-- I hate when people do this!!! New blog that's been getting it's 15 minutes of fame, or whatnot, about changing your mind at the supermarket.

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"Full operations will start at a U.S. mine by the end of next year.

Molycorp has secured the permits and funding needed to restart production at a mine in Mountain Pass, California, that would become the first U.S. source of rare earth elements in more than a decade. The mine is one of the world's richest deposits of these elements, which are critical for making components found in a wide range of technologies. On Tuesday, the company announced that it will partner with Hitachi Metals of Japan to turn materials from the mine into high-strength magnets, which are vital in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and many other products.

China currently has a lock on the market for rare earth materials: in 2009 it provided 95 percent of the world's supply, or 120,000 tons. This concentration of supply has become a major issue in recent months, particularly after China temporarily blocked exports of these materials to Japan in September. A Critical Materials Strategy document issued by the U.S. Department of Energy last week points to the "risk of supply disruption" in the short term. Worldwide demand for rare earth elements was 125,000 tons in 2010 and is expected to rise to 225,000 tons by 2015.

The mine is a 50-acre open pit about 50 miles outside Las Vegas, surrounded by a stark landscape of red-brown mountains, Joshua trees, and the occasional cactus. Molycorp has begun draining groundwater that seeps into the bottom of the pit and removing areas of rock called "overburden" to expose a layer of bastnäsite, a mineral rich in rare earth elements. Expansion of operations will push the mine from a depth of 500 feet to 1,000 feet in the coming years..."

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“U. TEXAS-AUSTIN (US) — What a father includes in his diet passes down and is able to reprogram how genes function in his children.

A new study published in Cell shows that environmental cues, including diet, influence genes in mammals from one generation to the next, suggesting paternal environmental effects may play a more important role in complex diseases such as diabetes and heart disease than previously believed.

“Knowing what your parents were doing before you were conceived is turning out to be important in determining what disease risk factors you may be carrying,” says Oliver Rando, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at the University of Massaschusetts, and coauthor of the study with Hans Hofmann, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin.

The study details how paternal diet can increase production of cholesterol synthesis genes in first-generation offspring…”

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-- Though sometimes it looks more like a bear cub using cat as a toy... haha Also, what is a bear doing inside their house?!? Only in Russia.

“The decline of Caozhu Village is at the same pace with that of many rural villages in China. What’s different is, here, desolateness is caused by affluence instead of poverty. People have left waves after waves for their American dream. Their pursuit of happiness leads to a faraway city that has a 13-hour time difference: New York. The village that doesn’t resign to its fate is a microcosm of the entire city of Changle, which supervises the village and has a population of 673,000: people are either in New York, or on its way to New York.

After half a century of nonstop emigration, the actual Caozhu Village has been moved to the United States. Now over 3,000 villagers resides in the U.S., while fewer than 1,000 still live in Caozhu. The population has dropped to an all-time low since its founding in Ming Dynasty four hundred years ago.

Huge outflow of young villagers is now a rarity. At the end of 1980s, it was still a common sight that formidable crowds of young people set off together. People waved goodbye to one another, as if Spartans bade farewell to warriors heading for Thermopylae…”

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-- This video is one of the more beautiful and eloquent presentations on how science equips people with knowledge and the ability to understand their surroundings rather than relying on the "God did it!" explanations. It captures just how grand and beautiful scientific explanations can really be by doing a really good job at explaining the magnificence and the mystery of the universe. HOWEVER, I almost did not to post it due to the needless use of expletives that I consider to be immature and damaging to the overall goal of the presentation. The speaker talks of maturity, but his arrogance is misplaced and injurious to his message. Nevertheless, here it is, a bit late due to my hesitations, but it is definitely worth a watch.

“One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author,Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences…”

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-- This past Christmas Eve, December 24th, Spanair flight from Barcelona to Las Palmas arrived close to midnight. 190 people were flying while everyone else celebrated Christmas Eve, so Spanair decided to surprise the full flight of people with unexpected luggage at the carousel.

