Author Archives: Egg Syntax

How "workarounds" cause people with dyslexia to be more creative [feedly]

 
 

Shared via feedly // published on Boing Boing // visit site
How “workarounds” cause people with dyslexia to be more creative
“Mounting evidence shows that many people with dyslexia are highly creative, out-of-the-box thinkers, and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that their brains really do think differently.” An interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal on adaptive responses to a “neurodifference” that affects as many as one in five Americans.

Sent via feedly // A news reader for creative minds.

Sent from my iPad

Lightest-ever aerogel is only twice as heavy as hydrogen – Boing Boing

Lightest-ever aerogel is only twice as heavy as hydrogen – Boing Boing:

400+ Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow  /  4d  //  keep unread  //  preview

Lightest-ever aerogel is only twice as heavy as hydrogen

Delicious

TwitterLinkedInFacebookBuffer

+Tag

In a Nature paper called “Solid carbon, springy and light, scientists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China introduce a record-breakingly light aerogel, lighter than helium, only twice as heavy as hydrogen:

Gao Chao’s team had already been building macroscopic graphene materials in one and two dimensions; to create the new aerogel, the researchers branched out into the third dimension, using a new method of freeze drying the solutions of carbon nanotubes and graphene to create malleable carbon sponges.
PhD candidate Sun Haiyan explained, “It’s somewhat like large space structures such as big stadiums, with steel bars as supports and high strength film as walls to achieve both lightness and strength. Here, carbon nanotubes are supports and graphene is the wall.”
The new material is amazingly absorptive, able to suck in up to 900 times its own weight in oil at a rate of 68.8 grams per second — only oil, not water, which means it has massive potential as a cleaning material when it comes to events such as oil spills.

Graphene aerogel is the new world’s lightest substance [Crave/Michelle Starr]
(via Beyond the Beyond)

Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics – Boing Boing

Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics – Boing Boing:

Today, on Twitter, I learned something new and interesting fromenvironmental reporter Paul Voosen. Over the years, I’ve run into reports (like this one from the Union of Concerned Scientists) showing that genetically modified crops — i.e. Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, which is really the stuff we’re talking about most of the time in these situations — don’t increase intrinsic yields of those crops. But I’ve also seen decent-looking data that seemed to suggest exactly the opposite. So what gives?
Turns out, this is largely an issue of terminology…