12. A Potato Battery Can Light Up a Room For Over a Month

    Can you believe you can light up your room over a month by using a potato battery? According to the researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, potato which is boiled about eight minutes have a power ten times better than a raw one. However, how the 'Potato battery' really works is the potato acts as 'salt-bridge' between two metals attached to each side of potato, and it allows the electron current to move across the bridge to create electricity.
Check out for more information from http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/12/a-potato-battery-can-light-up-a-room-for-over-a-month/

                     

11. Now it is time to video chat with your puppy!

     

           When you have to leave house for couple days, now you wouldn't have to worry about anymore. Recently, 'PetChatz' is invented by Mark Kroll, a medical technology developer, who first considered this pet paranting device by looking at his dog can recognize and respond to her daughter through skype. This device can interact with your pet while you are not home using microphone, you can also give him food and you can check your pet's safe anytime you want.

If you are more interested, click http://www.petchatz.com/about/features-and-benefits or http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/12/this-device-lets-people-video-chat-with-their-pets/

10. Some Birds Can Stay in Flight for Six Months Straight!

       

Have you ever thought how long a bird can fly without resting on the ground?  Felix Liechti and his colleague at the Swiss Ornithological Institute found out the alpine swift, a small migratory bird can fly for more than 200 days without touching the ground using new sensing technology.
This technology works as to attach a small electronic tag on the body of the birds and the tag collect data every four minutes of the bird's location. The result shows that the bird stays in Europe for summer breeding and then migrate to Africa for the winter, thousands of miles away.  The only flaws of this research is as this tag sends the data every 4 minutes, so there is a chance the bird might touched down the ground in between these intervals. But still, I think it is cool study to show that this tiny bird can fly over 200 days without resting!
If you want more information,
Go to http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/10/this-bird-can-stay-in-flight-for-six-months-straight/

9. Mehmet, Oz. Genetically Modified Foods (GMO): Good or Bad? Doctoroz.com [Internet] 2012 Oct 16 [cited 2013 Nov 25 for SCIENCE in the NEWS]. Available from; http://www.doctoroz.com/blog/mehmet-oz-md/genetically-modified-foods-good-or-bad.

       Genetically modified foods are created using biotechnology to change their genetic material. The technique develops desired genes that are useful for our lives, or sometimes inactivates unwanted genes to make the product more efficient. Mehmet Oz, who is the host of The Dr. Oz Show and a professor of Surgery at Columbia University, talks about each side’s main points on genetically modified foods (GMOs), which are still greatly controversial today, instead of standing on one side of the GMO issue in this article. Mehmet explains several specific examples of modified corn, such as genetically modifying corn to be tolerant to herbicides, breeding corn with a built-in pesticide that kills bugs, or taking out a fish gene that can survive in cold water to make corn that survives in cold water. Furthermore, even though there are many merits to using genetically modified foods to feed a growing population, his opinion is that we still have to be on alert about the future costs of using GM foods.

     Overall, this article is a brief introduction of genetically modified foods and also about several cases of GM foods used in real life. I do agree that we have to be sure of what we eat and aware of future side-effects that might cause severe diseases. However, instead of worrying about upcoming negative effects of eating GM foods, I believe the problem of hunger and starvation has to come first which we all have to solve out together. In that way, using GM foods is the best way to figure out the problem of insufficient global food resources resulting from poverty at this stage.

     * However, if there is any other way to solve this hunger problem from poverty in developing countries, what would be the methods to replace the GM foods? 
   * If you disagree with popularizing GM foods, what would be the reason?