science
Houston, We Have a Coredump
Naturally, the astronauts aboard the ISS kept logs of all their activities while up there.
We can read the logs thanks to The Laboratorium, brought to us since 2000 by James Grimmelmann. Thanks, Jim!
The kinds of computer problems they experienced in space are interesting to read about if only because they are no different than the ones we experience here on Earth.
Read some of their logs by clicking here – if you likey.
And – if you’re REALLY geeking out on this stuff like i did, you can download the complete logfiles via NASA’s site.
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Teaching Fish to Swim Isn’t Easy
Thanks to Gerald for turning me onto this.
Adapted from Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin © 2008.
Professor Shubin, the University of Chicago’s Robert R. Bensley professor, chair and associate dean for Organismal Biology & Anatomy, is also provost of the Field Museum of Natural History.
Hernias, hiccups, and snoresâ€â€oh, my! It’s been 3.5 billion years, and the human body’s past still plays a role in our lives and health.
My knee was swollen to the size of a grapefruit, and one of my colleagues from the surgery department was twisting and bending it to determine whether I had strained or ripped one of the ligaments or cartilage pads inside. This, and the MRI scan that followed, revealed a torn meniscus, the probable result of 25 years spent carrying a backpack over rocks, boulders, and scree in the field. Hurt your knee and you will almost certainly injure one or more of three structures: the medial meniscus, the medial collateral ligament, or the anterior cruciate ligament. So regular are injuries to these three parts of your knee that these three structures are known among doctors as the “Unhappy Triad.†They are clear evidence of the pitfalls of having an inner fish. Fish do not walk on two legs.
Our humanity comes at a cost. For the exceptional combination of things we doâ€â€talk, think, grasp, and walk on two legsâ€â€we pay a price.
This is an inevitable result of the tree of life inside us. Imagine trying to jerry-rig a Volkswagen Beetle to travel at speeds of 150 miles per hour. In 1933 Adolf Hitler commissioned Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to develop a cheap car that could get 40 miles per gallon of gas and provide a reliable form of transportation for the average German family. The result was the VW Beetle. This history, Hitler’s plan, places constraints on the ways we can modify the Beetle today; the engineering can be tweaked only so far before major problems arise and the car reaches its limit.
In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingersâ€â€and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed worldâ€â€one with no historyâ€â€we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.
Nowhere is this history more visible than in the detours, twists, and turns of our arteries, nerves, and veins. Follow some nerves and you’ll find that they make strange loops around other organs, apparently going in one direction only to twist and end up in an unexpected place. The detours are fascinating products of our past that, as we’ll see, often create problemsâ€â€hiccups and hernias, for example. And this is only one way our past comes back to plague us.
Our deep history was spent, at different times, in ancient oceans, small streams, and savannahs, not office buildings, ski slopes, and tennis courts. We were not designed to live past the age of 80, sit on our keisters for ten hours a day, and eat Hostess Twinkies, nor were we designed to play football. This disconnect between our past and our human present means that our bodies fall apart in certain predictable ways.
Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component. The examples that follow reflect how different branches of the tree of life inside usâ€â€from ancient humans, to amphibians and fish, and finally to microbesâ€â€come back to pester us today. Each of these examples show that we were not designed rationally but are products of a convoluted history.
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Another Eureka Moment!
If you had to wear a knee brace every day you’d definitely want to wear one of these.
Funny how these simply wonderful ideas elude us for so long :
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Scientists in the United States and Canada said on Thursday they have developed a unique device that can be strapped on the knee that exploits the mechanics of human walking to generate a usable supply of electricity.
It generates enough power to charge up 10 cell phones at once, the researchers report in the journal Science.
you can [read more of the reuters article] too.
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Machines learn to lie
Scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other about food sources.
The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for “food” targets nearby while avoiding “poison.” Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.
The little wheeled robots had neural circuitry with about 30 “genes” that determine their behavior, and how much they react to light in the environment. The food sources charged up the robots’ batteries while the poison drained them, and by using the genes of the most successful feeders in 50 successive generations, the team was hoping to select the fittest.
Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots’ honor, luckily, there were also a few “hero robots” that signaled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.
Will this culture make it into consumer robots? Imagine the possibilities. Security systems lying about whether or not kids snuck out in the middle of the night…
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another kind of tag
It would be an interesting first day on the job : sign the paperwork, W-2 and whatever else, and then roll up your sleeve for a microchip injection.
Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin.
No one’s quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be or why states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive [isn't that a term used for bombing other countries?] while the industry that produces the technology sees the states’ action as fear mongering.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags – tiny, data-storing microchips about the size of a grain of rice – are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his adulterous wife.
Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range [for now] – usually from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in car keys.
In humans they’ve been used to store medical information, to track movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, roughly 2,000 RFID chips have been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip.
The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification, and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer’s disease, have RFIDs implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by the Mexico attorney general’s staff to safeguard identity information at a time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon.
Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its employees be “chipped,†or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms. According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down.
But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry spokespeople to decry regulation as “scare tactics.â€Â
Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April. Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw theirs die. Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology.
Yet.
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Enjoy your Space, er, stay…
“Galactic Suite,” the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.
Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.
During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.
Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel’s joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.
“It’s the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge,” says Claramunt. “How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy.”
But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness — the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.
When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.
Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.
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Cloning for dollars
Scientists at Seoul National University Korea are seeking to commercially clone dogs this year, which would be the world’s first attempt to create canine clones for money. Senior researcher Kim Min-kyu at the Seoul-based University is spearheading the efforts based on his team’s expertise in cloning dogs. As per Mr. Kim early last month, they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korea Customs Service to clone its drug-sniffing dogs. They have already obtained somatic cells of the expensive dogs and will attempt to clone them in July or August to get puppies late this year at the earliest.
Demand for drug and explosive sniffing dogs has outstripped supply after the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks in 2001, as countries focus on beefing up security, according to Kim. But he refused to elaborate the terms of the MOU. Kim played a pivotal role in creating the world’s first cloned dog, a male named Snuppy, in 2005 as well as three other female clones last year. Still, no other scientists on the planet have succeeded in cloning a dog except Kim’s team.
here we go, folks…
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History of the Compact Disc
by Joshua Coventry
The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts. By the time his invention had been refined and further developed, it was actually a merger and adaptation of many different technologies including the laser (1960), digital recording (1967) and optical disc technology (1970s). Russell struggled to attract interest from investors at first but eventually Sony and other companies realized the potential and purchased licenses of the CD-ROM technology.
Development
With support from large corporations, the technology was further improved and enhanced to ensure it was ready for the market. In 1978, Polygram, a division of Philips, decided polycarbonate as the material of choice for the CD. Many other decisions were made that year, such as the disc diameter (115m) and the type of laser to be used by CD players. It was also decided that data on a CD would start at the center and spiral outwards to the edge. In 1979, a prototype CD system was demonstrated in Europe and Japan; Sony then agreed to join into the collaboration and both Sony and Philips compromised on the standard sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, and the choice to use 16-bit audio. The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback with the sampling rate and quality chosen.
The compact disc first surfaced the public eye’s scope 15 years after its invention when Philips made an announcement on May 17, 1978. The new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony in 1980 as ‘Red Book’, which was a set of color-bound books containing the technical specifications for all CD and CD-ROM formats. The standard is not free, and a license (known as an IEC 60908 document) must be obtained from Philips for US$210 as a PDF. In 1981, Matsushita accepted the new CD standard, but the collaboration between Sony and Philips ended as the two companies had products ready for 1982.
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Google Maps : test
Adaptive Technology :: Evolved
Doctors laugh at me when they ask me ideally what do i want to do about my knee problem and i tell them how i’d like them to just lop it off and gimme a rad prosthetic.
if there are any doctors out there who’d like to help a fella get his quality of life back by hooking him up with something akin to this would you email queue [ - at - ] thinfilmsproductions dot com, please?
i don’t wanna be the fastest runner on my block or break any records other than the furthest walk i’ve had in months.
there’s no doubt this new technology is fascinating but, as we all know, every new solution brings with it a new set of dilemmas.
Whatever. You are my total fucking hero! THANKS, OSCAR!
click here to learn more about Oscar.
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Don’t look into the straw…
Did you know our primitive brains weren’t wired very well to read this paragraph?
Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we’re peering through a straw.
And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only do our eyes feed our brain the words we’re reading, they’re also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we’re reading.
Every time we read block text, we’re forcing our brain to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs. This mental tug of war slows reading speed and diminishes comprehension.
When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way.
[more]
Alas, a threat to Google? Nah…
The evolutionary path of the computer is curiously cyclical. In the 1970s, companies relied upon mainframes, with multiple users sharing a single central computer through “terminals.†But by the early 80s, the ascendancy of the personal computer had pushed this setup to obscurity, essentially re-orienting the relationship to keep most of a computer’s processing and productivity tasks between the machine and its individual user. The rise of dial-up and then broadband Internet in the following decade changed our conception of computers from isolated islands of processing power to connected communication devices, not unlike phones or televisions.
[more]
we Like Sheep
Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera – which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells – and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.
Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.
[more]
VisuWords
remember the brain?
the technology has evolved into many cool applications, not the least of which is VisuWords.
