Clipmarks | wildcat's clips

Ordinary into Genius- Genes

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:40:18 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: io9.com

Scientists Identify Genes that Could Turn Ordinary People into Supergeniuses (or Mindless Drones)

It's clear that there's a specific set of genes responsible for brain development when you're in the womb, and that those genes affect your ability to learn later on. But now a group of researchers in the U.S. and Canada have identified those genes. And their discovery could represent the first step in tweaking brain development. It's possible that that knocking out some of those genes or adding extra copies of them to a developing baby could result in the tailor-made human minds of Brave New World: Some will be born to develop cutting-edge technologies, and others to be slow-witted and compliant.

Published this weekend in PLoS Genetics, the study is extraordinary not just because of its futuristic implications, but because of the cool new super-rapid system the researchers used to identify which genes are active during brain development. The technique is called RNA interference, or RNAi:

Tags: genetics, genes, dna, genius, drones

For Better or Worse, Sex in Space Is Inevitable

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:43:08 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Weddings in space could be right around the corner, and experts figure the inevitable cosmic consummation will be just around the next corner.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., announced last week they will host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen) apiece.

For all we know, sex in space has already taken place. But NASA officials aren't talking about that much.

Beyond space tourism as a platform for steamy shenanigans, space missions are the perfect petri dishes for close encounters, and this year NASA certainly has a busy flight schedule, with five missions planned. And more countries than ever are now venturing into space, with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata slated to become Japan's first long-duration space flyer this year and China gearing up for its first spacewalk scheduled for October.

Things will get even more interesting with future long-duration missions envisioned for the moon, Mars

Tags: space travel, sex, nasa

Will the Future of Space Travel Be Driven by Entepreneurs or Nations?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:04:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Costa Rican-American physicist/rocket scientist Franklin Chang-Diaz is typical of the new breed of entrepreneurs driving the future of space travel. The future astronaut has some interesting insights on the kind of power and propulsion will need in order to truly colonize space. By his calculations, a trip to Mars could take as little as 39 days, and, with the development of nuclear powered travel, people could visit anywhere in the solar system within a few weeks. Chang-Diaz believes that these kinds of developments aren’t too far away.

I think lots of people are going to be moving into space. I think we will be populating the moon, building enclaves of research and even money-making ventures there. Just last month, Ad Astra signed an agreement with Excalibur Exploration Ltd., a British company, to mine asteroids [when the time is right]

I believe there will be a huge demand for resources, particularly water, from asteroids and comets

Tags: space travel, entrepreneurs, future

Cruise Ships: How They Sail Skyscrapers Around the World

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:55:50 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Large cruise ships typically host 1,800 passengers or more, plus 800 staff. Remarkably, many of these massive structures—three football fields long and 14 stories high—can deftly turn on a dime, spin 360 degrees, even mosey sideways.

For years big ship propulsion had a standard configuration: a propeller in the rear with a rudder behind it to steer. But increasingly, they are being equipped with an innovative propulsion system called the Azipod, made by ABB Oy in Finland. This gigantic electric motor and propeller hang underneath the back of the ship from a hefty swivel that allows the rig to rotate 360 degrees, driving the ship in any direction. Smaller bow thrusters, installed laterally under the waterline in the nose of the hull, help to push the boat from side to side near docks or obstructions.

Tags: cruise ships, sailing, skyscrapers

Buy immortality - name a new species

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:23:17 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sfgate.com

Jeff Goodhartz is single and has no children. But he wanted to ensure the family name would live on after he's gone.

So he paid $5,000 to have a newfound sea worm given the Goodhartz name, "goodhartzorum."

"This really jazzes me up," said the 55-year-old high school math teacher whose namesake is translucent with a flamboyant blue tuft. "It will be out there, the family name."

And it will be swimming in the Belize mangroves where someone else discovered it.

Goodhartz bought the naming rights from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which unveiled its name-a-species program earlier this year. This modern twist on taxonomy is a way to raise research money, and lots of groups have been doing it.

But its growing popularity has rekindled a debate over whether the practice invites fake discoveries and has led to a push for oversight.

Tags: species, naming, immortality

AUTOPOIESIS, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:19:14 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.oikos.org

The concept of autopoiesis has long surpassed the realm of biology. It has been used in areas so diverse as sociology, psychotherapy, management, anthropology, organizational culture, and many others. This circumstance transformed it in a very important and useful instrument for the investigation of reality. Years ago, Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela proposed the following question: to what extent human social phenomenology could be seen as a biological phenomenology? The purpose of this article is to look for an answer to this question. However, before getting to it I think that it is necessary to review some of the fundamental principles introduced by these two authors.

Autopoiesis

Poiesis is a Greek term that means production. Autopoiesis means autoproduction

In Maturana’s viewpoint, the term "autopoiesis" expresses what he called "the center of the constitutive dynamics of living systems"

Tags: autopoiesis, culture, society

Tit-for-tat: birds found to repay wartime help

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:36:56 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.world-science.net

When it spots a lurking predator, the sparrow-like pied flycatcher reacts in a way common among some birds and mammals. It calls up a mob of its peers to drive the interloper away.

But more than a feisty defender, the northern European bird is also a shrewd account keeper, researchers say: it remembers which of its neighbors answered its call to arms, and which stayed home. And it repays each in kind.

Scientists say the behavior offers new insights into the evolution of cooperation and altruism, and a new appreciation of the complexity of bird social life.

