Plastic bag recycling

Paper, or plastic? When people in America buy groceries, they tend to buy about a week's worth at a time, and this is more than can readily be carried by hand. So markets typically provide bags for easy carrying. Almost all of these are immediately thrown away once the groceries are safely in the refrigerator or pantry. Those that are kept are reused once, again to hold something.
This wouldn't be a problem, except that stores go through thousands of bags per hour, and the plastic bags will remain in their current form for geological periods of time. Should they blow loose, they clutter up (and ugly up) the nearby environment, and harm turtles when they blow into the ocean, and the turtle confuses them with a tasty jellyfish.
The bag can be recycled, by melting it down and running it through an extruder to give it a new shape. But Discovery news reports that a laboratory in Illinois can turn them into fuel. For not much more energy than recycling them would take.
The lab heats them in an airless environment, until the atoms dissociate from each other. The hydrogen is siphoned off for the many uses of loose hydrogen, and the carbon forms into "microspheres," (which sound a lot like buckyballs), which have a thousand-and-one uses. The lab hopes that this will change the economics of plastic bags, such that hobos will cheerfully gather waste bags for money. Quickly, the landfills would empty, and no more would a turtle choke to death on something that existed only for hauling a bunch of food for a few hours at most.

Prosethetics for Animals

Today I have two stories about animals with prosthetic limbs. The first is old, about five years ago. A cockatoo was viscously attacked in her cage by her own mate, which sometimes happens due to their instincts to chase off a mate while in danger. Feet are very important to parrots, seeing as they function as both foot and hand. So most birds with injured feet wind up euthanized.
But "Candy's" owner had prosthetic feet build for her so that she could at least walk, even if holding things was no longer an option. And walk she did. She has gone off to a good life as a pet, and her mate has wound up in a triple-locked cage.
Now, this year, hack a day reports that a cat who lost all four feet in an industrial accident is getting a new set. Complete with video. The cat understandably now walks a little awkwardly, but is now walking and doing all the normal cat things.
Prosthetics for humans is more advanced because people care more about their own. Compassion is a remarkable thing, and people's love for pets is impressive. Hopefully, the two fields will benefit from each other.

Recycled Antibiotics

LCD screens are pretty cool. They use less power than the old cathode ray tube monitors, take up far less space on a desk, and remain razor-sharp for years at a time. (Remember having to "degauss?") Too bad they're full of poisonous stuff that will surely leak into the ground when the screen goes bad and you throw it away.
Discovery news reports that one of the ingredients in LCD screens can be made into a very powerful antibacterial substance, one that utterly destroys bacteria, yet is perfectly safe for human use.
The discovery comes from the chemistry department of the University of York, United Kingdom. Apparently Polyvinyl alcohol, found in the electronics, can be treated inexpensively to produce a powerful antiseptic. This will cause broken LCD screens to no longer be thrown away -- you'll be gleefully selling them to chemistry labs, who'll be remaking them into useful things for hospitals.

A/C for America's Birthday

Happy birthday, America.
July is a hot month here in the northern hemisphere of earth, being mid-summer. Much of my region, the southwest, would be uninhabitable without good air conditioning, and in fact in the past before air conditioning, commerce and life came to a screeching halt during daytime summer hours. It was just so hot that no one could be bothered.
This comes at a price. Summer at noon is one of the highest demand-load times for our power plants, which strain as hard as they can to keep the uncountably many air conditioning pumping, so that the residents don't all suffer heat-stroke. In fact, if the power system ever fails, a few people will die of heat stroke. (Mostly the very old and very young.)
Discovery News is reporting that a more ecological air conditioning, combining older technology like evaporative cooling (which provided most of the cooling before air conditioning was invented), with modern desiccants and membranes, so that the moisture stays within the unit, rather than affecting the building's environment. (Humid air feels warmer, as it prevents our natural cooling method, sweating, from working properly.)
The new system is claimed to use 50% electricity, up to 90% less. (The 90% claim is iffy. Probably best-possible-conditions, plus a little fudging and rounding up.) Still, even a 50% reduction in electrical use will be a big relief on the power systems, and will be welcomed by building owners due to lower bills. We can all get behind lower bills.
The system will be sold by a company called "Coolerado." Rimshots sold seperately.

