Technology
grrlscientist | January 22, 2010tags: Growing Organs, medicine, TEDMED,regeneration, stem cells, organ, tissue, Anthony Atala, TEDTalks, streaming video
Anthony Atala's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs -- from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. At TEDMED, he shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that "prints" human tissue.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18…
edyong | January 21, 2010
In a Japanese laboratory, a group of scientists is encouraging a rapidly expanding amoeba-like blob to consume Tokyo. Thankfully, the blob in question is a "slime mould" just around 20cm wide, and "Tokyo" is represented by a series of oat flakes dotted about a large plastic dish. It's all part of a study on better network design through biological principles. Despite growing of its own accord with no plan in mind, the mould has rapidly produced a web of slimy tubes that look a lot like Tokyo's actual railway network.
The point of this simulation isn't to reconstruct the monster attacks of…
razib | January 20, 2010If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe:
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was "12345."
Today, it's one digit longer but hardly safer: "123456."
Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google's e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug.
According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like "abc123," "iloveyou" or even "password" to protect…
cagapakis | January 20, 2010Modern day biological engineering and artificial life research focuses on the microscopic, the molecular, the informational, the stuff of the scientific revolutions of the past one hundred years. Our current synthetic biologies aim to turn the living into the designed, the wet into the computational, the complex into the understandable. In the 1700's, the interplay between the living and the mechanical was reversed; engineers were trying to make machines look and feel more like living things--soft, flexible, moist. Studying these historical artificial life technologies provide a valuable…
cagapakis | January 18, 2010
Many synthetic biologists cite one of Richard Feynman's many famous quotations as the inspiration for their work: "What I cannot create I do not understand." For synthetic biology the interpretation is clear--only by designing and building living systems will we truly understand the principles underlying the functions of living cells.
This connection between knowing and making that defines much of synthetic biology research today is, however, a much older idea, rooted in the philosophy of the enlightenment and centuries of western science. The 18th century philosopher Giambattista Vico said…
sporte | January 18, 2010Have you ever wanted to volunteer your talents and help with fun projects like these:
* Refurbish computers for schools
* Teach students how to use popular software or online services
* Build a database for a nonprofit
* Help out in your school's computer lab
* Become an online mentor for students across the country
In the spirit of MLK day, Serve.gov is calling on educators and tech people to participate in connecting schools and non-profits with tech needs to those who can help. You can use the widget below to find projects in your area.
To quote Serve.gov, and Dr. King…
revere | January 18, 2010Many years ago we had a terrific carpenter build stairs in our old house using a technique called housed stringer construction. This guy was fairly young but a skilled wood worker. He was also missing several fingers on his right hand. Table saw.
I used to have a table saw, too, but its spinning blade always made me nervous. So I gave it to my brother-in-law who is a cop and tends to be very careful. He still has all his fingers. But a lot of hobbyist and home do-it-yourselfers don't, courtesy table saws, the woodworking tool associated with more injuries than any other. A new study by the…
cagapakis | January 17, 2010Awful Library Books has a post on books about genetic engineering from the 1970's and 80's, saying that it's time to get rid of them because "Genetic information is dramatically different from what we knew in the 70's and 80's. No mention of Human Genome Project or Dolly, the sheep." If you're looking for information about cutting-edge genetic engineering you're probably better off not looking for a book at all, but while science is inherently focused on the future, a historical perspective is almost always valuable, especially when it comes to genetic engineering and synthetic biology.
The…
revere | January 15, 2010Yet another cell phone and disease story, and while this one is on the "good news" side, it doesn't reassure me:
The millions of people who spend hours every day on a cell phone, may have a new excuse for yakking. A surprising new study in mice provides the first evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may actually protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study, led by University of South Florida researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), was published today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
“…
drorzel | January 13, 2010As I've mentioned before, I have a cell phone that's just a cell phone-- no data plan, no camera, no nothing. It's also a few years old, so the battery life isn't what it could be. I was a little concerned about that, so I made a point of plugging it into the charger last night before bed.
And I am absolutely sure that it's still charged, mostly because I think it's still plugged into the charger in Niskayuna. Which won't do me a whole lot of good here in Austin...
On the bright side, sine it's just a phone, I'm not missing that much, unlike most people with fancier phones, who rely on them…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: Grab More Science, LabGrab, science news, technology, graphic, image of the day
Image: LabGrab, 13 January 2010.
An American start-up company in Portland, Oregon, announced the release of their new technology that creates a colorful chart to visualize the volume of science and medical stories published by discipline (above). The boxes are defined by discipline and their sizes are determined by the total number of article headlines published by universities, journals, science news aggregators, and science blogs within the given time period (as defined by the user).
"We read a…
pontiff | January 11, 2010A while back I posted a short, hopefully jocular, note about the machine learning algorithm for catching card counters at blackjack. Here is a more substantial article about the system. I wonder if systems like these will find use outside of gambling: anywhere an employee performs a repeated physical task (think a grocery store clerk?) and the company want to catch the errors. Boy those jobs are going to stink it up kind of rotten: "Johnny, if you make one more computer detected error tomorrow at the check stand, we're going to have to let you go!" Is it better to be fired by a computer…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
drorzel | January 10, 2010Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman's mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he's doing it himself. If he's paying someone to put this together, he's being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit "Page Down" five times to get from the top of the page to…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2010tags: How it's Made: Snowboards, snowboards, sports, engineering, material science, technology, streaming video
This video describes in detail something that winter sports enthusiasts care about during this time of year!
pharyngula | January 5, 2010One of the big problems with YouTube is that science channels that criticize creationists are often shut down — they are targeted by votebots that lower their ratings, and there are plenty of people who file frivolous notifications of DMCA violations that lead to whole channels being shut down until the case is fought out. This is not good — the system is hair-trigger sensitive to complaints, but does nothing to filter out the noise of unwarranted claims made solely to silence people.
A science regular on YouTube, Andromeda's Wake, has put up a short video requesting more confrontation with…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2010tags: Cotton: Building a Better Plant, cotton, agriculture, genomics, fabrics, technology, streaming video
This is another beautifully written and produced video about plant research. The lucky plant? This time, it's cotton -- what jeans and t-shirts are made of! This video explores how modern cotton plants came to be, the 50 species of cotton, and how cotton genomic research can improve our lives.
Plant genome research is already revolutionizing the field of biology. Currently, scientists are unlocking the secrets of some of the most important plants in our lives, including corn, cotton…
revere | January 1, 2010I doubt many of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that at least one of The Reveres was sort of geeky while young (now, of course, he's just sort of geeky while old). I thought about this objectively (geeks don't think we are really geeky; we just think the things we do that others call geeky are "interesting") when I ran across (via Slashdot: warning sign #1) a link to The Technologizer (warning sign #2) picking the Ten Most Tarnished Brands in Tech. This isn't about scandals. It's about once proud brandnames that nobody cares about any more, like Netscape or Commodore. And on the…
razib | December 31, 2009The Google Decade Ends: If the search king hasn't ripped up your business yet, just wait. 10 years is a long time in the tech industry. I wonder which company will be the center of retrospectives in 2010? It seems that the time cycle of the rise & fall of "It" firm is speeding up; from IBM to Microsoft to Google. So perhaps it isn't even around right now.