Saving the Kakapo

The Kakapo is a very large, heavy parrot from New Zealand. They are herbivorous, quiet, gentle, and rare. There are only 123 of them left, due to hunting by cats, rats, stoats, and humans. The nature conservancy societies of New Zealand are attempting to encourage them to recover these numbers.
Unfortunately, easier said than done. Kakapo in the wild breed rarely based on the growth of certain plants, and otherwise show about as little interest in reproduction as Pandas. (Namely, extremely little.) Also, Kakapo have a polygamous breeding system, but now have more males than females. This further limits the options for keeping their species going.
I propose we create "genetic reproductions" of some of the females. The "reproduced" females will have shorter lives than their naturally conceived sisters, but can be artificially inseminated and have perfectly normal offspring, in very large numbers. Existing conservationists have collected large amounts of semen. This was quite helpful of them, but it will do precisely nothing if not enough females are available. And yet it would be very helpful with a large cache of females available.
Offspring of the "Reproduced Kakapos" would be indistinguishable from other Kakapos, but would suffer from the same problem as the rest of the Kakapos: a shallow genetic pool, leading to excessive recessive traits.
I can further help the problem with a second set of "reproduced Kakapos", these would be subject to "Genetic insertion technique." There is a simpler form of life with a unique ability to rewrite our own DNA, and this technique is used in agriculture and animal husbandry to insert new genes. We would insert many new genes and inspect the health of the newborn kakapo. Healthy ones would be introduced to the kakapo population as a whole. Unhealthy ones would live their lives under human supervision.
I propose that I could multiply, at least twelve-fold, the kakapo numbers given just a local biology lab, a million eggs of similar size to Kakapo eggs (possible turkey?), and blood sample from a Kakapo female.
Lastly, I think I should try to sequence, if possible, genetic samples from taxidermied Kakapos in museums.
The Kakapo faces numerous challenges to survival, but I believe that they can be made to thrive. Maybe even thrive so well that people buy them as pets.

Control it with your mind

I think the trend in communication is towards concealment of technology. Same abilities, less footprint. Electrical wires are hidden in my walls, powering my devices. Plumbing, also hidden in the walls, brings me water and takes it away again. And phones are a little box that lets me talk to people that are thousands of miles away.
Back in the day, I remember, phones were larger. The size of my head, practically. The trend has been for smaller and smaller phones. I currently have a mobile phone about the size of two of my phlanges, which is way smaller than was seen as even possible when I was born.
Discovery is reporting that phones and remote controls may soon be replaced with a small unobtrusive hat that you wear and impose your will on your living room by your thoughts. It's another EEG project.
Or possibly more in the future. We may have cybernetic implants that let us think our way through a phone call, so you can reach the office by closing your eyes and concentrating. No more speaking aloud, which used to be necessary but will now just make you look like a tool. And controlling the TV? It already knows what you want to see and has tuned itself to the right station.
Okay, maybe no implants. Drunk calling is trouble enough on cell-phones, I don't wanna wake up tomorrow to find that I called Amenijad on my brain-implant and insulted him for several hours and now have a phone bill that costs more than a house.
But the possibilities are endless and amazing.

Boobquake -- results are in!

Science blogger Blag Hag performed a scientific experiment on April 26th, regarding an Iranian cleric's assertion that immodestly dressed women cause Earthquakes. So she, to challenge this, asked as many women as possible to dress as scantily as they felt comfortable doing on April 26ths, and measured earthquake frequency worldwide before, during, and after the event, which she has joking dubbed the "Boobquake," and has been reported even in mainstream media like CNN.
She now reports that statistically, immodest dressing prevents Earthquakes. Specifically, the maximum, mean, and median values were down. The minimum was up, possibly due to the small sample size. The null hypothesis, that immodest dress has nothing to do with earthquakes, has been upheld.
Blag hag's author, an advanced student and future PhD holder, named Jennifer McCreight, rightly points out flaws in the experiment, as all good scientists would. For one, she notes that having a control was impossible, as we don't have a second earth where everyone dressed perfectly modestly to compare to. She also notes small sample size, numerous possible sources of interference, and a possible error in tactic (based on the cleric's remarks, it may have been ogling, rather than low-cut shirts per say, that sets of the earthquake, and ogling was strictly avoided.)
In any case, an excellent study from Ms. McCreight, who we can expect great things from in the future. Ms. McCreight is a biologist by training.

