being teh master genius that I am, I can’t get the friggin’ player thingie to work, so you’re gonna have to go to the awesome black hole time sucker that is TED’s website. But it’s worth it, promise. Shoo.

Brilliant.

These are incredible. Stefanie Posavec visualized Kerouac’s On The Road in a really clean, incredible way. Using variables of sentence length as well as topic categories of her own construction, she can give you a bird’s eye view of the book. And she has used the same dataset in several different illustrations, each with a feel of their own. Pretty, poetic.

It’s always nice to start your day with some uplifting news. Turns out some researchers from Penn State that have been trying to increase the efficiency of hydrogen production using bacteria that feed on biomass (plant matter, food scraps, and on Mondays only, dogshit) have recently made a headline-grabbing breakthrough:

In laboratory experiments, their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

“This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added in the process,” said Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State.

Can you imagine filling your gas tank with the leftovers from your picnic (assuming you had mostly vegetables)? The best part is this is not another one of those greenwashing stories á la “we-can-power-a-car-on-hydrogen-but-it’ll-take-another-20-years” variety; according to one of the team members, the technology is available today.

“The technology is economically viable now, which gives hydrogen an edge over another alternative biofuel which is grabbing more headlines”, Logan said. “The energy focus is currently on ethanol as a fuel, but economical ethanol from cellulose is 10 years down the road,” said Logan.

Pretty wonderful news. Let’s hope that enough information about the process gets out so people can start tinkering with this technology, and we won’t have to wait for the auto industry to investigate.