Apparently even some birds have learned that “playing nice pays,” University of Chicago evolutionary biologist David Wheatcroft wrote recently, alluding to the flycatcher research, in which he was not involved.

Tags: memory, birds, tit for tat

Biologically Inspired Ocean Power Systems

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:49:15 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.biopowersystems.com

BioPower Systems is commercialising ocean power conversion technologies. Through application of biomimicry, we have adopted nature's mechanisms for survival and energy conversion in the marine environment and have applied these in the development of our proprietary wave and tidal power systems.

Our technologies inherit benefits developed during 3.8 Billion years of evolutionary optimization in nature’s ocean laboratory.The resulting systems move and sway in tune with the forces of the ocean, and naturally streamline when extreme conditions prevail. This leads to lightweight designs and associated low costs.

The inherently simple bioWAVE™ and bioSTREAM™ devices are designed to supply utility-scale grid-connected renewable energy using efficient modular systems. These systems will reside beneath the ocean surface, out of view, and in harmony with the living creatures that inspired their design.

Tags: biology, ocean, energy, biomimicry, wave, tidal, power

Robots Advance

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:35:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.jumpthecurve.net

Last week, I explained how humans might soon be learning things from robots. Today, I’d like to explain why robots might become a more integral part of life faster than most people expect.

Yesterday, Technology Review published an interesting article entitled: ”Robots Learns to Use Tools.” What is really intriguing about the article, which describes a new robot called the UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan for short, is that the robot is employing sophisticated algorithms to teach itself how to deal with unfamiliar objects.

One of the major barriers to date with robotics is that programmers have had to write complicated software code to help robots deal with almost every contingency that it might encounter. For example, for a household robot to be effective, it needs to recognize every item that might conceivably be in someone house—everything from a pair of scissors to a flower vase. This is no easy chore.

The implications of self-learning robots could be quite profound

Tags: robotics

Virtual Personal Assistants: Not Just for the Filthy Rich

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 11:15:26 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.technewsworld.com

If you think virtual assistants are too expensive, you might want to think again. AskSunday.com, for instance, charges users $29 a month for 15 "requests"; meanwhile, GetFriday.com offers monthly plans that start at $120 a month for 10 hours and pay-as-you-go options.

Think only celebrities, high-ranking professionals and the wealthy can enjoy having personal assistants at their beck and call? Not necessarily.

A growing number of Web sites are making it easier to outsource virtual errands overseas, making it cheaper to indulge in the luxury of never having to write another thank-you card or sit on hold with the department of motor vehicles.

Those who use the sites, for everything from ordering takeout to managing online dating, say the cost is affordable and a small price to free up their time -- even in the face of a sputtering economy.

Taking Over Tedious Tasks

Tags: virtual, personal assistants

Stem Cells 2.0: Scientists Make Revolutionary Advance

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:07:19 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

A while back scientists were making revolutionary breakthroughs in stem cell research. Unfortunately they fell foul of interpretations of thousand year old texts in foreign languages, and a government with the scientific understanding of a squashed grape said "Sorry, our kind and loving God requires that people continue to suffer from Parkinson's, anemia, and various other horrible ailments." Luckily, scientists are awesome and did the obvious thing - make ANOTHER revolutionary breakthrough to get around the problem.

The previous problem with stem cells was that they came from aborted or otherwise unviable fetuses. Note that these fetuses had been terminated anyway, and the only issue now was whether it was more moral to chuck the goo in a bin and burn it, or use it to help cure the sick. The ethical answer, apparently, isn't what you think.

This issue can now be sidestepped with the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) from any kind of tissue

Tags: stem cells, breakthrough, medicine

Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:25:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning ~~282~~ 235 mpg.

Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.

According to Britain's Car magazine, VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010. They'll probably be built in the company's prototype shop, which has the capacity to build as many as 1,000 per year. That's not a lot, but it's enough to help VW get a lot of attention while showing how much light weight and an efficient engine can achieve.

Tags: wv, cars, energy, gas, fuel efficiency

Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:46:52 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: as always, a fascinating read from K.Kelly at the Technium

Clip Source: www.kk.org

All extropic systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day

Ditto for civilizations

Tags: ecology, investment, extropic systems, future, environment

Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:31:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV -- and now, scientists may have found a way to give that immunity to anyone.

Viruses enter cells and take them over, but to get inside, they need a handhold. HIV pulls itself in by grabbing onto a protein called CCR5, which decorates the surface of T-cells, which are one of the two major types of white blood cells and play an important role in helping the body fight infections. Back in the 1990's, researchers took interest in a handful of promiscuous gay men who were able to engage in sexual relations with their HIV-positive partners with impunity. Most of them had a mutation that kept their cells from producing normal CCR5 protein.

Armed with that knowledge, scientists have developed several tactics to block the production of CCR5 or perturb its shape so that the HIV virus can't grab onto it during the first step of its hijacking attempt

Tags: dna, hiv, immunity, viruses

Firefox Users Most Secure on Internet, Study Reveals

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:43:11 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.crn.com

Mozilla Firefox fans might rest a little easier these days after a study released Tuesday revealed that its users are most secure on the Internet.

The study "Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the "insecurity iceberg," was a collaborative effort conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM (NYSE:IBM) Internet Security Services. The research offers a comprehensive analysis of Web browsers, particularly in the area of security. The study's aim was to analyze Web browser preference and behavior for people using the Internet.

Altogether, the study found that less than 60 percent (59.1) of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers. Failure update browsers exponentially increases the chance for remote attacks executed by hackers, the study found.

Tags: browsers, firefox, net