The dangers of the rate at which state-of-the-art technology becomes obsolete are illustrated by this story about the Field Museum’s efforts to re-record voice recordings from 1958 describing more than 6,000 artificats collected by Captain A. W. F. Fuller. It’s a little disturbing to find out that what was state-of-the-art the year before I was …
Boys and girls are different…and not just in the obvious ways. Even their brains are wired differently–which has implications for everything from education to the treatment of mental disorders. The differences between the male and female brain are the focus of a lengthy article by Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist at the University of California in …
Here’s an update on the prospects for finding life on Mars…and those prospects, many scientists are beginning to believe, are excellent.
Pie in the sky? An awful lot of people don’t think so. It so happens there’s a major carbon-dioxide-using enhanced oil recovery project just about an hour south of here, down in my old stomping grounds around Weyburn.
There’s a Time Traveler Convention planned for this Saturday, May 7, at MIT. It was great; I had a fabulous time.
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.
…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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
Coincidentally, after I posted the item before, I ran acrossthis story on another form of 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 …
