Technology
drorzel | February 20, 2011My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on... But that's not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker giveaway from AAAS, which is a combination laser pointer and 1GB USB drive.
"Big deal," you say. Those are cheap." And, yeah, they are, but when you think about it, that's really kind of amazing.
50 years ago, the laser had barely been invented, and was still in search of a problem. Nobody had yet had the idea…
heathero | February 18, 2011I got to spend last week in sunny California. I forgot how wonderful it is to sit and eat lunch outside! I was participating in a workshop held at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI). The workshop was entitled Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics. Basically I spent the week learning about different tools that are available to help biologists deal with the data flood that has come out (and continues to flow faster and faster) of sequencing technologies that continue to get faster and cheaper.
Since microbes are not exactly easy to observe with ones eyes,…
gregladen | February 18, 2011These stories are closely related at a philosophical level: Both stalwart entities have similar philosophies about what they think they can tell other people to do, how they do things, and what they fear:
Libyan dictator warns against use of Facebook, 40 protesters injured
Many Libyan Internet activists have declared their support for the pro-democracy movements and revolutions in the Middle East. After seeing the power of the people succeed in Tunisia and Egypt, they created groups on Facebook to call for political and economic reforms in Libya. Libya's dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011Obviously, I did it all wrong. I have a digital video microscope in my lab, but what I did was spend about $20,000 on a nice microscope, $1000 on a digital still camera and about $500 on a digital video camera, and $200 on a pair of custom adapters to link them together. The principle is simple enough, though; you're just mounting a camera on the scope where your eye would be and grabbing images with a standard computer interface. So here's New Scientist bragging about building a video microscope for £15.
I've done something similar in the past, but I can one-up Lewis Sykes: I made my…
cevans | February 14, 2011
In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within…
gregladen | February 12, 2011Thousands of Nokia workers walked off the job for the day in protest of the Microsoft-Nokia deal.
First there was the "Burning Platform" memo:
In Elop's 1300-word memo ... the ex-Microsoft exec likens the company to an oil platform burning at sea while the hands try to put out the fire by dousing it in gasoline instead of water.
We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses," Elop wrote. "We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're…
kbonham | February 10, 2011I was going to cover this paper, but Ed beat me to it (and did a far better job than I would have):
With a pulse of light, Dayu Lin from New York University can turn docile mice into violent fighters - it's Dr Jekyll's potion, delivered via fibre optic cable. The light activates a group of neurons in the mouse's brain that are involved in aggressive behaviour. As a result, the mouse attacks other males, females, and even inanimate objects.
Lin focused on a primitive part of the brain called the hypothalamus that keeps our basic bodily functions ticking over. It lords over body temperature,…
cevans | February 8, 2011
To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!
First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy Klüver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.
Klüver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence…
jtoney | February 8, 2011
Source.
Here is a compelling example of creative use of protein labeling technologies to view complex anatomy - a perfect complement to my ongoing series about fruit fly brains!
According to the paper in Nature Methods' Abstract: excerpted for the non-scientist;
To facilitate studies of neural network architecture and formation, we generated three types of fruit flies using the mouse Brainbow-2 system, called Flybow. Using the visual system, the embryonic nervous system and the wing imaginal disc, we show that Flybow can be used to visualize cell shape with high resolution. This could…
pharyngula | February 2, 2011I'm white. I'm a nerd. I live in Minnesota. I have no rhythm at all — dancing for me is more of a syncopated chaos. But now, for a mere $40, I can get a little yellow robot that can dance.
Maybe the robot would be willing to give me lessons?
pharyngula | January 29, 2011Looking for a nice demonstration of genetic algorithms? Here's a simulation that takes randomized connected collections of polygons and wheels and scores them for their ability to traverse a rugged 2D landscape. I tried it last night, and it gave me an assortment of very bad vehicles: for example, a lot of them were just polygonal lumps that fell flat and sat there, while some had an odd wheel here and there, but also pointy bits that acted as brakes, or wheels that pointed upward at the sky and did nothing at all. So I just left it running and went to bed.
This morning, I've got strange…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I have a Lenovo thinkPad X61 tablet that I use for a bunch of things, but mainly for working on the book in places that aren't my home or office on campus, and lecturing. I do use the tablet features, primarily for marking up my lecture slides (I have PowerPoint slides that I use for class, and I leave blank spaces on them for examples, which I hand-write. This helps slow down the pace of the lecture a little, which is the chief student complaint about PowerPoint lectures.