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how to move up the food chain
Since the 1960s scientists have known that chimpanzees are able to make and use toolsâ€â€behavior once thought to be an exclusively human trait.
Now National Geographic-funded researcher Jill Pruetz has observed toolmaking behavior that further blurs the line between the apes and humans: chimps in Senegal sharpening sticks into crude spears and thrusting them into tree hollows, presumably to hunt small mammals.
Jill Pruetz’s work with chimpanzees will be featured in an upcoming NOVA/National Geographic special on PBS (airdate to be determined). National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.
Lucas’ network infrastructure trumps world
Given the cult-film status of 1971′s THX 1138 in the George Lucas universe, it should come as little surprise that the total capacity of Lucasfilm’s giant data center is 11.38 petabits per second.
Granted, that number–which represents the value one would get by adding up the bandwidth capacity of all the company’s 1 gigabit per second desktop machines and its 10-gbps backbone–is purely theoretical. But in an environment like Lucasfilm, which is celebrating four Oscar nominations this week, and where self-referential history is a big parlor game, numbers like that are nothing to be messed with.
The 10-gbps backbone is the core of the data center’s network. That rate is faster than the prevailing industry standard of around 1 gbps for most servers.
“They’re hesitant to change that capacity,” Kevin Clark, Lucasfilm’s director of IT operations, said of the total theoretical bandwidth number.
Take a video tour of this badass datacenter here!
Speaking of Orwell…
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.
 George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
humanity : doomed to run before it walks
Rumor has it NASA wants to build a colony on the moon.
Is this another example of our culture getting ahead of itself? Do we always do this? Most of us still are unable to RTFM on things that have been around for decades much less something that’s not been yet attempted.
We’re cloning living, breathing mammals tho we cannot make even a simple blade of grass from scratch.
Surely you can bet your bottom dollar there won’t be any shortage of “heroes” to volunteer to be among the first to live on the moon!!!
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “And so it goes.”
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Symmetry
“There are thousands of other striking instances of animal asymmetry. The akita dog in Japan with a tail that curls one way on males, the other way on females, the tendency of dolphins to swim counterclockwise around tanks, the asymmetric sex organ of the male bedbug, a fungus called laboulbeniales that grows only on the back left leg of a certain beetleâ€Ââ€â€and so on.
John Henry hear this
In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.
A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.
Mr. Kramnik fell behind in the match when he lost Game 2 by walking into a checkmate in one move with hardly any pieces remaining on the board, a mistake that ranks as one of the biggest in championship-level chess history. Needing a win today to tie the match, Mr. Kramnik took some chances, eventually lost a pawn, and was then outmaneuvered by the computer.
Growing up with Newsweek
Newsweek loves to feature articles about Autism.
People love to buy Newsweek and read articles about Autism.
If the following cliche’ is true [about Autism] then most of the world is Autistic only they don’t know it yet:
Work is play and play is work
Sound like anyone in YOUR neighborhood?
When was the last time you didn’t schedule something? when was the last time you did something “spontaneously” and it was fun? when was the last time you played, really played without having to work at it?
if we’re not careful about our obsession with time management and commitment to “careers” we may all be in for more and more future generations of Rain Men and Rain Women who are engineered to think fun is being at the office until sunrise and work is going to the park [ugh] again.
how weird is this “are you a workaholic” quiz on Forbes.com?
WHAT IF [humor me here for a moment] it’s unhealthy lifestyles like ours that generation after generation give rise to abominations such as Autism?
Did you know that Autism does not exist in Native cultures, such as Native American, Native Alaskan, Aboriginal, etc? Not a single trace exists in these cultures. Well, maybe if they continue to participate in our culture long enough they will, too!
WHAT IF, collectively, we are killing off our collective consciousness [ie imagination] by exercising mostly only those “muscles” that work and watch tv or some such other unimaginative recreation? at what age does imaginative play stop? what was it 20 years ago? 50?
PLEASE. DON’T JUST SIT THERE READING NEWSWEEK.
THINK ABOUT IT.
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no more dishpan hands
Stanford scientists plan to make a robot capable of performing everyday tasks, such as unloading the dishwasher. By programming the robot with “intelligent” software that enables it to pick up objects it has never seen before, the scientists are one step closer to creating a real life Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons cartoon show.
“Within a decade we hope to develop the technology that will make it useful to put a robot in every home and office,” said Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science who is leading the wireless Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project.
“Imagine you are having a dinner party at home and having your robot come in and tidy up your living room, finding the cups that your guests left behind your couch, picking up and putting away your trash and loading the dishwasher,” Ng said.
At last!!!
Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstratesâ€â€for the first time publiclyâ€â€his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.
