BREAKING NEWS! Milwaukee scientist discovers that the innocent appearing bubble is the ferocious culprit behind American obesity. "Why are Americans overweight?" he asks. "Soda and fried foods. But what is it about these delicious foods that make them so unhealthy? It is the insideous bubble."

He goes on. "Have you ever drank a flat soda? It's disgusting. No one would drink this stuff if it weren't for the sweet sweet bubbles coursing through the liquid."

Similarly, the bubble is the culprit behind the unhealthy partially hydrogenated oils used for frying all across the board of American cuisine. "Yeah, what make an oil partially hydrogenated? Bubbling hydrogen through the oil. Bubbles. BUBBLES. BUBBLES!!! AHHHHH!"

Yum!

I started my HowStuffWorks journey out wondering how sewers work. Do they really go downhill all the way to the treatment plant? (answer: for the most part, yes) But then the article on hangovers caught my eye:

According to studies, drinking about 250 milliliters of an alcoholic beverage causes the body to expel 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water; that's four times as much liquid lost as gained. This diuretic effect decreases as the alcohol in the bloodstream decreases, but the aftereffects help create a hangover.

The morning after heavy drinking, the body sends a desperate message to replenish its water supply -- usually manifested in the form of an extremely dry mouth. Headaches result from dehydration because the body's organs try to make up for their own water loss by stealing water from the brain, causing the brain to decrease in size and pull on the membranes that connect the brain to the skull, resulting in pain.

The frequent urination also expels salts and potassium that are necessary for proper nerve and muscle function; when sodium and potassium levels get too low, headaches, fatigue and nausea can result. Alcohol also breaks down the body's store of glycogen in the liver, turning the chemical into glucose and sending it out of the body in the urine. Lack of this key energy source is partly responsible for the weakness, fatigue and lack of coordination the next morning. In addition, the diuretic effect expels vital electrolytes such as potassium and magnesium, which are necessary for proper cell function.

--http://health.howstuffworks.com/hangover.htm

Yikes!

From Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Chung Lee: [video]

Hmm.. can't seem to get the video embedding to work today.

Check out this awesome video at:
Youtube: Child Ninjas

I'm on a blogging rampage!!!!!!! Sorry! I saw this, though, and really loved it. What a great way to increase consciousness about this issue:

A facinating TED Talk!

I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof." This is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families while researching the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigorous fractal math underpinning African architecture, art and even hair braiding

Video: Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

In my dream last night, someone said something very koan-like to me:

"Use glue to free yourself."

Who wants to take a stab at it?

There's a good chance you've seen the art scupture contraptions that walk on the beach on youtube. The creator talks about them (and demonstrates them) at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/162

These things are pretty mindblowing. They can sense where the water is, and turn away. It can set itself into the sand if a storm is coming. And there are no electronics on this thing at all. It's completely driven by wind, and uses a "computer" that stores information using compressed air!

"Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"

[...]

If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."

[...]

Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion. Schwarzenegger, who was on the set that day, asked Goodwin on the spot to convert his Wagoneer to biodiesel.

--FastCompany: Motorhead Messiah