Technology
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Category archives for Technology
Kepler Doubles its Prospects
Posted by Wesley Dodson on October 4, 2011 The planet-hunting spacecraft known as Kepler has detected the first definitive exoplanet in a binary star system, and lead author Dr. Laurance Doyle has all the details on Life at the SETI Institute. He writes, “Perhaps half the stars in the galaxy are in double star systems. Understanding that planets can form in close binary…
Feats of Engineering
Posted by Wesley Dodson on September 23, 2011 It seems like every time we turn around, there’s another new smartphone or robotic butler pouring coffee in our laps. On Uncertain Principles, the engineering breakthroughs du jour are “technical advances in ion trap quantum computing.” Chad Orzel explains, “previous experiments have used optical frequencies to manipulate the states of the ions, using light from…
Aesthetic Tech
Posted by Wesley Dodson on March 2, 2011 On Universe, Claire L. Evans takes us all the way back to 1966, when an event called 9 Evenings happened in New York City. This “epic art salon” brought together ten artists with a bevy of engineers from Bell Laboratories, who “helped the artists with complex technical components to their pieces.” FM transmitters, infrared cameras,…
Astro News Near and Far
Posted by Wesley Dodson on February 28, 2011 On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Franck Marchis shares the latest results from Kepler, a telescope in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit which keeps a distant eye on 156,453 stars. Kepler watches for tell-tale reductions in brightness, which “could be due to the transit of an exoplanet passing between its star and us.” As of…
Google: The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
Posted by Wesley Dodson on February 23, 2011 If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, then what of the hand that rocks the world? Dr. Jeffrey Toney reports that Google recently showed its revolutionary colors with speak2tweet, a service that enabled netless Egyptians to access Twitter over the phone. After breaking with China over censorship issues last year, Google’s political…
The Buzz: Linking Fact and Fiction
Posted by Wesley Dodson on November 23, 2009 Good science takes time, but good science fiction hinges on impatience. Why wait for the invention of real technological marvels when you can imagine them yourself or see them on TV? On The Quantum Pontiff, Dave Bacon ponders the formative links between fantasy and reality, spurred by an Intel talk on the possibilities of “fictional…
The Buzz: Out of Sight
Posted by Wesley Dodson on November 15, 2009 In Ethan Siegel’s ongoing treatment of dark energy on Starts With A Bang!, he considers a number of alternative explanations for the dimming of redshifted supernovae. Could photon-axion oscillations be to blame, or does a “grey dust” pervade our universe? In another post, Siegel appreciates that our galaxy smells like raspberries and rum, and not,…
The Buzz: Facial Recognition and Society
Posted by Erin Johnson on October 26, 2009 How do we remember, collect, and recognize faces, and do sex and race have any role in how we process and treat faces, and ultimately people? On Collective Imagination, Peter Tu writes about how researchers can use differing theories of facial recognition to further developments in digital security technologies, citing that “this knowledge captured from…
Modern Fear, Modern Security
Posted by Erin Johnson on October 8, 2009 What moves human beings to innovate measures of security? History will tell us that the most inventive and industrious times are fraught with warfare, uncertainty, and widespread fear. Greg Laden, a longtime ScienceBlogger, helps tackle this topic this month on the new Collective Imagination blog with Peter Tu, a systems design engineer who has developed…
The Buzz: Scientists’ Fall Movie Favs
Posted by Erin Johnson on September 8, 2009 Labor Day marks the traditional transition into fall. It also boasts some of the busiest days for moviegoers, and ScienceBloggers have early reviews of two of the season’s films. The Primate Diaries takes a critical look at Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film District 9 through the eyes of an anthropologist, citing its “eerily familiar” messages about…
