Lina Zeldovich
AUTHOR / JOURNALIST
The unlikely breakthroughs in today’s medical science.
Particle accelerators can make you healthy and wealthy.
What’s wrong with the tomatoes we eat now? A few things.
Revising your daily menu is easier in summer, because stuff just tastes so good.
“We have this department called Imagineering,” says Lenny De George, Walt Disney World Executive Chef, who’s been cooking up the magic for 20 years. “So the imagineers would dream up what a new restaurant would be,”
Using bioreactors, a team of Columbia University bioengineers grew more than 50 healthy bones from stem cells.
The grass is always greener on Jackson Madnick’s lawn in Wayland, Mass.: green in a drought and green when it emerges from under the snow. Yet, he barely waters and mows it, and he never uses chemical pesticides or fertilizers.
Biochemical engineers can now download a piece of software and, with a few simple clicks, assemble the DNA for new life forms through their laptops.
Trees that grow and glow may one day replace street lamps, cutting down on electricity use and CO2 emissions, says a group of synthetic biologists at Singularity University in Moffett Field, Calif.
Solar-powered thermal batteries harness the sun’s heat to chill milk in regions with unreliable power in India.
A little colorful sticker you can slap onto your shirt may prove to be one of the most efficient methods to ward off malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne diseases.
Cornell University researchers build a sun-powered cancer-testing device.
Ants mastered husbandry way before us—about 50 million years ago, and they still continue farming today.
When it comes to water, some plants are picky drinkers. To measure plant water levels continuously, Cornell University researchers, equipped every plant with its own personal water sensor
Sitting on top of a volcano may be just what Nevis, a small sombrero-shaped Caribbean Island, needs to become one of the greenest nations on Earth.
“Each one of these when heated will release hydrogen gas,” says Cella Energy CEO Stephen Voller, of the small heap of pellets in his palm. “You get about a balloon worth of hydrogen gas from that.”
The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our dark matter, but the long line of engineering marvels we’ve created to do so—from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today—have also done considerable damage to the earth’s ecology. Now scientists tell us: we’ve been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, and much more. Hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Grossly ambitious and fully scientific, THE OTHER DARK MATTER shows how human excrement can be a life-saving, money-making resource—if we make better use of it! So let’s start doing it now. My dear fellow humans, please use your innate organic power for the greater good. Don’t just sit there and let it go to waste! THE OTHER DARK MATTER is available for preorder on Amazon
Once inside the body the robot unfolds like a NASA spaceship, communicates its position through a wire connected to an external computer, and follows instructions to advance, stop, tie sutures and perform other actions.
In 2009, Eric Alm, a professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hadn’t had a bowel movement at home for almost the entire year. Instead, every time he had to go, he’s drive to his MIT lab.