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lukecorp luke fritznews sciencedailywired space.com newscientist beyond 2000 links scientific americancosmic ancestry extropy webmonkey reading The Cyborg Handbook: Chris Hables Graylistening  weblogs eatonwebdamaged vavatch orbital archives 8.1.2000:8.31.20007.1.2000:7.31.2000 6.1.2000:6.30.2000
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8.31.2000
ahh, nothing to report again, im sorry. work is hectic as heck! :-) GADGET: An R2-D2 for astronauts. Check this little guy out!
Not only does telomerase have the promise of prolonging or eliminating aging, it's also a prime candidate for a universal cancer vaccine. GeronCorp is working on the TERT vaccine (TERT is a certain part of the telomerase protein), which looks effective in creating tumor-specific killer T cells in genetically different test subjects. The idea behind going after telomerase, is that the body hasn't completely adjusted to it, and therefore it is possible to get our immune systems to recognize and go after tumor cells and change the TERT area of the protein, so that T cells can kill tumor cells.
Ugh, nothing to report. In the Seattle suburb of Renton, a new community is springing up. What makes this so special? The same kind of technology thats going into Bill Gates' $97 million house. This community is the showcase of Vicinium, the software company providing the technology within the homes. Each of the 18 homes in this community will have their appliances connected to a home network. Every switch and appliance will be able to be controlled from the remote controller on your TV set. Also, all the homes will form a community intranet, where neighbours can send messages to each other over the TV, and report crimes, or suspicious persons. The question is: will this new community connectivity bring people closer together, or isolate them further? Will genomics kill the insurance industry? Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been extremely busy at work... so here's a larger edition for you to enjoy :-) Did you happen to catch BattleBots on TV? That was very entertaining, let me tell you! Watching deathmachine robots slicing each other to bits seems to hit all my buttons. It's got: cool engineering, creativity, action, destruction, and high tech. Also, by fighting with robots, many of the ethical problems of getting people or animals to fight each other are eliminated. Basically it means I can watch it without feeling like a hick. So anyway, catch BattleBots on Wednesday night at 10:30PM EST on Comedy Central (if youre in the US). A technique for making the skin temporarily transparent has been developed. Glycerol is injected into the skin and allows doctors to view and diagnose things such as tumors and organs in a non-invasive way.
GADGET: The computer of 2010, brought to you by Forbes and frogdesign. Galileo confirmed that Europa has a liquid ocean 5 to 20 km below the surface. By observing the fact that Europa's magnetic field 'flip-flops' often, scientists determined that there is a conductive layer that is highly mobile in Europa. Although this isn't completely definitive, other possible explanations for the phenomenon (such as a graphite layer) are far less plausible. This latest finding is music to the ears of those who hope to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Interview with James Lovelock, the creator of the gaia hypothesis.
Two nanotube firsts: nano-bearings and nano-springs. Berkeley physicists succeeded in making the bearings by ripping the ends off of a nanotube (10,000 would fit across the width of a human hair). To make a spring, the physicists would slide a nanotube within the other nanotube in and out, utilizing Van der Waals forces. Researchers can breathe easy, now that U.S. President Clinton has OK'd stem cell research. The new guidelines limit researchers to using only frozen fertilization clinic cells that were going to be discarded. Stem cell research has the potential to cure diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimers. A DNA zoo exists! Desperate to preserve the genetic information being lost in animals becoming extinct, zoologists have set up the Frozen Zoo. It holds samples from 4300 individuals from 353 species and subspecies. Oliver Ryder, chair in genetics at the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, said:
A new process for coating metal has been discovered. Reported at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, polyaniline lasts at least 10 times longer than other methods, such as zinc coating and plastic coatings. Polyaniline acts as a mediator in the oxidation reaction, accepting electrons from the metal and giving them to oxygen, creating a pure iron oxide layer that halts corrosion. More evidence was found for an ancestral link between bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. The bright sunlight of science marches on!
Nothing exciting happened today. Sorry.
Bizarre, someone split the electron. Whoa. Just goes to show saying something is absolute and infallible will always come back to bite you in the ass. I remember my science teachers saying things like that are "impossible" as opposed to the more scientific "improbable". Deep Space 1 broke a record this week. Over 200 days of operation for its ion-propulsion drive! The record was previously help by the Space Electric Rocket Test 2, which operated for 161 days. DS1 should continue to operate for at least another 383 days, when it will rendezvous with Comet Borrelly. The success of this type of propulsion has made it a new favourite in deep space missions, with JPL seriously considering using the ion-drives on future space missions.
