Google Launches Private SF Bay Ferry Service To Shuttle Workers « CBS San Francisco

KPIX 5 has learned that Google has contracted with a private firm to provide a catamaran to ferry its workers from San Francisco to Redwood City.
The service started Monday and the catamaran – the Triumphant which holds 149 passengers – runs two trips in the morning from San Francisco to Redwood City and two return trips in the evening. The ride takes about 47 minutes each way.

As for whether Google has the proper permits and inspections for the ferry service, the Coast Guard told KPIX 5 if Google is not charging employees for the service, the ferry would be treated the same as a recreational vessel and would not require an inspection.

via Google Launches Private SF Bay Ferry Service To Shuttle Workers « CBS San Francisco.

Observing the observers – MIT News Office

Why is this? According to Juanjuan Zhang, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the potential recipients who reject seemingly viable kidneys are engaging in “observational learning,” the cognitive process of intuiting answers based on limited information — and sometimes drawing the wrong conclusions from those observations.

via Observing the observers – MIT News Office.

Confirmation bias…

Why Carmakers Always Insisted on Male Crash-Test Dummies — Taming the American Idol

But a female dummy didn’t become a mandatory part of frontal crash tests until last year. For all this time, the average American guy stood for us all.

That may have had a substantial impact on women’s auto safety. If airbags are designed for the average male, they will strike most men in the upper chest, creating a cushion for their bodies and heads. Yet small women might hit the airbag chin first, snapping their heads back, potentially leading to serious neck and spinal injuries.

In some cases, according to tests with female mannequins, small women were almost three times as likely as their average male counterparts to be seriously injured or killed. A study of actual crashes by the University of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics found that women wearing seatbelts were 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured than males in similar accidents.

via Why Carmakers Always Insisted on Male Crash-Test Dummies — Taming the American Idol.

Dooop.

How to Heal Cavities Naturally | Minds

The food remedies that can heal cavities and tooth decay

In order to restore the ratio of calcium and phosphorus in our blood, and to enable minerals to bond to our teeth, it is not enough to just avoid eating too many sweet or processed foods. We must also eat health-building foods, containing copious amounts of minerals and vitamins that will build a glassy hard tooth structure.

Foods to focus on are:
– Coconut oil, grass-fed organic dairy (especially butter), grass-fed meats, seafood and bone broths.
– Organic cooked vegetables (soups with bone broth are ideal). 
– Organ and gland meats, like liver.

Limit foods that are high in phytic acid, like grains, beans, nuts and seeds, as well as limiting processed food intake full of processed flours and sugars that upset blood sugar balance.

Supplements to consider are:
– Fermented cod liver oil – very high in fat soluble vitamins A, D and K.
– Magnesium – required to use calcium and phosphorous effectively.
– Gelatin – if you don’t have time to make bone broth, this is a good alternative and is great for gums and digestion.

via How to Heal Cavities Naturally | Minds.

How to Brew Your Own Conductive Ink – IEEE Spectrum

a new liquid-metal ink. Conductive inks made from silver nanoparticles have been available for some time; recently, a group at Georgia Tech demonstrated a way to use them in inkjet printers to create custom circuits. But they are quite pricey, and I’m not keen on the idea of pumping metal through my printer. In contrast, this new ink can be used in an ordinary roller-ball pen to draw circuit traces, and the recipe for making the ink is amazingly straightforward: Mix 75.5 parts gallium with 24.5 parts indium in a beaker of deionized water, heat to 50 °C, stir, and voilá: an alloy that’s liquid at room temperature, costs about US $1 per milliliter, and is two orders of magnitude more conductive than the nanoparticle inks; its resistivity is just 17 times that of copper.

I phoned the senior author on the paper, professor Jing Liu of the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Science, in Beijing, to check that this was really something I could do at home. Use 99.9 percent pure gallium and indium, he advised; I bought the metals from GalliumSource.com for about $130. The pen cartridge needs to be completely clean before filling, and the liquid alloy must be free of any solid bits that might clog the tip. Most important, write on plastic transparencies. The surface tension of the ink is so high that it beads up on paper.

via How to Brew Your Own Conductive Ink – IEEE Spectrum.

So cool, I have to try this!

Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food – NYTimes.com

One-sixth of China’s arable land — nearly 50 million acres — suffers from soil pollution, according to a book published this year by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The book, “Soil Pollution and Physical Health,” said that more than 13 million tons of crops harvested each year were contaminated with heavy metals, and that 22 million acres of farmland were affected by pesticides.

via Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food – NYTimes.com.

Sad.