Duck Goes Moo!

Engines that run on water and nothing else. check it out:

WaterFuel.wmv

St. Andrews University scientists have found that dolphins, at least the ones they studied, call each other by name. It’s been known for a while that dophin pods have their own unique “school cheer”, but the discovery that each dolphin has its own name suggests their way of thinking is not so different than our own.

Other simularities include war, corperal punishment, and rape… not the image most people have of the seemingly peaceful dolphins. Makes me wonder if dolphins have also founded their own religions, governments, or have developed the one true sign of civilization: knock-knock jokes.

Someone had the crazy idea to put a jet engine into a Volkswagen beetle… no, really:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/30/MNGJGII7BB1.DTL&type=printable

One feature humans lack that modern computers have is a USB port. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pop in a new sense organ or other device and add it to our brain’s functioning via some port on our body?

University of Wisconsin scientist Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, now principle member of BrainPort Technologies, found that the tongue served quite well as a conduit for information between man and machine.

Now the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has continued Dr. Bach-y-Rita’s work alongside the US Military to find ways to give our soldiers superhuman senses, including infrared vision, sonar, and many other potential extensions to the base-model human.

A less military application of the technology is to give sight to the blind:

In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls. A version of the device, expected to be commercially marketed soon, has restored balance to those whose vestibular systems in the inner ear were destroyed by antibiotics.

from news.yahoo.com

Perhaps if I got one of those vestibular system replacements I could ride a bike and not fall over all the time.

Read On:

http://rdu.news14.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=82612

Using advanced laser micro-machining, a German team of scientists have created a pair of glasses for a fly:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0328_060328_fly_glasses.html

Who needs stem cells when you can grow whole organs from scratch? Scientists have now mastered the art of growing cells over a properly shaped framework to form a replacement organ. This process requires samples from a source organ in the body and cells from one organ cannot be used to grow into a different type of organ. The cells are already typed, not being stem cells, and only know how to be what they already were (I think… the reports were vague on that).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0404_060404_bladders.html

A new dinosaur has been discovered in Utah that they are saying looked like a giant turkey when alive. So does this mean that the intellegent and sinister raptors from Jurasic Park are the ancestors or the modern day gobbler? Perhaps Ben Franklin was right to suggest the turkey should be America’s national bird.

Very Cool Stuff!!!

http://www.454.com/

I’ve often complained about the 21st century’s complete lack of flying cars, but I recently had an interesting pondering: How would flying cars effect our cities?

When highways were first introduced it allowed the middle and upper class to move out of the cities and still work their city jobs. This brought on the collapse of many urban communities due to the lower class being left behind as the suburbs florished.

To help fight urban decay many cities have implemented public transportation and loft districts to try to bring the middle and upper class back to dead areas of the city. This has been shown to work quite well and many cities have seen signs of communities becoming revitalized due to increased pedestrian traffic (meaning more opportunities to patron urban businesses) brought on by suburban dwellers catching the public tram to spend a fun day in the city.

How would affordable flying vehicles change our cities? A flying vehicle would seem to allow people to live even farther away from their jobs, perhaps leading to a complete decentralization of where the middle and upper classes live. The empty “boonie” areas that no one would live in before may become the new hot places to live. Paved concrete and highways would no longer have an effect on where new homes would be constructed.

Would this bring on the decline of the suburbs as well as the inner cities? It may, but the declining need to build super-highways could also serve to turn once abondoned communities into new hot spots for entertainment and the like.

Still, the development of middle to upper class communities without a need of roads would truly leave those unable to afford a flying verhicle in the lurch. They would grow even more isolated from the roadless rich, not even being able to drive to their locations.

The solution to prevent the complete isolation of the poor in a flying vehicle future may once again lay in public trasportation. If cars can fly, why not busses? The presence of flying public transportation would do well to prevent the complete abandonment of the cities and subburbs.

Either way, I want flying cars.

It’s not uncommon for me to spend many a late hour pondering the nature of existence and death instead of sleeping, tonight being more of the former than the latter. This often results in me sleeping late and being groggy all day, with breif spots of caffeinated clarity.

The main topic of discussion I have had with myself in tonight’s session is how we percieve time.

Think about how long it has been since your last meal. How do you assertain that distance of time (if distance is the appropriate word… )? You can look at your watch and do the math to come with a more precise answer, but generally one can “feel” how long it has been.

You might say it “feels” like a few hours or it “feels” like a few minutes, but that gut-feeling might sometimes be off. You might look at the actual amount of time passed and be surprised to find “time has flown” or “time is dragging”.

It all got me thinking about how the concept of how long a stretch of time “feels”. Is it almost innate and inborn like a sense, like sight? Is it a perceptual construct learned through experience, like learning a language or how to walk?

It may have something to do with memory. When your mind stores in information about your experiences, does it also attach some kind of “time stamp” that is used for knowing when something occured, is it stored in some sequential pattern that can be used to deduce when something happened, or is the sense of when something happened just a random blurb of information we store away, like the colors and smells we encounter.

In the end, memory seems to me to be the key to our perception of time. When time seems to fly, perhaps it is because less memories were stored than normal, due to the brain focusing on thought and perception than internal processing and storage. This thought reminded me about an old mind stretcher I had come up with during my more avante garde days: What if time is not sequential, or what if time takes a 1000 year break between every second? We would never know, because our brains would only be recording new experiences when time was actually moving and that information would be stored sequentially, making us oblivous to time doing anything unusual.

