The Poet and The Scientist Debate How To Reclaim the Shared Language of Wonder

Ever since the romantic poet John Keats accused Newton of trying to unweave the rainbow in his poem Lamia, science and poetry have lost a common tongue. Listen to this wonderful podcast from ABC Radio National's Big Ideas Programmes entitled Weaving the Rainbow: The Poet and The Scientist Speak as two of Australia's leading cultural icons, Barry Jones and Les Murray discuss and share views on how science and arts might regain a shared language for wonder.

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When ideas have sex | Matt Ridley Video

British author Matt Ridley knows one thing: Through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, the mating of ideas. The sophistication of the modern world, says Ridley, lies not in individual intelligence or imagination; it is a collective enterprise. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Ridley (whose previous works include Genome and Nature via Nurture) sweeps the entire arc of human history to powerfully argue that "prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else." It is our habit of trade, idea-sharing and specialization that has created the collective brain which set human living standards on a rising trend. This, he says, "holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead -- because ideas are having sex with each other as never before."

The Big Idea: Capital Market Funds For Invention - Harvard Business Review

Here is a very interesting idea from Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. As the cofounder of Intellectual Ventures, he has been reviled as a patent troll - a renegade who buys up patents and uses them to hold up companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this worthwhile article from Harvard Business Review, he proposes the world needs a capital market for invention like the venture capital market for start-ups and the private equity market for revitalizing inefficient companies. The argument: Inventing—producing useful, patent-worthy ideas—is a dysfunctional, cash-starved activity that’s overly dependent on government largesse because it is not organized as a for-profit activity. A better approach:

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Could urine be the way forward for transportation?

New Products and Inventions

Researchers from Ohio University have developed an efficient way to produce hydrogen from urine. The technique could fuel vehicles while cleaning up wastewater from sewage plants.

Producing hydrogen from urine could be done at a fraction of the cost of producing it from water, as the hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than they are to the oxygen atoms in water, thus taking less energy to break them apart.

However, urea quickly turns into ammonia, and produces emissions which can cause health problems such as chronic bronchitis and asthma attacks...

Source: Idea Connection

Chicken Feathers to Create Cheap Hydrogen Storage

Chicken Feathers may one day compete with more high-tech solutions such as carbon nanotubes for storing hydrogen for fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

Richard Wool's team at the University of Delaware in Newark heated chicken feather fibres to 400 °C without burning. The process resulted in stable, porous carbonised fibres. When cooled to -266 °C, the material could store almost 2 per cent of its weight in hydrogen - almost as much as carbon nanotubes.