The Wing-Friends and Other Books

In Blogger's slideshows images are greatly reduced, so lose much of their impact. And captions added to them in Picasa Albums vanish, so the images shown above are: the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, Earth, Earth with New Zealand circled, New Zealand, Auckland & the Hauraki Gulf, Waiheke Island, some native NZ forest, a Fantail and chicks, various doves, etc.

(If you want to see the first ten images in their original size, they are in a posting made on the 24th of November 2011.)

My book The Wing-Friends is an imaginative tale of a small brave boy, a magical adventure, a magnificent Pegasus and the wonderful Kingdom of the Pegasi. It has been given very good reviews, and virtually every reader on Goodreads has so far awarded it five stars. It is available here. Some of my other writings are available as e-books, such as The Lower Deck, which is an over-the-top take on Waiheke happenings--sort of.

Friday 2 August 2013

NET GLEANINGS 050

Graphene-based supercapacitors:
'Monash University researchers have brought next generation energy storage closer with an engineering first--a graphene-based device that is compact, yet lasts as long as a conventional battery.'

Splitting water with sunlight to produce hydrogen:
'A University of Colorado Boulder team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel.'

Climate-change is spreading disease:
'Climate-change is affecting the spread of infectious diseases worldwide, according to an international team of leading disease ecologists, with serious impacts to human health and biodiversity conservation. Writing in the journal Science, they propose that modelling the way disease systems respond to climate variables could help public health officials and environmental managers predict and mitigate the spread of lethal diseases.'

The hubristic theory was junk, not the DNA:
'Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk," the 97% of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.'