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Via medgadget: C’mon, linking actual brain cells to a silicon chip might sound a bit sensational at first, but considering the work that’s already been done on replacement retinas and human brains, Ted Berger’s recently-hyped work is pretty much right on time. Essentially, the USC researcher has spent the past decade or so “engineering a brain implant that can re-create thoughts,” and moreover, certain implementations could even “remedy everything from Alzheimer’s to absent-mindedness.” We know, thoughts of instantaneous brilliance are running wild through your mind, and considering that Ted (and his highly-regarded team) have figured out how to link a silicon chip to actual brain cells and elicit responses, the possibilities are indeed nearly endless. Put simply, Berger hopes that brain disorders that are currently battled with intensive drug regimens with less-than-exciting side effects can be solved “by simply implanting a few computerized brain cells.” Of course, the team admits that it’s “years, maybe decades” away from hospital-approved apparatuses, but if you’re interested in reading (a lot) more about “the future of brain science,” grab your specs, prepare your paltry short term memory, and hit the read link for all the insight. link

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Via Stanford: What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. link

Via Digg: Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark, D-Calif., is the first openly “nontheistic” member of Congress, the Secular Coalition for America announced Monday, March 12. The coalition said Stark, who has represented San Francisco’s East Bay since 1973, acknowledged his atheism in response to a questionnaire sent to public officials in January. link

Via The Washington Post: Al Gore won an Academy Award last week and, who knows, may rack up a Nobel Prize for describing the perfectly obvious. Not the future, but stuff that happened years ago. Go watch his dull, plonking, painfully backward documentary. You see those ice caps melting? That has major consequences.

Wall Street investment tycoon Henry Kravis, the original “Barbarian at the Gate,” is buying into Texas coal plants so they won’t exist. The great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were corporate green all the way. Austin has proclaimed itself the world capital of the war on climate change. Britain’s Stern Report on the economics of climate change proves that it’s cheaper to run a world than to wreck it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has figured out that a climate crisis is as scary as a nuclear exchange. And there is an absolute explosion of trendy green design Web logs, of which mine, Viridiandesign.org, was one of the first.link

Via Digg: Deep below the ocean’s surface, blue whales are singing óand for the first time, scientists think they know why. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recorded the sounds and say they offer new insight into the behavior of the passenger jet-sized animals. link

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Via Reuters: BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European homes, offices and streets will have to use energy-efficient lighting by the end of the decade, EU leaders decided on Friday.

The decision to order a massive switchover that will affect the lives of all the European Union’s 490 million citizens came at a summit of the 27-nation bloc as part of an ambitious green energy policy to fight climate change.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chaired the summit, told a news conference: “We’re not saying people should throw out all the bulbs in their house today but people should start looking at what’s in the shops. link