According to Aubrey de Grey, if you can hang on for another 25 years, you have a decent chance of living to be 1,000–or more. I’m not holding my breath. (Well, obviously, because if I hold my breath, I definitely won’t make it another 25 years, will I?)
“Science’s Doomsday Team vs. the Asteroids” is a fascinating–and slightly frightening–tale about the discovery of the asteroid that’s going to miss us–but only by a little bit–in 2029, but may still have an explosive rendezvous with the planet sometime after that.
A bionic suit has been developed that could help older or disabled people walk or lift heavy objects. It’s called HAL, for hybrid assistive limb. They’re up to HAL 3, so far. Gee, I wonder what the HAL 9000 will look like? (If you get that reference, I’m afraid you’re a fellow geek. Or possibly …
Long-forgotten recordings by jazz superstars Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Ray Charles and the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, never before heard in the U.S., have been unearthed in the Library or Congress. Cool.
Scientists in Japan want to find sperm DNA in a frozen woolly mammoth carcass, use it to fertilize an elephant egg, and thus bring back a version of an animal that went extinct 10,000 years ago. Critics are, to say the least, dubious.
A new study suggests that half of the known planetary systems outside our own could have Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits–which certainly bodes well for the possibility the galaxy is teeming with them.
When you read or hear a piece of text–say, a science column–you automatically analyze it for its tone: positive, negative, happy, excited, etc. Increasingly, computers are being programmed to do exactly the same thing. Large organizations of all kinds like to keep track of what the media are saying about them, but it’s a time-consuming, …
Blogging will continue to be light to non-existant over the next few days as Globe Theatre rehearsals and ridiculously overlapping writing deadlines combine. But don’t worry, I haven’t gone away. I’m sure that’s a relief.
I use Word’s spelling check feature, but I don’t trust it. And I always turn off the grammar check tool. Looks like I made the right decision.
An interesting collection of werewolves, masks, and, well, “things”, made by a man with a really cool last name…
It’s just a speck of light, of course–but it’s still the first visible image of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Wasn’t that long ago there was debate over whether we’d ever know if there were planets around other stars. Now we’re starting to take their pictures.
I’ve written a bit about this before, but here’s a good round-up article on the current state of the burgeoning field of using brains signals to control computers.
