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dystopia
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dystopia
phoenix mars lander
NASA Engineers Prep for Phoenix Lander Rendezvous with Martian Arctic
The Phoenix Mars Lander will touch down on the Martian surface on May 25, where it will probe the soil for signs of past life and touch Martian water (in the form of subsurface ice) for the first time in human history. At a press conference I attended this morning, NASA's engineers explained how they are rocking it old-school, using tech from some of the scrapped Mars missions earlier in this decade and dropping to the surface with thrusters and landing legs instead of air bags. Phoenix gives new meaning to the term "retro rockets." More »
nukes
What do you do when you have a barn-sized pile of nuclear waste materials that you have to store for 100 years while it loses its toxicity? In the Netherlands, the answer was to stick it inside a giant art project: specifically, this orange building called the Habog Facility, covered in physics formulas by Einstein and Planck. Every twenty years, the building will be repainted in a lighter color to symbolize the slowly decaying radiation in the waste.
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A Gorgeous Monument to Radioactive Decay
What do you do when you have a barn-sized pile of nuclear waste materials that you have to store for 100 years while it loses its toxicity? In the Netherlands, the answer was to stick it inside a giant art project: specifically, this orange building called the Habog Facility, covered in physics formulas by Einstein and Planck. Every twenty years, the building will be repainted in a lighter color to symbolize the slowly decaying radiation in the waste.
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mad genetic engineering
No, Bitches, It's Not a Designer Baby
It's inevitable: the media has not only confused human reproductive cloning with "designer babies," but in fact they have confused a stem cell experiment with designer babies too. I love my sensationalist science as much as the next person, but the London Times has gone batshit with its reports that a GM human embryo could lead to "designer babies" out there in the wilds of science land. Now all these anti-baby engineering groups are going nuts because nobody has bothered to explain the science to them. Even Wired picked up the story, though thankfully without the "designer baby" crap. So what's the deal? When will you get your designer baby with wings and mutant powers? More »
Pollution Levels Going Down in U.S. Coastal Waters
Although it's tempting to turn every piece of news about environmental science into a dystopian scenario, dire predictions are not always warranted. Today the U.S. government released the results of a 20-year study of contaminants in the coastal regions of that country, and found that environmental laws enacted in the 1970s had significantly reduced the amounts of pesticides and industrial chemicals in the water. So sometimes legislation can actually change the future. The report warns that other kinds of contaminants still need to be curbed, such as oil-related waste from cars and ships. There's a very readable version of the report here, or you can check out a summary on Science Daily.
Although it's tempting to turn every piece of news about environmental science into a dystopian scenario, dire predictions are not always warranted. Today the U.S. government released the results of a 20-year study of contaminants in the coastal regions of that country, and found that environmental laws enacted in the 1970s had significantly reduced the amounts of pesticides and industrial chemicals in the water. So sometimes legislation can actually change the future. The report warns that other kinds of contaminants still need to be curbed, such as oil-related waste from cars and ships. There's a very readable version of the report here, or you can check out a summary on Science Daily.
