fungi
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NASA will attempt to develop drugs in space
A team of researchers from the University of Southern California and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are sending fungi aboard a SpaceX flight to the ISS on April 8th. Not to expose them to Mars-like conditions like an earlier experiment did, but to see if they can be used to develop medicine in space. See, fungi produce molecules called secondary metabolites that can be used to develop medicine. One good and familiar example is penicillin. However, scientists (including USC professor Clay Wang who's leading this project) found that in many cases, fungi can only generate secondary metabolites when they're put in stressful conditions. And space can provide an environment harsh enough to activate the production of those molecules.
'Mutarium' prototype is the perfect farm for edible plastic-eating fungi
Biodegradable plastics exist because traditional ones take between 20 and 1,000 years to break down in the wild, often blocking waterways and killing animals as that all happens. That's why two industrial designers and a group of microbiologists have designed a way to break down plastic -- and create edible mushrooms in the process. To be precise, the team (the designers are from Vienna, Austria, while the microbiologists are from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands) created something called the Fungi Mutarium: a glass dome that houses hollow egg-like pods containing bits of plastic in their cavities. These "pods" serve as food to nourish the fungi, as they're made of agar, sugar and starch, similar to those agar plates used to culture organisms in labs.
Inhabitat's Week in Green: rotating house, desktop 3D printer and a Star Trek-style warp drive
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. Mid-September is a busy time of year in the world of design as the Solar Decathlon Europe takes place in Madrid and the London Design Festival kicks off -- and Inhabitat has correspondents on the ground at both events bringing us a steady stream of photos and updates. At the Solar Decathlon, Team Portugal designed an innovative house that can actually rotate to follow the sun in order to increase energy production and adjust interior daylighting. Team Valencia developed a modular home that can grow or contract depending on the family's needs. And the team from Tongji University produced an eye-catching house that embraces both Western and Daoist principles. In the competition, Rome's super-efficient MED in Italy house jumped out to an early lead -- but it's still too soon to call the winner so stay tuned.
Behind the name could be fungi
Character names in World of Warcraft are very personal, even if you started out trying to be nonchalant. For some players, their character names are the only handle they will ever be known by with their Azerothian friends. I for one am about 75% certain that I would answer to my main's nickname "IRL".For many, this naming decision, which used to be permanent, and now is potentially too changeable, is a way to express one's interests outside of gaming. Although staying within the boundaries of Blizzard's naming policy requires some extra creativity, the effort is worth it in the end. Mythological figures is a very popular choice, and our very own Elizabeth Wachowski chooses medical terminology when naming her toons. Amanda Rivera has varying logic behind her character names, although by times she takes inspiration from her own works as a writer.Names can work to bring characters with similar, even obscure, interests together in WoW. Any of you who have ever encountered a character and done a double take, realizing that their name is some obscure 18th Century poet or minor figure in Romanian history, will be able to identify with Jeremy Bruno of The Voltage Gate. Jeremy has recently become quite interested in WoW characters named after an organism's genus name. He has begun to feature such characters, along with photographic representations of the actual organism and tidbits of interesting facts. As he points out, these organisms are important enough to people to name their characters, which they might have for years, after them; and he wants to help honor them. If you have such a toon, shoot him a message, because he's accepting reader submissions. We're all interested to see what types of animals, bacteria, plants, and fungi will turn up on our realms.Do you have a theme or an interest that is reflected in the names of your characters? Have you ever stumbled across a character with such an obscure name that you were taken aback?
