There’s a Time Traveler Convention planned for this Saturday, May 7, at MIT. It was great; I had a fabulous time.
Category: Blog
Circuit bending
There is no practice so strange that it cannot spawn its own sub-culture. Here’s one with a particularly SF-ish vibe (with a hefty overtone of, oh, let’s call it cyberpunk primitivism): circuiit-bending.
Sailing to the stars…
…or, at least, the planets, but that’s not as nicely alliterative. Here’s an update on the most romantic form of space propulsion you can imagine: the solar sail. I’ve loved this technology since I first read about it in science fiction novels decades ago. And now, at last, it might be on the verge of …
It’s a bike, it’s a trike, it’s…both!
I never had training wheels on my bicycle. I also fell over a lot. Now an industrial design team has come up with a revolutionary trike/bike: it starts out as a kind of trike, with two rear wheels that splay out at the bottom for stability, then transforms into a bike as the rider gains …
Well, duh!
I hate the way TV stations clutter up programming–especially news programming–with crawls and sidebars and temperatures and God knows what else. And now I have scientific evidence to support my curmudgeonly grumbling.
Artificial retina undergoing tests
This is cool–opthamologists are conducting trials of an artificial retina for people with severe vision loss due to diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. In an earlier trial, all 10 patients provided with the artificial retina reported some improvement. If all goes well, the device could be available for widespread use in just …
More tabletop fusion
Coincidentally, after I posted the item before, I ran acrossthis story on another form of tabletop fusion.
Tabletop fusion
A fusion reactor on every tabletop? That’s almost (with allowances for poetic hyperbole) the dream of two engineers who announced in 2002 they had produced thermonuclear fusion by imploding tiny deuterium-rich gas bubbles with sound waves and neutrons. Now they’re trying to build on that discovery, to see if it’s possible to generate electricity with …
More on quantum wire
Quantum wire is one of Technology Review‘s technologies to watch, as the post below notes: here’s a Wired article on why. Think space elevators, faster computers, a new generation of flat-planel TV displays, and more.
Understanding antibiotic resistance
This sounds promising: Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are making strides in understandin g antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Their findings are already leading to new, experimental antibiotics. We do NOT want to find ourselves living in a post-antibiotic age. In the words of Billy Joel, “The good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t …
Technologies to watch for
Technology Review offers10 technologies to watch, ones they think will transform the Internet, computing, medicine, energy, nanotechnology and more. Short version: they’re Airborne Networks, Quantum Wires, Silicon Photonics, Metabolomics, Magnetic-Resonance Force Microscopy, Universal Memory, Bacterial Factories, Enviromatics, Cell-Phone Viruses and Biomechatronics. If you don’t know what some of those are (and I didn’t) read the …
"Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists"
This isn’t exactly the science fiction headline of the day–it’s more like the H. P. Lovecraftian headline of the day.
My latest live walk and vlog
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