I made several comments at this futurepundit post that again lay out more of the case against coal energy There is some aspects of global warming and fossil fuel energy that are controversial. The uncontroversial and certain damage should be enough for us to motivate us to stop using coal. Stop using coal means trying …
Skin cells genetically engineered to be resistant to bacteria could reduce infections and improve chances of survival among burn victims. A patient’s skin cells, genetically modified and grown in a test tube, could provide the next generation of artificial skin. As a first step in creating such replacement skin, scientists in Cincinnati have engineered bacteria-resistant …
New Scientist has an article about a new fab@Home system for $2400 The fab@home This system is in the fabber category which has different systems of different capabilities. The MIT Fab lab is described in many places The MIT fablab is more expensive at $20,000-40000 There is also the inexpensive Reprap system which is about …
Mostafa Ronaghi, one of the inventors of this sequencing chemistry, group at Stanford is working on an inexpensive superscaler pyrosequencer. It would use $10 CMOS imaging instead of $100,000 CCDs. The objective is to run 400 million sequencing reactions in parallel that can produce between 60 and 100 gigabases of data per run with 200-base …
The World Future Society makes forecasts which show that the forecasters do not seem to really understand some of the technology that they are forecasting. Forecast #2: The era of the Cyborg is at hand. Researchers in Israel have fashioned a “bio-computer” using the DNA of living cells instead of silicon chips. This development may …
The first in a new generation of nanotechnology-based cancer treatments will likely begin clinical trials in 2007, and if the promise of animal trials carries through to human trials, these treatments will transform cancer therapy. One of these new approaches places gold-coated nanoparticles, called nanoshells, inside tumors and then heats them with infrared light until …
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions. First, the study clearly demonstrates that the neural network underlying future …
From physorg.com and the university of Rochester, the theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced “invisibility cloak” have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak’s powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone. Greenleaf and his collaborators used …
DNA computers are likely more than a decade away so they will not be used and minimally useful. The performance will probably not be more than traditional computers of that time and for massively parallel comparison searches it will be faster to use quantum computers. Analog Quantum computers should start to see introduction in 2007 …
Stem cells used to grow teeth in animal models Utilizing stem cells harvested from the extracted wisdom teeth of 18- to 20-year olds, Shi and colleagues have created sufficient root and ligament structure to support a crown restoration in their animal model. The resulting tooth restoration closely resembled the original tooth in function and strength. …
From IEEE spectrum, IBM is making a major research effort into services science. The goal is to measureably improve service productivity. Paul Maglio, a senior manager at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, says his services group has grown from nine people in December 2002 to more than 70 now. He estimates that 550 …