Technology
pharyngula | May 30, 2011On my last flight, I sat next to a woman who had the worst case of fear of flying I've ever seen. She spent the entire trip clutching the armrests and breaking into frequent bouts of tears; when I asked if there was anything I could do, she said, no, she knew it was completely irrational, but she just felt extreme terror every time she got in an airplane.
I wonder if she'd pass this new ridiculous test Homeland Security is installing in airports?
Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to…
pharyngula | May 28, 2011This is a video produced in the 1960s to illustrate life in the 1990s. Nerds will find hilarity in the computer interfaces, women will rage at the gender stereotypes.
pharyngula | May 27, 2011I was reading Roger Ebert's lament over the disgraceful decline of quality in theater projection (a function of theater owners who just don't care anymore and the corrupting influence of bad 3D), and then I remembered that last year I took some pictures of the funky old technology in our local movie house, the Morris Theatre.
This is a classy old place, a bit run down now, but once it was the entertainment center for the whole community. It was built in the 1940s, and it's very old school: a single screen, so you don't get many choices here. What's playing this week is what's playing this…
jtoney | May 26, 2011
Figure 4: Synaptic responses of HFF-iN cells.
There seems to be a brain-centric theme emerging this week in groundbreaking science. Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have reported in Nature the first example of transforming human skin cells into functional nerve cells. Could skin cells someday be able to "think"? Could they be used to create a biological computer or in regenerative medicine?
How did they do it? Excerpted, and revised for clarity, from their Abstract: {my comments in italics}
Somatic cell nuclear transfer, cell fusion, or expression of lineage-…
drorzel | May 26, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I was the founding president of a start-up / spin-off company out of the University of Toronto. The company was originally called Northern Nanotechnologies, and is now called Vive Nano. My current job is…
jtoney | May 25, 2011Source.
That doughnut shape decorated with bright green spots, some connected by red pathways, amidst sky blue neighbors could be an artist's creation, but is the result of a creative scientific attempt to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories. Really.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh published this stunning study in the journal Lab on a Chip {the full paper can be accessed here.} When I first learned how to grow cells in a lab, the technique of tissue culture, the idea of even growing brain cells was a far-fetched dream, much less brain cells capable of forming…
gregladen | May 21, 2011Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I'm still annoyed ... had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold…
jtoney | May 19, 2011
Figure 1. Miniaturized radio transmitters attached to bumblebees.
(a) Transmitter attachment on a Bombus terrestris individual kept in a glass tube with opened gauze where the transmitter is fixed with superglue. (b) Nectar collecting individual of Bombus terrestris on Phacelia flower having a transmitter attached. (c) Bombus terrestris individual with attached transmitter, foraging on red clover (Trifoliumpratense).
Can you imagine being able to track a single bumblebee over the course of a day? German and Danish scientists accomplished this impressive feat. So what do those bees do all…
jtoney | May 18, 2011
Maybe it's just me, but I see beauty in this. Scientists at the University of Manchester have created high resolution images of a 49 million year old spider encapsulated in fossilized amber resin using X-ray computed tomography, typically used in medical imaging.
If the still image doesn't convince you, I invite you to watch this stunning video revealing 3D images of the little beast.
I wonder if this evidence would give those believing the world was created 6,000 years ago pause. Probably not.
See press release here.
Original citation:
Dunlop, J. A., Penney, D., Dalüge, N., Jäger, P.,…
pharyngula | May 17, 2011You can't get riper nerd schadenfreude from anywhere but a bad powerpoint competition.
There are some real horrors at that link, but they unfortunately miss a trick: the greatest suffering is not inflicted by the single slide, but by the endless flood of one bad slide after another.
I have suffered through a presentation by Kent Hovind: 3 hours nonstop, and over 700 slides. My brain yet bears the awful scars.
jtoney | May 15, 2011
Hilary Clinton famously said in 1992:
I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.
Ironically, daily domestic necessities such as baking and cooking have taken on a different twist in a recent partnership between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Academy Award winning actor Julia Roberts.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves' mission, led by the United Nations Foundation, is:
...is a new public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods,…
gregladen | May 7, 2011The games developer David Braben and some colleagues [developed] something called Raspberry Pi. It's a whole computer on a tiny circuit board - not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with them.