“Cavers' headlamps light up the towering walls of Vietnam's Son Doong cave, the largest single cave passage yet found. First explored earlier this year by a joint British-Vietnamese team, the cave measures at least 262-by-262 feet (80-by-80 meters) in most places and is at least 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) long.

"For a couple of kilometers it is more than 140 meters [460 feet] wide and 140 meters [460 feet] high," said Adam Spillane, a member of the British Cave Research Association expedition that explored the massive cavern.

Son Doong beats out the previous world record holder, Deer Cave in theMalaysian section of the island of Borneo, conceded Andy Eavis, president of the International Union of Speleology and discoverer of the now demoted Deer Cave.”

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“Skywatchers throughout much of Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia, were treated to the first eclipse of the new year on January 4, a partial eclipse of the Sun.

But traveling to the area around Muscat, capital city of Oman, photographer Thierry Legault planned to simultaneously record two eclipses on that date, calculating from that position, for a brief moment, both the Moon and the International Space Station could be seen in silhouette, crossing the Sun. His sharp, 1/5000th second exposure is shown here, capturing planet Earth's two largest satellites against the bright solar disk. As the partial solar eclipse unfolded, the space station (above and left of center) zipped across the scene in less than 1 second, about 500 kilometers from the photographer's telescope and camera. Of course, the Moon was 400 thousand kilometers away. Complete with sunspots, the Sun was 150 million kilometers distant.”

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“Researchers are sure that they can put lab-grown meat on the menu — if they can just get cultured muscle cells to bulk up.

Mark Post has never been tempted to taste the 'fake' pork that he grows in his lab. As far as he knows, the only person who has swallowed a strip of the pale, limp muscle tissue is a Russian TV journalist who visited the lab this year to film its work. "He just took it with tweezers out of the culture dish and stuffed it in his mouth before I could say anything," says Post. "He said it was chewy and tasteless."

Post, who works at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, is at the leading edge of efforts to make in vitro meat by growing animal muscle cells in a dish. His ultimate goal is to help rid the world of the wasteful production of farm animals for food by helping to develop life-like steaks. In the near term, he hopes to make a single palatable sausage of ground pork, showcased next to the living pig that donated its starter cells — if he can secure funds for his research.

Post started out as a tissue engineer interested in turning stem cells into human muscle for use in reconstructive surgery, but switched to meat a few years ago. "I realized this could have much greater impact than any of the medical work I'd been doing over 20 years — in terms of environmental benefits, health benefits, benefits against world starvation," he says. Largely because of the inefficiency of growing crops to feed livestock, a vegetarian diet requires only 35% as much water and 40% as much energy as that of a meat-eater1. Future 'in-vitrotarians' should be able to claim similar savings…”

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“BEIJING — Chinese scientists have mastered the technology for reprocessing fuel from nuclear power plants, potentially boosting the supplies of carbon-free electricity to keep the country's economy booming, state television reported Monday.

The breakthrough will extend by many times the amount of power that can be generated from China's nuclear plants as fissile and fertile materials are recovered to be new fuel, CCTV said.

Several European countries, Russia, India and Japan already reprocess nuclear fuel – the actual materials used to make nuclear energy – to separate and recover the unused uranium and plutonium, reduce waste and safely close the nuclear cycle.

The CCTV report gave no details on whether or when China would begin reprocessing on an industrial scale.

China overtook the United States as the world's largest energy consumer in 2009, years before it was expected to do so, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

But it is heavily dependent on coal, a major pollutant. It has 13 nuclear power plants in use now and ambitiously plans to add potentially hundreds more.

Reprocessing nuclear fuel costs significantly more than using it once and storing it as waste. It is also controversial because extracted plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons, although China has long had a nuclear arsenal.

U.S. commercial reprocessing of plutonium was halted by then-President Jimmy Carter because of nuclear proliferation worries. Then-President George W. Bush proposed a resumption, but the National Research Council found it not economically justifiable. President Barack Obama scrapped the Bush effort…”

-- China, China, China...

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-- Classic!