CrankyRants.com

CrankyRants.com - No, that’s not a new super round fun robot toy for the kids this holiday season… it’s a car. A vehicle with which you can weave about the highway and swap paint with massive trucks and SUV’s and mini-vans that would gladly eat this little morsel for brunch. 

The Pivo 2, recently unveiled by Japanese manufacturer Nissan, is a battery-powered concept car with a fully rotating cabin that makes going backwards obsolete, since the driver can turn to face the direction they need to go.

Its wheels also turn 90 degrees, making parking easier. In fact it’s practically small enough to bypass parking altogether and simply drive it into your office, onto the elevator… rotating the cabin to discuss the days agenda with co-workers, before pulling out into the hallway and down towards your cube. 

Granted most concept cars rarely make it into production resembling their predecessors, you need only look at the Smart Car on any European street to see that micro-cars like this would do well. Just keep in mind that most truck drivers will register only minor annoyance at the spilled coffee resulting from the slight kerkunk of your mobile speed-bump passing cleanly beneath their 18 wheels of steel.

Passenger-side airbag though. So that’s a plus.

CrankyRants.com - The title could stand on it’s own, but if you’re interested in the details, apparently scientists at the University of Washington are genetically altering trees to pull toxins out of contaminated ground water. Not necessarily the quicker-picker-upper, these trees and plants spend years absorbing the bad stuff through their root system and turn them into I’m guessing some form of grotesque glowing mutant tree leaves or something. Remember the “Kite Eating Tree” from the old Charlie Brown cartoons? Big tree? Giant creepy smile? Lot’s of childhood tree nightmares that resulted? That’s what it’s like.

The relatively new field of phytoremediation is the cause for the new discoveries. Through a plant’s natural ability to extract chemicals from water, soil, and air, specific trees and plants are being bio-engineered to extract specific forms of chemical by-products and waste. Great idea. Horrible dilemma for your typical environmentalist.

“Love that we’re cleaning up the toxins here… but icky water make tree cry!”

Lasers beamed from space have detected what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice.

These lakes, some stretching across hundreds of square miles (km), fill and drain so dramatically that the movement can be seen by a satellite looking at the icy surface of the southern continent, glaciologists reported in Thursday’s editions of the journal Science.

So… I’m no scientist or anything. But I’ve seen enough James Bond movies to know that if there’s anything giant space laser are best at… it’s melting stuff. Anyone in the research team ever think to ask “Hey guys? Are we sure all of that under-ice water wasn’t just ice before we started pointing our giant laser blaster at it?”

Seems to me that would have been the first question asked… followed closely by “How’s progress coming on the research into the melting ice-caps from our Giant Direct-light Space Toaster?”

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If professor Ray McAllister could perfect his time-machine technology… he’d send a note back to his 1972 self that simply read: “Tire reef. Dont!”

Back in the heady days of disco, cocaine, and environmental research, professor McCallister and a team of fellow oceanic engineers decided something needed to be done to help promote new coral activity and underwater wildlife growth. The solution? Strap tens of thousands of old tires together and sink them off the coast of Florida.

The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area. It just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”

Give the guy credit for admitting he was wrong, I suppose. But clearly every member of that team needs to strap on a speedo and snorkel and commence to floating that 30 year old science experiment back to the surface. At least we now know a little more about tires. Can’t burn’em. Can’t drown’em. Those things are strong.

How do you get a spider in the mood? Pour some wine, drop the needle on a scratchy Barry White album, and un-dim the ultraviolet lights. Ohhh yeah, baby. Just like the human species crica 1978… nothing sets the scene like the back of a van with shag carpet, avacado-green bean-bag chairs, and Jimi Hendrix posters glowing in beautiful black-lights.

Same for spiders, though instead of glowing guitars and unicorns… it’s their face that glows in ultraviolet light. And the ladies? Oh yeah… they swoon. Big time.

Apparently both male and female jumping spiders, Cosmophasis umbratica, have markings on their faces and legs that glow in ultraviolet light, researchers led by Daiqin Li at the National University of Singapore reported, before carefully coming down from their chairs and lab tables… trying their best to stifle a quiet, “eww… spiders.”

Many animals possess UV vision and use it for foraging, navigation and sexual selection, Li explained. Jumping spiders are known to have good eyesight, he said, adding that many of these spiders are colorful, with the males generally more colorful than females.

So if you happen to know of someone who is a little put-off by the creepy-crawly critters, now you know what to get them for your next gift exchange. Natural, wholesome ultraviolet lights for their basement. “Helps kill mold!,” you might explain.
 

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First declared a planet in 1930, Pluto has now been officially downgraded to a Galactic Dirt Clod by the International Astronomical Union this week. The new rules to qualify an orbiting ice chunk as a planet include a clause that states the body must “clear the neighborhood around its orbit”.

Doesn’t make any sense to me either. But apparently it’s got something to do with the orbit being circular and not oblong, or that Pluto’s orbit passes through Neptune’s, or that Pluto has cooties or something like that. Modern astronomers are apparently so caught up in their lack of anything new to report that they now have to create their own news. First it was the discovery of a few new chunks of ice along the outer rim. Now the argument that these new “Dwarf Planets” are no better than Pluto, so why should Pluto get treated any differently just because it’s been a part of our squeaky classroom solar system models for nearly 80 years. 

So it’s clear the egg-heads at the IAU have sent a specific message to school children everywhere. ”Stick it up Uranus and forget about cute little Pluto. We’re scientists, dammit! And we determine what’s right. So repeat after me: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us NOTHING!”

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