Category: Blog

One device away from the beginning of the end of traditional book publishing? Sounds right to me. Of course, for me, my Audiovox Harrier already serves as a perfectly terrific e-book reader. In fact, the device described in the Michael Hyatt article I linked above sounds rather bulky. The size of a hardcover book? Yikes! …

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Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with a national team have developed a biodefense cocktail which activates the immune system against a broad range of viruses and bacteria. The new treatment boosts the body’s response against common characteristics of germs. Not a lot of detail in this press release, unfortunately, …

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British architects have drawn up plans for a kilometre-tall skyscraper, which could be built in Kuwait. If it’s built, it will be twice as tall as the world’s tallest building today, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which is 509 metres tall. I immediately thought of Robert Silverberg’s novel The World Inside, where people live in …

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The North Magnetic Pole appears to be fleeing the country. However, spokespersons for the North Magnetic Pole, speaking on condition they not be identified, claim this should not be taken as a political statement. One saving grace, from the point of view of the Canadian ego: it’s heading to Siberia, not to the U.S.

In 1908, Traffic Bridge was the scene of a near-disaster that marked the end of large-scale river traffic in Saskatoon. Yep, still writing the section on Saskatoon bridges.

Somehow I missed this last month, but the oldest map of anywhere in the western world, dating from about 500 B.C., has been found in southern Italy.

If you were to play a word association game with a random selection of people, it’s a safe bet that the word most would associate with the phrase “engineering project” would be “bridge.” Today’s topic: the bridges of Saskatoon, and specifically the Broadway Bridge, also known as the “Engineers’ Bridge.”

NASA might be interested. It’s posted its official request for proposals for privately built spacecraft that could ferry supplies and crew to the International Space Station. (Via Dispatches from the Final Frontier.)

Not that I’m one to be giving fashion advice (as my wife would be the first to tell you), but the idea of a scarf that automatically changes colour to match your clothes strikes me as, well…cool.

Get your colour–yes, colour–photographs of Imperial, pre-Revolution Russia here. Gorgeous, and fascinating.

No, honestly, that’s what this story says: a “brain” made of 25,000 neurons grown from a single rat embryo has learned to fly a figher jet simulator. I’m evenly divided between “Cool!” and “Ewwww!” Could go either way. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Methane-producing microbes buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland provide credance to the notion that high methane concentration in areas of the Martian atmosphere could be the result of life. Little green bugs, as it were. (Via The Speculist.)