Better Painkillers Designed with Yeast
In Carmel Valley, a charming, rustic village located 11 miles inland of Carmel-by-the-Sea, there are a score of Monterey County wineries and tasting rooms, convenient to Carmel Valley home dwellers and tourists alike. The yeasts cultivated from wild strains have fermented wine from grapes or leavened bread from flour for thousands of years. Now cutting-edge Stanford research has taken yeast into the laboratory and reengineered it to produce modern plant-based painkilling medications.
In a recent breakthrough after a decade-long effort, Stanford scientists reprogrammed the genetic machinery of baker’s yeast so that it could convert sugar into the opioid compound hydrocodone within three to five days. Producing the opioid so rapidly could potentially speed access to lower cost medicines, especially for impoverished countries. The techniques they developed and demonstrated for opioid pain relievers can be adapted to produce many plant-derived compounds to fight and treat chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and arthritis, infectious diseases, and cancers.
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If you are planning to buy a home in Carmel, CA, you will want to make sure that any property you wish to invest in is thoroughly inspected. A home inspection can be conducted to check for structural damage and other factors that might influence your decision to purchase. Whether you choose to perform the inspection yourself or hire a professional home inspector, here are a few of the main things that should be inspected when checking out a property.
Roof Quality
The roof should be carefully inspected to look for things like missing tiles or cracks that might allow water to leak into the home. If the roof is severely damaged or outdated, you may need to invest a considerable amount of money in repairs if you wish to purchase that particular property.
Pest Damage
Pests can cause extensive damage to homes, and sometimes this damage is not easily seen right away unless the property is thoroughly inspected. Rats, mice, squirrels and other rodents can chew through wires and cause major damage to the electrical system. Termites can eat away at the wood and cause significant structural damage. A home inspection will also help to identify the presence of bed bugs, wasps and other potentially hazardous creatures.
Plumbing
The state of the pipes, fixtures and other plumbing system components can greatly affect the overall quality of the home. You will want to make sure that every part of the plumbing system is up to standard and that there are no cracks or other signs of damage that could lead...
I work in the Monterey Bay real estate market. I have become aware from a victim of a new type of burglary. When a home is tented for termites one has to vacate, poisonous gas is set off in the house and a big tent is draped over the house for several days.
I've learned that burglars are now attacking homes when they are most vulnerable. When the tent is on, the burglars have been cutting through the tenting or unclamping the seams and entering the house and ransacking it. It appears they would be wearing gas masks and using flashlights. As this tent is on for several days, it might be that the burglars are long gone before you get there and find your life and house has been turned upside down.
When a home is fumigated, it is done by licensed pest control operators. They have the utility company turn off the gas to the house, then tent it. After the home is sealed, they set up cannisters that release the gas. When the allotted time 2-3 days often is up, they take the tent off ,then test for residual gas. If there is any, they open windows to allow the fumes to evacuate.
So during this time you can set your...
California sunshine is beautiful but in parts of the state the summer time temperatures can reach triple digits in the summer months. New building technologies however can turn your roof in to an inexpensive way to cool your home. Engineers from the University of Colorado in Boulder have developed what is referred to as a “scalable manufactured meta-material”. Simply put, it is an engineered material with superior properties even nature can’t make. This new material acts as a kind of air conditioning system, with the ability to cool even when the object, in this case your house, is under direct sunlight. The saving come from the fact that cooling your home this way takes zero energy and zero water consumption.
One of the truly unique things about this new roofing material is that it is a glass polymer hybrid material that is a mere 50 micrometers thick. To put that in to perspective, it is only slightly thicker than the aluminum foil you use in your kitchen. Commercial builders will find this material cost effective and easy to apply. It can be manufactured and placed on to rolls. The cost savings, and ease of application will, if it has not done so already, trickle down to the home owner.
This eco-friendly material is applied to a surface, like the roof of a house or even a thermoelectric power plant, and keeps that structure cool by reflecting solar heat back in to space. It also allows the building surface to shed heat naturally. It requires no electricity like a home air conditioning...