The X61 is a few years old, now-- three and a bit years-- so it's been getting kind of creaky. It crashes hard every…
pharyngula | January 25, 2011I've heard back from a few people now who contacted Google about the issue of indexing creationist sites in Google Scholar; these are informal remarks from the team, not an official policy statement, but they're still interesting. And revealing. And useful. They'll change your perspective on Google Scholar.
The premise of the petition to Google to stop serving up creationist claptrap is a misconception. Google Scholar does not index on content; it can't, it's just a dumb machine sorting text. Google Scholar does not, and this is the surprise to me, index on the source — it makes no decision…
jtoney | January 25, 2011
Tonight, President Obama will give his State of the Union address at 9 pm with a new twist: using the latest online technologies, including streaming visual aids, with charts and statistics relevant to his comments. What a wonderful way to engage and educate the public!
See you online.
From Senior Advisor to the President David Plouffe:
Good morning,
Tonight at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address and outline his vision for putting aside the politics that divide us and moving forward to create jobs, up our game to out-compete in the global economy, and…
jtoney | January 24, 2011Imagine being able to observe the health status of your brain streaming real-time in 3D. Medical treatments for a range of neurovascular, neurological, cancerous and trauma-induced conditions would be far more effective, because snapshots over time would reveal the progression of a disease or damage.
This is not science fiction. Scientists at Stanford University have reported a new brain imaging technique in the journal Nature Medicine that takes a major step towards this goal. Proof of concept was demonstrated using mice.
Figure 3:
a) Two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional…
gregladen | January 23, 2011Rumor has it that Apple is developing what is probably the worst idea ever. Now, I quickly add that when Apple yanked 3.5 inch floppies1 from all of their computer designs, I thought that was the worst idea ever, and it turned out to be the best idea ever. But this one, I don't know ... a mouse with a keyboard on it is not a good thing.
Apple has shown interest in adding a display to its multi-touch Magic Mouse, adding interactivity and functionality to the wireless mouse for its Mac line of computers.
Mice have had keyboard on them before. I've seen various Logitech devices with zillions of…
gregladen | January 22, 2011Apple likes its hardware to be closed source. Very closed:
If you want to remove the outer casing on your iPhone 4 to replace the battery or a broken screen, it won't be easy anymore. In the past, you could use a Phillip screwdriver to remove two tiny screws at the base of the phone and then simply slide off the back cover.
But Apple is replacing the outer screw with a mysterious tamper-resistant screw across its most popular product lines, ...
source
Keep an eye in iFixit for a fix to this.
A little Linux Naval Gazing:
With the recent announcement from Apple that Steve Jobs is taking a…
jtoney | January 21, 2011My recent posting on deepwater oil drilling raised questions about alternative energy sources. The news of more and more permits allowing deepwater oil drilling is discouraging given available alternative fuels, but understandable.
Here's why.
A recent Science publication by Richard Kerr provides an historical perspective of energy production and consumption since the 18th century. It is no surprise that fossil fuels are so popular, because:
A coal mine or oil field, for instance, yields five to 50 times more power per square meter than a solar facility, 10 to 100 times more than a wind…
drorzel | January 20, 2011I gave a talk today on blogs as a tool for science communication (basically the same as this one, with a few minor updates), and got asked "Aren't the people who read science blogs mostly scientists already?" Which reminded me that it's been a while since I did a "Who are you people?" post.
So, if you've got a minute, leave a comment to this post, telling me something about who you are and how you got here. And if you want to throw in something about what you particularly like to read, or would like to see more of here, that sort of feedback is always helpful.
Thanks in advance.
jtoney | January 19, 2011Inducing a worm to lay eggs with laser light from Samuel Lab on Vimeo.
A research group at Harvard University, led by Prof. Samuel has developed a new way to manipulate nerves using lasers, given the cheeky term "CoLBeRT"{reference to Stephen Colbert}. In science terms, CoLBeRT is:
Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time
Here's how it works. The nematode is a simple organism that contains 302 neurons that can be genetically altered to make a foreign protein sensitive to a certain type of light - such as that coming from a laser. By tuning the laser to a specific wavelength,…