August 01, 2006
Newfound Blob is Biggest Thing in the Universe
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.
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July 11, 2006
When humans transcend biology
With everything else that's happening in the world today, debates about whether humanity should embrace as yet nonexistent technologies that could enhance our physical and intellectual abilities and someday make us ``more than human" may seem frivolous. Nonetheless, a debate on ``transhumanism" has been going on for the past few years, with naysayers and doomsayers on one side, optimistic futurists on the other, and too little in between.
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July 02, 2006
The Geometry of Earth is All Wrong
Stephen Hawking is best known for thinking about time, space, and those teratoid trash mashers known as black holes. But in a recent talk in Hong Kong, the famous physicist digressed from his usual subject matter to tell the audience that they'd better get off the island, and he didn't mean Kowloon. Instead, the Cambridge don was urging the crowd to get off the whole, gosh-darn planet. Hawking was hawking space colonization.
"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers," Hawking disclosed.
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June 19, 2006
Reprogramming Biology
Biology is now in the early stages of an historic transition to an information science, while also gaining the tools to reprogram the ancient information systems of life. Few of us go more than a few months without changing the software programs we use in our electronic devices, yet the 23,000 software programs inside our cells called genes have not changed appreciably in thousands of years (although recent research suggests that a few have changed as recently as a few hundred years ago).
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June 13, 2006
X3D
What ever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the web? Back in the late 90s, all the hype was about VRML—Virtual Reality Markup Language—which would turn the web into an immersive environment that you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here to tell you that the reports of the 3D web's death are greatly exaggerated. As evidence, we present three 3D browsers that will use that graphics card for something other than gaming: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer.
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June 11, 2006
Touch sensor
An artificial touch sensor as sensitive as a human fingertip has been developed by US scientists. One day it could let surgeons remotely "feel" tissue through an endoscope and help robots pour drinks without spilling a drop.
The sensor is made from a film of nanoparticles of gold and cadmium sulphide. It is so sensitive that it can easily detect the contours of Abraham Lincoln's head embossed on a US penny, and even make out the outlines of the smallest letters printed on the coin.
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Trust me, I'm a robot
IN 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.
This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer. The laws appeared in “I, Robot”, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction (see table), remain in the realm of fiction.
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June 08, 2006
Tiny Robots Control Cockroaches
Scientists have created miniature, insect-like robots that can change the behavior of cockroaches.
The devices work by at first fooling the bugs into believing the devices are fellow roaches and then leading the insects away from darkness into light, according to a recent announcement made by the European Union Information Society Technologies Program.
The thumbnail-sized devices, called "insbots," are among the first to manipulate insect and animal behavior.
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June 03, 2006
iRobot Scooba Exposed
Robots have long fascinated humanity. Movies like "Artificial Intelligence: AI" (2001) and "I, Robot" (2004) portrait possible futures where all your mundane chores are performed by a mechanical life form. Just imagine not ever cleaning the windows, doing the dishes, or washing your car! On average, a family spends 1.8 hours per day doing just such activities. That is 12.6 hours a week, 655 hours a year, or 2,047 days of your life wasted on something that a robot could do.
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May 28, 2006
The real 'cloaking device'
Physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible.
Light normally bounces off an object's surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.
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May 25, 2006
Strong
Just a small interesting incident to share;
I received three samples of coolant from one of our clients, out of the three two were dark and strong because of higher % of coolant in water and the third one was clear and dilute. This afternoon during lunch time I was discussing something with one of my vendors. My senior, an old British, came in and said (in fun mood), pointing towards the samples, “this one is me (the clear sample) and this one is Chand (the dark sample) hehehe…“ And in just less than a second, I replied, “See.... (Showing the bottle just at his face) I am STRONGer than you.. hahahahahahaha…:D”
I don’t know what exactly he wanted to say, but I answered for all, and clearly the guys understood my SENSE, and kept on laughing at my reply to my senior.
Yes. I am STRONG.
PS: you might be wondering what is this coolant thing I am doing with in design? It was just one of the things that came in my way of doing many things.
Afterall,
I love DESIGN.
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May 17, 2006
Frankencotton
Genetically modified foods have caused no end of anxiety and distrust. But not genetically modified shirts. Why?
Readers may imagine the reason is that there is no such thing as a genetically modified shirt, and they would be half right. The shirt genome has yet to be mapped, and the heritability of sleeve length is not widely accepted in either the textile or molecular biology community.
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May 14, 2006
Most realistic virtual reality
More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room.
That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with computer-generated 3-D images. That means the C6 will produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
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May 07, 2006
Changing Constant
Cosmologists claim to have found evidence that yet another fundamental constant of nature, called mu, may have changed over the last 12 billion years. If confirmed, the result could force some physicists to radically rethink their theories. It would also provide support for string theory, which predicts extra spatial dimensions.
This is not the first time fundamental constants have been accused of changing over the lifetime of the universe. Most famously, there was controversy over the fine structure constant, alpha (α), which governs how light and electrons interact. Some physicists claimed it is changing while others said it was not.
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April 30, 2006
piSight
The piSight™ virtual reality (VR) system is the world's most immersive 3D virtual reality display, ideal for numerous applications including virtual prototyping, training, data mining and more.
The product of nearly a decade of research supported by NASA and a global car company, piSight uses a breakthrough patented optical design that provides for a 3D wrap-around visual sensation with 150° field of view, 2200x1200 pixels per eye in full color.
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