Refraction animation

Excellent animation of reflection and refraction here.

Floodproof rice?

They've come up with rice strains that are resistant to pests, that can grow with less water, but what do you do when you have floods? Well, here's one possibility.

The Perseids Are Coming

For night skygazers, some action

A motor tiny enough for blood vessels

Complete story here.

Are lice good for us?

From Popular Science.

Little bits for the planet

Some of the trivia I picked up in my travels around the web. Sorry, no citations, since there were too many sources.

• Imagine a PET bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.
• The net cooling effect of a young, healthy tree is equivalent to ten room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.
• Conventionally grown cotton uses approximately 25% of the world's insecticides and more than 10% of the pesticides.
• Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles. (Closer home, think of seafood and kiwi fruit that we want to enjoy in Delhi!) If you start your own garden the vegetables only have to travel to the kitchen table.

GeoEye looks at our planet

So many people mail out 'stunning pictures' of the Earth, endlessly forwarded, that my mailbox creaks with the load. So here's a link to the site of GeoEye, the new kid on the block when it comes to high-resolution images of the earth. The images are a big improvement over Google Earth, though they don't offer anything but the picture.

Enjoy your planet.