When we sleep it may seem like dreams only last a few minutes or seconds, but brain scans of sleeping people show that we may actually dream for hours; we just do not form memories of those experiences, making it seem like only a brief bit of time had passed.

Time could be flowing backwards and we would never know. Our memories would still be recorded in the current fashion. In the end, how do we know time did not actually start a few seconds ago, the universe actaully starting in this current state along with our memories of past experiences.

Well, enough about memory and time, for it is time for me to get some sleep. Sweet dreams, night watchers, and keep watching the stars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500999_pf.html

In the year 2001 a strange scarlet rain began to fall in Kerala, India and continued to fall for two whole months. People believed at the time that it was soil blown by the wind from another area, as is not so uncommon, but Dr. Godfrey Louis from Mahatma Gandhi University, also in Kerala, believes he might have evidence it is actually not soil, but small organisms, organisms from outside the planet.

Under a microscope the particles seem very much like little cells, but they lack DNA, so if it is life it is some other type of life never heard of before.

http://www.newswales.co.uk/?section=Education&F=1&id=8530

A long talked about and theorized method of bringing objects in and out of orbit is the Space Elevator. The idea is to have an geosynchronus orbital station that has a tube, cable, wire, or something spanning the distance between itself and a location on a planet’s surface. This does away with rocketry and perhaps could present a cheap and reusable method of bringing objects and people in and out of orbit.

A company in Bremerton, Washington is aiming to have a fully working space elevator by April 12, 2018: The LiftPort Goup. They are combining their expertise in nanotechnology and robotics to make nanotubes and robots to climb them. Nanotubes are artificial structures made out of carbon which are super light and super strong, which is ideal for making a 20,000 mile long, unbreakable beam.

Perhaps instead of trying to get to the Moon and Mars we should put all our efforts into helping this space elevator project, which could do wonders for a lot of industries.

http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_3482712

The work of Dr. Hwang Woo-suk from South Korea has stunned the world with his and his team’s work in human stem-cell cloning. Many might even say his research borders on the profane and is opened a Pandora’s Jar of new technologies with wide imnplications; However, it would seem Dr. Hwang never even managed to get the lid off in the first place.

It’s now been reported that his work is fraudulent and he has just recently resiegned in shame. His career and life in the public eye as a super-scientist are now over, and South Korea is racing to control the damage that is being done to its reputation as a place for technology innovation.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/3544156.html

On a side note: Illinois is having its own cloning scandal.

NOTE: I do not in anyway endorse or even like the content of lifesite.net.

Modern physics has come a long way since Eintstein’s day, at least those scientists on the cutting edge have. Most physicists live in a world of particles: electrons, quarks, bosons, etc… The new wave of seeing the universe (well, not quite new, just recently coming into popularity) has no particles but instead has strings which span multiple dimensions as the hum with vibrations.

Sound confusing? Well, there are books out there that have the equations and pencil work done to mathematically prove this, but for those of us who do not have a PHD in Quantum Mechanics, PBS has has made public the entire three-hour CGI spetacular “The Elegant Universe” publicly viewable on their site:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

Going back to an earlier post of mine about the extropian movement, a book recently came out called The Singularity is Near that posits that within a few decades we may reach the critical point of biological, nanological, and computational technologies for the creation of computers that transcend human intellegence, allow humans to live forever, eradicate poverty by allowing anything to be artificially constructed cheaply, and bring about a permanent blending of humanity and the technologies it creates.

The author’s name is Ray Kurzweil, and he lives a life very much like those of the extropians, taking hundreds of suppliments a day to slow his aging as much as possible. He claimed on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” that he feels he has not aged much at all in the last 15 years.

With the advances of technology and bio-sciences, humanity is growing ever closer to completely reverse-engineering the million-old technology known as homo sapiens, perhaps soon giving birth to a new species: homo superior.

The idea of a “new man” or cybernetics is one often tied in with Orwellian nightmares and fears of losing that which makes us what we are, our humaness; however, not everyone fears the idea of tinkering with what God blessed us with, some even relish it and see it as humanity’s only hope for true survival and freedom from a certain doom from war, famine, and the “de-humanization” of free will by our more animalistic desires.

The Extropians were originally about finding ways to live forever, but as the movement has grown it has come to embrace new ideas about modifing humanity to cure it of its ills and suffering as well as escaping the grave. They do not fear modern bio-science but view it as their savior, the doorway to a new way of life not limited by our biological faults.

This is all part of a growing movement called Transhumanism, which is not neccessarily a new concept but is quickly becoming more and more of an issue as the lines between science and science fiction blur.

Once back in 1924 two scientists, namely Satyendranath Bose and Albert Einstein, brought forth the idea that atoms could be bound together to form a structure that acted as a single atom. This conceptual structure became known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, which was first created in a lab in 1995 at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics.

Research on BECs, plus our growing knowledge of dark matter and dark energy, has continued since then and is beginning to change the way we view the mechanisms behind how subparticles come together to form matter and the properties there-in. Could this spell the end of the classic Periodic Table of Elements?

WikiPedia Entry

Physics Web Article