Andrew Cantos raised some interesting philosophical points in reply to my partially tongue in cheek post The Great Domain Model Debate - Solved the other day. As ever, my short reply turned into a blog post and this is it. Andrew’s point was that there is a metaphorical link between objects in a domain model [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I spent years bemoaning the fact that the laws of physics didn’t allow the wireless transmission of power. Now it seems that I bemoaned prematurely. Researchers at MIT have a found a way to use inductance to power a 60W (think similar power rating to a laptop) lightbulb from a distance of up to 2 [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Normally I have a very optimistic outlook. Especially when it comes to technological breakthroughs. But this morning I was given pause for thought. MAKE magazine carried a news article today about a highly accurate DNA replicator for $10. I am fully convinced that such breakthroughs can be used to tackle the issues of world poverty, [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Some of the low and high points of today’s science headlines:
Smoking and Caffeine inversely associated with Parkinson’s disease
Arsenic in chicken feed may pose health risk to humans
Guns in homes strongly associated with higher rates of suicide
Good behaviour, Religiousness may be genetic
Why small dogs are small
Study links propensity toward worry to early death
No, Einstein *wasn’t* religious
Segment [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )The surge of religiosity in the US continues unabated. A survey from NEWSWEEK is the current cause of distress – apparently over 90% of Americans profess to be religious, and almost half reject the findings of science. Alarmingly, 35% of college graduates (the most educated of Americans) accept the bible as fact and believe that [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )For the mathematician there is no Ignorabimus, and, in my opinion, not at all for natural science either. … The true reason why [no one] has succeeded in finding an unsolvable problem is, in my opinion, that there is no unsolvable problem. In contrast to the foolish Ignoramibus, our credo avers:
We must know,
We shall know.
It’s [...]
D-Wave Systems, Inc. plans todemonstrate a technological first onFeb. 13: an end-to-end quantumcomputing system powered by a16-qubit quantum processor, runningtwo commercial applications, live.This is the core of a new quantumcomputer to be unveiled by D-WaveSystems, says Steve Jurvetson,Managing Director of Draper FisherJurvetson,…http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=6385&m=28179
A 16 qbit processor. Will it be demonstrating the ‘commercial application‘ MS-DOS?
From KurzweilAI. If this isn’t worth blogging about, then nothing is. Could this be the most historic announcement ever to arrive in my inbox?
Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers
NewScientist.com news service Jan. 20, 2007
University of Alberta scientists
have tested dichloroacetate (DCA) on
human cells cultured outside the
body and found that it killed lung,
breast and brain cancer cells, [...]
NASA Ames research centre have announced a collaboration with Google to make available the gigaquads of data that they have gathered over the years. Hopefully this should make available data from lunar expeditions and some very interesting satellite imagery. I don’t know whether this will include data from things like the Hubble space telescope, but [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Researchers at the University of Texas have developed a technique to create artificial muscle fibres using Carbon Nanotubes woven into a yarn a mere 2 microns thick. Each fibre has a strength equal to 100 times that of equivalent human muscle fibres. It is a expected that there will have revolutionary consequences for the prosthetic [...]
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