The sperm cells made in an artificial “bioreactor” look identical to those produced naturally. The technology could be used in two to four years to help infertile men have their own biological children, according to researchers based at a French national research institute in Lyon.
Scientists have been trying for two decades to find a way of producing human sperm in the test tube (in vitro). But no one has been able to complete the complicated cycles of cell division and development that lead the immature “germ cells” in the male testes to become fully mature sperm cells capable of successfully fertilising eggs.
A collaborative team led by Philippe Durand, scientific director of a biotechnology start-up called Kallistem, now claims to […]
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Monday, September 21st, 2015
Stephan: Did you know that you pay for 800 military bases scattered across the globe, where tens of thousands of Americans are posted, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars? Probably not. Almost no one in the U.S. seems to know about these bases. They are rarely covered by media, and few in Congress, except perhaps Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and a few others, seem to consider it a matter for much concern. In fact the Rightists and Neocons would like to expand our presence.
However, if you live in one of the countries where these bases are located, unless your income is tied to the base and its personnel, you may have a very different take on this. And, as this story describes there are very significant unanswered questions as to whether this network is making us safer or not.
U.S. Forces overseas
Credit: Shutterstock
With the U.S. military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of U.S. bases and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.
Like most Americans, for most of my life, I rarely thought about military bases. Scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson described me well when he
wrote in 2004, “As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.”
To the extent that Americans think about these bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and […]
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Monday, September 21st, 2015
Tina Casey, Clean Technica - Clean Technica
Stephan: Here is an excellent essay on the state of solar energy. Once again I am struck by how quickly this is going.
Concentrating solar power technology has had its doubters, but throw in a big dose of energy storage and now you’re cooking with gas, so to speak. That’s our takeaway from a phone call we had last week with Fred Redell, Managing Director of global solar giant and concentrating solar specialist Abengoa.
The conversation was timely because just yesterday the Energy Department announced a new $102 million round of funding for solar projects, a gigantic slice of which is going to ramp up concentrating solar power (CSP) tech to next-generation status, and it just so happens Abengoa is one of the CSP awardees.
Solar Energy And Energy Storage
With that in mind, here’s what Redell has to say about the interplay between solar energy and energy storage:
For our solar thermal electric projects we’ve been adding energy storage in one form or another essentially all the time…they [CSP systems] inherently have a certain amount of energy storage just because of the thermal inertia of the project. Our towers have included steam energy storage mostly for operational purposes, and then our Solana […]
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