space metals
Zero-G Metals Will Put a Flying Car In Every Garage
Get ready for the first gadgets to be stamped with the words, "Made In Space." The European Space Agency has plans to manufacture lightweight metal compounds under zero-gravity conditions on the International Space Station. The new materials could boost the efficiency of hydrogen engines and make aircraft faster, more powerful and less expensive to build. If we can achieve the proper thrust-to-weight ratio, jet-powered aircraft could become cheap enough that everyone can afford one. More »
nanotech
Nanotech Precisely Measures Spiciness So Your Tongue Doesn't Have To
The Scoville Units you see on the side of chili sauce bottles are measured subjectively by taste testers, who determine how hot a given hot sauce really is. But now a new nanotechnology will allow food scientists to quickly and cheaply measure the exact amount of capsaicinoids — the active component in chili peppers — in each spicy sample. Science gives us many wondrous things, but you probably never thought it would help prevent you from making bland chili. More »
brains
First-Ever Example of a Computer Hack Attacking People's Brains
Neal Stephenson speculated about computer viruses that could crash human brains in his classic novel Snow Crash, but the technology to do something like that has always seemed (luckily) far in the future. Now, however, computer hackers have created a loophole that lets them do it today. Over a month ago, a group of anonymous people exploited a fairly well-known software vulnerability that allows them to flood web forums with a lot of posts. In this case, however, the posts were on an epilepsy site — and many contained images full of flashing icons explicitly designed to cause seizures. More »
hormone tampering
Fast Food Joints Add Hormone to Food That Makes You Want to Eat More
When you ingest a stomach hormone called ghrelin it causes your brain to respond to food the way junkies respond to drugs. You are filled with an intense desire for it, and eating it becomes far more memorable. Researchers at Montreal's McGill University studied people's reactions to food after they had ingested ghrelin, and discovered that it made them crave whatever food they were shown in pictures — even if they had just eaten. Drugs that tamper with ghrelin are just around the corner. More »
artificial mouth
Killer Robots Can Now Eat Us and Enjoy the Flavor
A new artificial mouth will allow robots to snack on our tasty human flesh. French scientists have developed a way for robots to simulate the act of eating and tasting, using pointy artificial teeth combined with the proper chemical and environmental conditions found inside a mouth, including fake saliva. What's the use of such a device? More »
quantum internet
Quantum Internet Could Protect Batman's Secret Identity
With countries like China, Pakistan, and even the US spying on their citizens, it's nice to know a remedy might be on its way in the form of the Quantum Internet. As researchers like Seth Lloyd of MIT make progress toward the goal of quantum computing, they've found that the same architecture used to build quantum random access memory (QRAM) could apply across the whole of the internet. This could put an end to internet spying for good, and would mean that Batman could send email to the JLA without fear of discovery. More »
mega materials science
On the auction block at Bonham's last week were two strange items: a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from the dawn of the universe (left), and two chunks of fossilized dinosaur poop (right). Which do you think sold for the most money?
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Meteorite vs. Dinosaur Poop -- Who Wins?
On the auction block at Bonham's last week were two strange items: a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from the dawn of the universe (left), and two chunks of fossilized dinosaur poop (right). Which do you think sold for the most money?
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mad science art
Curator Forced to Kill Out-of-Control Bio-Art Exhibit
The problem with bio-art is that it's often made of living tissue — and sometimes living tissue gets out of control. That's what happened late last week at a New York MoMA exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," where a tiny living jacket made out of stem cells had to be put to death for growing too fast and trying to burst out of its container. More »
mad defense tech
Air Force Study Shows How to Boil Eyeballs with Lasers
We may not be using lasers on the battlefield yet, but when we do we'll know exactly how to use them to make our enemies' eyeballs explode. And how to create heat-induced bubbles inside "biological substances" (i.e., bodies). A researcher funded by the Air Force to study laser safety has inadvertently also produced a lot of data on what makes them unsafe too. His paper is ominously titled "Laser Induced Shock Waves and Vaporization in Biological Systems and Material Science." More »
robots
Meet McSleepy, the World's First Robot Anesthesiologist
Anesthesiologists are required to participate in every surgery, standing by to administer drugs and monitor the patient's vital signs while surgeons do their jobs. But now a group of researchers at Montreal's McGill University have invented a device that could replace human anesthesiologists with robots in the next five years. An anesthesia bot called McSleepy has just successfully completed its first surgery, administering drugs to a patient undergoing a tumor removal on his kidney. More »
mad genomics
Should Google be Able to Read Your Genome?
Gene-sequencing technology is taking off, but George Church at Harvard University is taking it to the next level: he wants to sequence the genomes of 100,000 people. Right now, about 12 human genomes have been sequenced and Church's ambitious plan is likely to cost cost around $1 billion to complete. Recently Google — who in February announced its Google Health software for storing electronic medical records — agreed to foot a major part of the bill. Google gives us free email, chat, search, a shopping client, and so on and all they've ever asked is that we let them look at all over our most private information. Seems like a fair trade, but does that extend to our DNA? More »
exobiology
Alien Plants of Many Colors
The first extraterrestrial life we spot will probably be plant life, but what will it look like? There's a good chance it will be blue, purple, red or even black. A team of scientists examined what makes Earth plants green, then modeled the evolution of plants on worlds with different kinds of stars or atmospheres. The answers they came up with could help astronomers detect planets beyond our solar system with flora. More »
mad medicine