Homemade Fusion Reactor

When I was first entering college, I heard of a young man who had a fusion reactor on his desk. He built it himself, and it did fuse hydrogen and helium. He had to plug it in -- it used more power than it produced. He made it more as a bragging thing -- he personally built it -- rather than any practical reason. And then I stopped hearing anything about it.
Discovery News reports that now many other people are following in his footsteps. They, too, are building reactors and plugging them in, owning their own personal stars that they keep contained on their desk. It costs loads of money, people are reported to spend as much as $35,000, and none of them can really get anything useful from it yet.
Humankind's best and brightest are struggling with fusion because it's so immensely valuable. It could be powered with water, which covers 75% of our planet's surface, it produces only helium gas as waste. And we know it works. The article points out that the sun is powered by fusion. The expensive part is keeping it contained so that it stays on your desk, and doesn't burn a hole to the center of the earth. (Which, needless to say, would really piss off your landlord and/or neighbors.)
If we ever really, truly, succeed at creating a fusion reactor, it will be the only form of power we'd be interested in from now on. The fuel is so cheap as to be nearly free, the waste products are things we use anyway and are in no way poisonous, and the potential production is huge. As a fusion-capable species, we would have easily petawatts of power, if not exawatts. Cheap energy would fuel all kinds of economic developments, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word.
I can only hope that some of our intensive research bears fruit.

New Battery Technology

Much of the modern world depends upon batteries. We have more and more portable gadgets that require batteries for the electrical power they consume. (Since requiring a wall-plug would make them significantly less portable.) Good batteries could also free us from the tyranny of gasoline, having cars powered by electricity made by whatever fuel source is cheapest this week.
Discovery News is reporting that a new battery technology would make batteries with ten times the capacity of the previous lithium-ion batteries, thus allowing your gadgets to run ten times as long. Hallelujah.
The new discovery isn't all rainbows and sunshine, though. It's difficult and expensive, involving carbon nanotubes laid exactly-so, so these miracle batteries would cost an order of magnitude more than the ones you have now. You may gain huge benefits, but you'll pay through the nose to achieve them. At least until the technology improves, and the batteries get so commonplace, that they get cheaper and cheaper.
Still, one step closer to decent electric cars, laptops that run for days at a time, and pacemakers that require much less maintenance. Everybody wins.
(Also, this is post #500. Woot.)

Regrowing Teeth

We humans grow two sets of teeth in our lifetimes. The first, as small children, are very small, but help us to eat solid food. Then, as adolescents, the first set falls out and are replaced with the larger set of teeth that we have as adults, and these are meant to last for our entire lifetime. We also, in our mid-twenties, grow a third set of molars, the so-called "wisdom teeth," because you're supposed to be wise by the time you get them.
Unfortunately, our teeth don't always last a lifetime. Sometimes people lose them due to trauma, as a blow to their face damages their teeth sufficiently to make some of them fall out. Others lose teeth to neglect, as tooth decay rots them until they fall out. Dentists have a few material options to replace lost teeth, from increasingly realistic-looking ceramic implants to dentures in extreme cases.
However, these are not the only options. Sharks are very hard on their teeth, and as a result, are constantly losing them. Like an adolescent human, a shark's teeth are constantly falling out and being replaced with new ones. Unlike an adolescent human, this process in sharks never stops.
I doubt we'll be able to have ever-regenerating teeth in the near future. However, I do see it as possible to extract a small piece of bone, and encourage it to grow into a tooth-like shape, which can subsequently be implanted, as a damaged tooth that fell out can often be re-implanted if preserved well enough. The bone-section should be grown in an intracellular-medium-like substance, and should be supplemented with adult stem cells, taken at the same time as the bone section. They should be fed with glucose and calcium, and the tank kept sterile. (Sugar alone doesn't rot your teeth, it's sugar plus mouth bacteria that are harmful.)