Source: sciencefactory, via mraaagan)

kidsneedscience:

 A curie is a unit of measure (symbol Ci) used to measure radioactivity, defined as 1 Ci = 3.7 × 10¹⁰decays persecond.  The curie is named after Marie and Pierre Curie, the husband and wife duo credited with the pioneering and defining work on radioactivity. 

Born in 1867 in Warsaw, then in the Kingdom of Poland, Marie Salomea Sklodowska followed her sister to study in Paris where she began her scientific career in Earnest.  By 1903 she would share the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband and physicist Henri Becquerel.  She won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.  A year after her death her daughter Irene Joliot Curie and son-in-law Frederic Joliot Curie would similarly share a Nobel prize, making them the winningest family in Nobel history.  Among her many achievements she discovered and named 2 elements, radium and polonium (named after her native country, Poland) and coined the term radioactivity. 

Image of Marie Curie in the public domain, photographer unknown. 

Marie Curie = insta-reblog

(via sciencenote)