A very interesting article from the field of economics. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mézard have created a new model of the economy that borrows from condensed matter physics. What they find is that money tends to accumulate to the rich, and heavy restrictions on trade aggravate this situation, making a handful of people super-rich. Using this model, they have determined that a more equal society can come from fair and free trade, something economists have been saying for a long time. See the original paper. Hmm, looking at techno-fashion today. Philips and Levis have come out with some sort of techno-jacket that will retail for £600. Its got integrated everything, from built in headphones and control systems to wireless internet access! Also, photos from the Brave New Unwired World fashion expo, thanks to MIT spinoff Charmed Technologies, founded by former Czechoslovakian spy Katrina Barillova.
For further information about wearable computing, please goto wearables.org Georgia Tech has opened up a new fuel cell facility in an effort to bring together different disciplines and spur development of better fuel cell technologies. Georgia Tech is seen as a leader in fuel cell research, and hopefully we will see great progress in the field with the combined efforts of the researchers at the Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technologies.
IBM succeeded in building the first 5-qubit computer. This "computer" consists of 5 flourine atoms in quantum entanglement. The experiment consisted of manipulating the states of the atoms to solve a mathematical problem in one step as opposed to the 4 distinct steps needed by a conventional computer. Although we are far away from having quantum computers sitting on our desks, this latest experiment confirms the theory that allows for single step calculations, such as the one that was performed. Ghassan Jabbour is leading the field in foldable organic displays. He envisions a day when you can take out your monitor and unfold it like a newspaper. Still in the early stages, Jabbour has been given a large amount of funding by the Department of Defense to bring this nascent technology to market. Rupturing the body's sugar-protein bonds might turn back the clock. NASA has developed a biofeedback system that uses popular videogames to help people control their brainwave functions. So far, great success has been seen in treating ADHD, primarily because the patients are motivated to come to the sessions. This differs from previous biofeedback system that used simplistic mechanisms, and weren't as much fun. This system works by restricting the amount of responsiveness in the joystick or gamepad, and making it easier to control when optimal brainwave function is reached.
There's finally some reason as to why so many amphibians are dying. Iridovirus and chytrid fungus seem to be doing the trick according to the US Geological Survey. The structure of the ribosome has been determined in what Yale researchers are likening to "climbing Mount Everest or running the four minute mile". Another great secret has been exposed thanks to X-ray crystallography. The primary use for this information is to create better immunizations for bacterial diseases, even the ones that have become resistant to anti-biotics. More importantly, however, is the implications for early cellular evolution. Since the protein synthesis reaction that occurs on the ribosome derives from the two-thirds of its mass that is RNA (and thus it is the enzyme component), protein synthesis evolved using RNA molecules. BIG WHOA: In an accident, scientists have discovered hybrid bacteria/semiconductors living in their lab. These bacteria had formed a germanium oxide shell around themselves, which made them impervious to all known bacteria killing methods, including intense UV and peroxide. These scientists will probably want to make transistors out of the bacteria, possibly leading to the day when you will feed your computer water and nutrients instead of using electricity. The major discovery is the bizarreness of the whole thing. The bacteria utilized totally foreign material, a semiconductor sheet, and incorporated them fully into their function, creating an organism thats survival is now many times that of other extremophiles, and is now also a living semiconductor. The implications are simply mind boggling. Supercharging the immune system. Cinnamon can prevent type-II diabetes.
Canadian researchers have figured out how much neural activity is needed for conscious thought (at least in the visual cortex). By taking a grey blob and slowly resolving the image into grey and white stripes, the research subjects would push a button when they were consciously aware of the stripes. By seeing spikes of neural activity before any button was pushed, the researchers determined the threshold minimum of visual consciousness. Simply amazing! With research like this, we pull back the black murky night of brain research, there is hope that soon much progress will be made in the true final frontier.
GADGET: Star Wars Jackhammer. The RAPTOR will shoot nails at 5,000 ft/s into the ground to loosen it up, without damaging pipes and cables. Saw a bizarre headline today, thought I was 30 years in the future: 'Antimatter Factory' starts work. Turned out that the 'factory' is a device that slows down anti-particles so that scientists can form anti-hydrogen. The aim of this endeavour is to see if there is any difference at all between hydrogen and its antimatter counterpart. If there isn't, we will still be in the dark as to why the universe didn't annihilate itself right after the big bang.
GADGET: BMW Z22 concept car. Whoa, interior looks stylish! Fly-by-wire controls, tri-camera rear-view composite video, voice activated controls, thumbprint starter, and indicators will appear to float 7 feet in front of the windshield.
