weston
Robot skin
If robots are ever going to evolve in the desperately unrealistic ways we want them to, they're going to need better input devices. Like eyes, and ears, a way to smell, and skin and taste buds. NASA's working on the skin. Oh, and the video of it is pretty darn strange.Mars Rover
According to RedNova, the Mars Rover is stuck in a dune, and scientists are carefully plotting movements. The Rover has revealed some incredible stuff, images not the least. Check out this pic of Marian twilight. NASA Mars site here. While Earth seems mired in war and ecological peril people are trying to ignore, Mars feels like the unexplored North, a great expanse of desolate unspoiled wilderness.Car safe from viruses. For now.
BBC reports that F-Secure has tested a car's OS against blue-tooth transmitted viruses via cellphone. They didn't find vulnerabilities, but the fact they're trying raises some seriously interesting, and dangerous possibilities. While it may be relegated to a Hollywood plot for the moment, I imagine it's only a matter of time before a virus on a cellphone to car, or car to car, is actual. Imagine parking your car, a pedestrian passes while on their phone, your car is infected, and suddenly you can't start the car anymore (or some other undesirable result).Invasion hubs
Two ecologists are studying web viruses to understand the behavior of water fleas in a Canadian lake system. There's practical similarities between networks of all kinds, biological, and informational -- a pioneer of biomath, small world theory, network theory, or just 'complexity', Steven Strogatz had studied fireflies peculiar ability to sync. With partner Watts, they produced groundbreaking work on how networks operate and organize in general, now used by researchers to study email worm propagation.Manimals, chimera
Dr. Moreau wants his island back. Wired reports on Congress's outline for guidelines on human-animal DNA cross experimentation known as 'chimera'. Far beyond the infamous 'ear mouse', which was more conventional (??) tissue engineering, instead we have the humouse, mice with human brains. The acceleration of developing DNA tech makes lengthly ethical considerations take a back seat, although Canada passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which bans chimeras. These 'manimals' could be used for 'body banks' style organ creation for the wealthy. No, really.Catching neutrinos
Thousands of tons of steel, 200,000-amp pulses, a football field length detector 2,450 feet below the earth -- sounds big, but it's all about the very small. A neutrino, ten-millionth the mass of an electron or less, are tough to spot since they're small enough to pass through everything. Of the uncountable that pass through the earth, and the very many the MINOS experiment plan on shooting at a detector, to catch a few is extrememly difficult. Why catch them? Neutrinos leave the sun's core, for instance, immediately, whereas the rest of the energy takes epochs ... read more »Smart, vicious little ants
BBC reports on the Allomerus decemarticulatus, an ant species that builds traps occupied by workers who grab prey and hold them down while the rest of the colony tears apart the prisoner. It would've made SIM ant more interesting. Ant colony behavior is fascinating, from the chemically coordinated attacks of the fire ant, aphid herding and even ants keeping slaves.DHS's ID Card: PIN numbers could be weakness
EPIC reports on the technical and conceptual failures of The Department of Homeland Security Access Card (DAC). Feature creep not the least: as in, using the card for verification of financial transactions, encrypting email, as well as access. The card would include biometric data (fingerprint) as well as other data and contain RFID. In case the fingerprint identification routine doesn't work (??) there's a pin number.Aggregation, Mindscape, Jesus Tortilla
The internet is leading to generalized human knowledge with little authority, moving away from academia, other than academia as a development arena funded by corporations for future products. Knowledge for sake of knowledge is available for free to anyone with a computer and connection -- decentralizing knowledge leads to libraries becoming community support centers rather than dispenser of authoritative information. The upside of this is that the revolution in information appears democratic and seamless; the problem is that nothing is truly verifiable, so you may never know whether you are getting original, primary info or socially and politically manipulated info. You ... read more »World DNA database
Against a compulsory ID card containing biometric data? Well, how about a worldwide DNA database? Alec Jeffreys, pioneer of DNA fingerprinting, wants one. This stuff makes the NWO and TIA people seem pissant, and the people paranoid about them more paranoid. In the old days, kids, we worried about getting a barcode tattooed on us -- now it\'s cutting edge geek to get an RFID implant. Is a world DNA database a good idea? Scientifically speaking, hell yes -- but the keeper of the db would have to be godlike in objectivity and above temptation of misuse. Cynical, perhaps, of me ... read more »