Yeah, yeah, help the little British school children yadayadayada. Let me know how that goes. Mean time, I WANT SOME OF THESE. I can imagine buying them six on a card off the wall at the supermarket!
One, Imma build into a belt buckle with the usb cord and video cord as the belt…
jtoney | May 6, 2011Source.
A strange email arrived in my Inbox recently asking me for a picture of my tongue, assuring me "lifetime benefits." First I wondered how this email escaped my Spam filter. But then I wanted to explore.
Here's the email {you likely will have received it too}:
Dear distinguished guest,
How are you recently? Is everything ok? I am Sasha from Traditional Chinese Medicine center (short for TCM), the assistant of Dr.Huang, it's my honor to contact you via this email.
I hope our TCM center have left nice memories for you.
It's our responsibility to give our remote concern to you since you…
jtoney | May 4, 2011
Credit: MIT International Review
Did undergraduate students pinpoint Bin Laden in 2009? A paper published in the MIT International Review indicates that they might have.
This story may well be a classic in the history of the war against terrorism and it is a compelling example of how students learning in the classroom can contribute to important, real-world problems involving human rights.
From ScienceInsider:
The bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie {UCLA geographer}, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from…
cevans | April 30, 2011
As you may have heard, SETI is in trouble.
Funding cutbacks on a state and federal level have forced the Allen Telescope Array -- SETI's new homebase, actually just a part of the U.C. Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) -- into indefinite hibernation. With U.C. Berkeley losing ninety percent of its NSF University Radio Observatory money this year, and the growing California budget shortfalls, the hunt for extraterrestrial life has simply, and pragmatically, fallen by the wayside.
This financial deficit particularly smarts because the Allen Telescope Array was just about to…
drorzel | April 28, 2011As previously noted, the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 tablet that I use for my lectures is limping badly these days (it blue-screened this morning, whee). The options for a direct replacement are pretty limited, but in thinking about it a bit, I realized that I hardly use the tablet functions other than to annotate slides during lectures. Most of what I do with it just involves using it like an ordinary laptop.
It's not clear to me whether the hardware is really a problem, but I might very well be able to wipe it, reinstall the necessary programs, then continue to use it as a lecture-only computer,…
jtoney | April 27, 2011Source.
I had a dream last night of harvesting MMORPG time to save the planet. Let me explain.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) are deeply engaging millions of players, spending some 21 hours per week in a virtual world according to The Daedalus Project. The World of Warcraft alone has more than 12 million subscribers, part of an industry that exceeded revenues of $1 billion in 2008.
Consider the scale of the time investment - 12 million players averaging 21 hours per week!
MMORPG's allure is understandable. They offer an alternative experience in which one is freed…
gregladen | April 26, 2011According to Steve Jobs, Apple's iPhone and/or Apple corporation (the distinction is important but often muddled in this conversation) does not track its users' geographical location, but Android (which is neither a phone nor a company, but a system ... another important yet muddled distinction) does.
Supposedly:
One MacRumors reader emailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for clarification on the issue while hinting about a switch to Android if adequate explanations are not forthcoming. Jobs reportedly responded, turning the tables by claiming both that Apple does not track users and that…
sastyk | April 26, 2011About a month ago I had the privilege of spending an hour talking (on stage, in front of an audience) to my congressman, Paul Tonko, about energy issues and preparedness. What emerged from this discussion was that *EVEN THOUGH* Tonko is one of the best congresspeople out there on energy and environmental issues, even though he's a tremendously smart guy, even though he actually has had some real education on peak oil issues, the two of us were talking past each other in many ways. It was fascinating - I know that Tonko grasps the basic idea, but the narrative in which efficiency,…
cagapakis | April 25, 2011Two videos that Patrick Boyle and I made were selected for the Bio:Fiction Film Festival! One of the prizes is an online audience award, and you can watch and rate all of the films! It's such an honor to be part of this festival and to be showing our work next to that of so many amazing artists, scientists, and filmmakers, and we would be super thrilled if you voted for us!
Here are our videos! First, the world premiere of Compound 74, a fictional documentary about a possible future of synthetic drug design through synthetic biology:
And second, the commercial we made for Ginkgo BioWorks--…