Recently we discussed how a sewer system could be run without charging citizens a special sewer fee, just through the sale of recovered minerals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. A new scientific study confirms that recycling nutrients from human wastewater is an economically viable venture.
Automated farming
Around the world scientists are developing robots for agriculture.
This Australian robot is suitable for open field farming:
Diet and ADHD
Just a few interesting articles on the relation between diet and ADHD.
Dietary change might help some children with ADHD – Unfortunately not for everyone and more research is necessary.
Unhealthy diet during pregnancy could be linked to ADHD – to be more specific consumption of high level of fat and sugar could be cause ADHD in one’s offspring.
Food Additives Linked To Hyperactivity In Kids, Study Shows – important for regulators to decide whether to allow or not certain additives.
Zinc Supplements Could Help Treat ADHD – interesting as this would be a rather inexpensive intervention.
Western diet link to ADHD, Australian study shows – again more research is necessary.
Omega-3 reduces ADHD symptoms in rats – though humans are not rats, this study confirms that fetal development is essential in later behaviour.
Exercise at work
As pointed out earlier too many people spend to less time on physical exercise and this seriously affect public health. A serious challenge for many people is to schedule regular work outs in their time tables. The DeskCycle is a tool that allows people to exercise while simultaneously doing something else, such as work.
Health policy
Health care is a costly affair and the best method to reduce a nation’s medical expenses, is to prevent its citizens from getting sick in the first place. Therefore space settlements should focus on preventive medicine in their health policies. Continue reading Health policy
No sitting, no kidding
Here a video by CBS about a Californian elementary school that does not allow sitting.
On downloading
A couple of years ago we proposed the idea of a general data download tax to fund an alternative compensation scheme. Under this tax people would pay a charge for each, say, gigabyte of data they would download. Though the concept itself is rather simple, it becomes complicated if one needs to take into account businesses, libraries and internet cafés. Continue reading On downloading
Omega-3 against crime
Earlier we discussed the link between environmental lead concentration and criminal behaviour. New research lead by Jill Portnoy has indicated that another substance might have significant effect on criminal behaviour: omega 3. Continue reading Omega-3 against crime
Refuse-derived clothing
Two Italian fashion designers have developed a technique to make a silk-like fabric from citrus waste, called Orange Fiber. The orange juice industry produce a very large amount of waste in the form of peels. The use of citrus peels as a resource for the production of textiles, is interesting as it increase the value of citrus fruits and hence potentially increasing the income of citrus farmers.
Sewage and Algae
In the previous post I did not discuss particular technologies to purify waste water and to turn it into clean water. One way to remove minerals from waste water are algae.
As orbital space settlements will get most of the energy from solar power, there is little use for biofuel. However, algae have a lot of other useful applications. Continue reading Sewage and Algae
