NASA has developed a device that keeps track of biological data for people, much like the flight recorder in an airplane keeps track of flight information. The comfortably wearable device can monitor changes in heart rate, the amount of oxygen in the blood stream and more. It’s intended for astronauts, but the medical possibilities here …
Category: Blog
Marines to get fighting robot
The Gladiator Robot, a three-ton unmanned remote-controlled vehicle that can fire machine guns, nonlethal sting balls or tear gas, has been rolled out. The U.S. Marines will begin testing six prototypes in 2007 and could deploy around 200 of them in 2009 if they work as intended. And at just $300,000 to $400,000 each, they’re …
The end of Disney hand-drawn animation
This makes me sad. Disney has closed its last studio turning out hand-drawn animation; it’s all going to be computer-generated from now on.
Row, row, row your boat
Wascana Lake in Regina, just a couple of blocks from my house, is the venue for canoeing, kayaking and rowing events at the Canada Summer Games, now underway. Which, naturally, got me thinking…about science. The first scientific principle involved in boating of any sort is the one named after Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who formulated …
Canola with a sting
Chinese scientists have inserted scorpion and moth genes into canola to make them poisonous to insects. The anti-GMO crowd is going to love that.
Another garden picture
Beverley’s Flower 1 Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. Actually, we have lots of friends with beautiful gardens. Here’s a late-afternoon shot of a lovely flower in yet another Regina garden.
A Saskatchewan garden
A Saskatchewan Garden Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. Summer may be deadly (see earlier post), but it has its rewards, too. Some friends of ours have a most beautiful garden, which we were in on Saturday morning. It’s almost enough to make me want to take up gardening myself. Almost.
It’s official: summer’ll kill ya
According to the Centers for Disease Control, over a 20-year period, from 1979 to 1999, more people in the U.S. died from extreme heat than from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined.
Communicating via "brain computer interface"
A University of South Floriday psychologist and his students are working on ways for people who are paralyzed but fully conscious to communicate via a brain computer interface, using brain waves alone to operate a virtual keyboard. So far the method is slow–about one character every 26 seconds–but if you have no other means of …
Lighting the torch
Lighting the Canada Summer Games Torch Originally uploaded by Edward Willett. We attended the opening ceremonies of the Canada Summer Games at Taylor Field here in Regina yesterday; here’s the big moment when the torch was lit. I’m glad we went, although proceedings were perhaps a little too drawn-out, especially for those of us attending …
Hugo Award winners
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, certainly one of my favorite books of the last year, has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. The complete list is here
This could be heaven or this could be hell…
…namely, 989 people playing accordians simultaneously. The mind boggles.
My latest live walk and vlog
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