More evidence for a bird-dinosaur connection. Read it and decide for yourself. A little progress was made on the nanotek front. Scientists at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have coaxed organic styrene molecules to form straight lines along a silicon surface. These "wires" are much smaller than anything possible with the current photolithography methods of making chips. They still need to figure out how to make the organic wires turn corners, but they are confident that in 5 years we will have useful devices that use this technology. Good, I'll be confident that I will be able to upgrade my 320 gigahertz processor so that I can get the latest IE update. It's time to focus on better software, before the bloatware becomes so huge and monstrous that we forget how to code cleanly and efficiently. When Windows 2010 comes out, it better be 50 megs as opposed to 50 teras. GADGET: The Hydro-Photon drink sterilizer. This looks pretty cool, it shoots out intense UV all around and kills all the microbes in an 8 oz glass of water, with enough charge for 100 glasses. This means I won't have to boil my water anymore before drinking it when going to an "exotic" country.
hi, just letting you know, my personal homepage is up and running... luke fritz Finally scientists have tuned into the fact that nature can do a better job of cleaning up soil pollutants. Joel Burken of UMR has shown success in planting trees in contaminated sites, with special genetically engineered microbes that live symbiotically with the tree. These microbes absorb the pollutants and prevent them from entering the water table, so drinking water doesn't become contaminated. Yet another example of how we can use the lessons of nature to enhance our lives. Some exciting news: Remember SETI@Home? Well the same distributed computing power is now being used by companies like Parabon to help find new flu vaccines and cancer treatments. This is definitely something I'd be willing to use my idle computer time for! Here is a list of uses for your idle time: - Cures for influenza Soon to be published is the result of a study that analyzed the genes of 200 of the smartest kids in America, in an effort to understand what makes people geniuses. Politics aside, it would be amazing to see treatments for retardation and "mind-boosters" for those who already have average or above average intelligence. In the long run, we will benefit from being a smarter humanity. Trust me on this one: smarter is better. All the evil in the world is caused by ignorance and instinct. NASA is trying to get people to innovate more by opening up a $7 million a year pot so that people working at Langley can come up with the technologies of tomorrow.
Half of the 90% of NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) that scientists are looking for have been found. It was announced that 410 asteroids larger than 1 km are accounted for, and NASA's goal is to find 810 by 2009. The more we find, the more warning we will have to prevent another extinction level event. Oh, I'm pretty late in mentioning this, but bacteria can survive the harsh conditions of space. NASA sent up a colony, and something like .1% survived, enough to restart the colony. This means that we can infect other biospheres with Earth life, but it also lends a lot of support for the Panspermia theory, which states that life was seeded on Earth by space-borne DNA material.
Oh dear, nothing to write about in the sci-tech world... I guess more planets were discovered, whoop de do, like anyone really cares about brown dwarfs and jupiter sized planets that we can't even see. Give me evidence of earth-sized planets in life-sustaining orbits of their stars and actual visual images, and I will be in awe. I watched The Green Mile for the first time, and it was good. Good acting, good camera-work and decent plot. There wasn't much of a message though, it was vague at best.
Scientists have cracked another brain secret: how we interpret color! Possible applications are making the bionic eye see in color and having implants that correct color blindness. Coolness. An article about the redistribution of power. Not political, but energy. I liked it. Here's a thought to leave you with, I got it in a weird fortune cookie: What is hidden in an empty box? It would be interesting to see what your answers are...
Found a good article about homeless outreach-type programs for the internet. In Seattle, there is a program that helps homeless people get online, get an e-mail address, and become part of a community. This is important, because the homeless don't have a community in "meatspace", but can find one and be accepted online. This further supports my belief that the internet can be a great tool for bringing people together in virtual communities, and that it doesn't isolate people from society, especially when they are already shunned by society. Hot spring algae could be used to absorb some of the CO2 emitted from evil coal powerplants.
UPDATE: Cholera bacteria mapped The chair of my department at school (Electrical and Computer Engineering) has won a $2 million grant from DARPA to research ways to maximize battery usage in military and civilian battery applications. He claims that it is possible to get 100 times more life from the battery by using more efficient techniques. This basically means that you could leave your laptop on for a week without recharging, instead of the measly 4-6 hours the best batteries today can manage. By the way, my faculty advisor, Alok Choudhary, is also on the team. Congrats!
just a quick post: newdeal software, a complete office suite on a floppy, utilizes assembly code and object-oriented programming to ensure code minimalization. runs from DOS. SETI finally gets some funds (Thanks to Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold), and the Allen Telescope Array will now be constructed. It's 1 hectare in size, and Seth Shostak, a famous astronomer at the SETI Institute, said: |
