Time again to blow through a bunch of assorted but unconnected links to things I’ve read in the science and tech worlds recently:

Mother Jones magazine featured this quasi-interview with MythBuster Jamie Hyneman about alternative energy technologies. I say “quasi-interview” because his responses to their questions are so terse that it’s hard to tell if he actually said them or not, except that Jamie is rather short-spoken in the first place. The piece says that he’s really into alt-energy, and on the show the MythBusters have repeatedly demonstrated that most of the “free energy” stuff you see is total hogwash. Something to think about, since this morning everybody has a link to this “$1/gal Ethanol” story in Popular Mechanics.

RetroThing had me all nostalgic the other day for the very first computer I ever owned, the Sinclair ZX81. Mine was not a kit, it came fully-assembled. I bought it second-hand from my high-school best friend Andy, who had moved on to such cutting edge technology of the day as the TRS-80. It even came with the add-on 16K memory module. The post includes a link to this page which tells you how to build your own ZX80/81 with a couple dozen ICs and a circuit board, but if you don’t feel like building one, you can just download an emulator here.

The science journal Nature has this news article about understanding metabolism as a genetic condition. British researchers re-used some urine samples originally collected for another study and used a new form of spectroscopy to completely identify all the chemicals in the samples. They then identified the geographies of the test subjects and graphed specific metabolites and were able to determine that different populations have unique metabolic rates. People in Southern China, they conclude, have the best metabolisms in the world. People in South Texas have the worst metabolisms in the world. Yet more scientific evidence as to why one should stay away from Texas, if you ask me.

You knew I would have at least ONE nanotech link, right? Of course right! Today’s nano-news is this bulletin that tries to sex up the story with the headline “Nanotechnology paves way for super iPods”. Nice try. The underlying story is that a team at University of Glasgow have figured out how to make molecule-sized switches, which in turn will allow for as many as 1 billion transistors to fit on a single chip (up from 200 million today). That, in turn, would increase the density of electronic storage devices without increasing their physical size: 500 terabytes per square inch (compared to about 3 gigabytes now). No actual mention of iPods anywhere in the article. You just have to make the leap of assumption that someday this technology would be used in some future iPod so that you could store every song ever recorded.