Brittish DNA database to encompass a lot of children.

Despite scrapping the original plans for a national DNA database, a lot of new entries are being made as we speak. One million children are already on file, some of whom are below the age of criminal responsibility.

To benefit the general public? I for one hope so, yet doubt it.

We'll never run out of oil?

More on ethanol from cellulose

They're calling it celulosic ethanol now, fancy name, but nothing different from bioethanol or drinking alcohol.
Anyhow, cellulose is all around us, and has often been a waste product of a lot of processes. Plant stalks, corn cobs, cut grass and kudzu are full of it. You could go through the expensive process of turning it into paper, cotton has a use of its own of course, but turning cellulose into fuel is a new matter.

I've written about the Q-bacterium in the past, well, there's a new player on the "fuel from grass" battlefield, the Chesapeake Bay marsh grass bacterium, S. degradans with it's zymetis enzyme. This comes at the same time as a large-scale study on the production of switchgrass for ethanol synthesis.

Mankind will find a way ...

Mind Probe operational in 3 ... 2 ...1 ...

Scientists over at Berkley University have succesfully built a device that allows one to analyse what another person sees, by exposing the subject to a series of pictures and analyseing the resulting brain activity, they determined which images trigger which responses.

This allows them to know what the subject is looking at.
Now the countdown is on: how long untill Sandia is able of putting the entire thing in a nutshell?