Voice Control

You can buy a number of programs to control your computer by speaking to it. Star trek style. Awesome. I'm told Windows 7 even includes one standard, one capable of arbitrary dictation, so you can write out your entire thesis by speaking into notepad.
This is not perfect, such programs are easily confused by words that sound close to alike, but I wanted to try it for myself, so I installed a program called CVoiceControl, and began to work it.
First, it requires microphone calibration. A program tells you to record silence, speaking, screaming, and other things until it's confident in the way that the microphone works.
Then, it requires you to train it. You enter a command for it to register, like "firefox," and then you record something to activate it, like "I want to surf the web." The longer the better, the instructions say. You need at least four recordings of yourself, and the more the better.
Then, it's testing time. When it came time for me to test, I could not get it to trigger. I think I messed up on the microphone stage or something. It just couldn't figure out what I was saying.

Tree Cooling

There's a tree that could singlehandedly end global warming forever. The princess tree, Paulownia Tomentosa, has a number of remarkable traits that make it perfect for sucking tons and tons of carbon out of the air. For one, it grows exceptionally fast. It grows as tall as I am in the first three months of its life. This growth is made of carbon that it sucks from the air, with a little nitrogen from the soil.
For another, it's very tolerant of climate and pollution. It can grow from 60 degrees north latitude to 60 degrees south latitude. It grows in all soil types, and grows thick and strong roots, stabilizing soil.
Most remarkably at all, it can regenerate from a stump. Every seven years, you can cut it down, harvest the wood, (which can be made into everything from houses to guitars), and it'll regrow from the stump. An economical carbon sink.
Each seven year cycle, about 2 tons of carbon are sucked out of the air and made into wood. Wood that can be sold to a number of industries. Or just stacked in a warehouse. Unless you burn it, or it rots, it's out of the atmosphere.
Earlier, I calculated the amount of carbon that would have to be sunk to end the problem, and it would take a forest of some 100 billion trees to do the trick. Which woulds like a lot, certainly, but 100 billion trees worldwide. The earth is fairly big, and I'm sure that the room for 100 billion trees is there somewhere. Perhaps on the grasslands of Africa. Perhaps on the great plains of the central US. Perhaps on the dry and dusty Australian outback. Perhaps in the less-inhabited west of China. Perhaps the steppes of the central Asian countries and southeastern Russia. Perhaps all of these together.
We're pretty much insisting on using carbon-based fuels. It would be best if we did a little something to clean it up.

Working Around the Volcanoes

A volcanic eruption in Iceland has made air travel to northern and western Europe mostly inaccessible. It is not safe to fly planes through the cloud of volcanic ash, as the ash clogs the airplane's air intake and fouls the engine.
So, if you really wanted to go there, how would you do it?
You could, as an immediate alternative, fly to southern Europe, and take trains to your final destination. Europe is quite interconnected with trains, even going to the UK, an island, via a tunnel.
But let's say you really really needed to fly directly to, say, Finland, and you lose a billion dollars for every moment after 8 hours from now. How could you fly directly?
You'd have to modify the plane. It would have to accept air not directly, but through a series of filters. It would need thick and tough hulls and windows. Or, alternatively, instead of gasoline it would have a non-breathing nuclear reactor. The filters would be in layers, and would have to be changed in mid-flight.
And when the plane landed, it would need to be instantly stripped for maintence. Flying through the ash and debris would have eroded every surface on the outside, and many clogged filters would need to be thrown away.
But it would be possible. And if you needed it that badly, you could do it.

Alternative Shower

Every day, I take a shower to get clean. Sometimes two if I'm working hard. This uses a surprising amount of water. With more and more of the country facing drought, there must be another way.
Well, one way would be to recycle and purify the water. It's been done, so I'm off to the crazier methods.
How about I copy the space program, and have a cleansing foam sprayed onto me, and then vacuumed off? It would use no water at all, and in theory the foam should be recyclable. Waste that it pulls off of me could go straight into a garbage can for easy disposal. Or, alternatively to that, an incinerator. Easy fuel source.