Future Tech
There's all sorts of things being developed and invented these days. Our technology is accelerating at an exponential rate, and every day it seems we're inventing a new field or crossing two seemingly distant fields together to crate something amazing. It also seems more and more these days that I'm living in a sci-fi novel. This tree is an attempt for me to organize all the crazy things I hear about on the internet and plot the sci-fi relationships they take in my head. Oct 5
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Asteroid Mining Venture Backed by Google Execs, James Cameron Unveiled - Yahoo! News
A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water. Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system.
Plastic-eating fungi found in Amazon may solve landfill problems
Just when you thought that plastic waste was never going to break down in the environment, along comes Mother Nature to solve the problem. The Amazon contains more species of flora and fauna than virtually anywhere else on earth. In a report by NZ Herald it was stated that a group of students from Yale University found a species which appears to be happy eating plastic in airless landfills. The group of students are part of Yale's annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory. Travelling with professor Scott Strobel of the molecular biochemistry lab into the jungles of Ecuador, the mission was to allow "students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way."NIF facility fires record laser shot into target chamber
Prior to this achievement, the most the facility had managed to coax out of the laser, the world’s largest, was 1.6 megajoules. Also, the new record shows that the NIF laser is capable of producing more than it was designed for, which was 1.8 megajoules. It also proved that it was capable of doing so without damaging its parts, allowing for another shot a day and a half later, which is important, because one of the goals for the laser is to get it to fire off shots at 15 per second eventually.
Genetic manipulation boosts growth of brain cells linked to learning, enhances effects of antidepressants
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) — UT Southwestern Medical Center investigators have identified a genetic manipulation that increases the development of neurons in the brain during aging and enhances the effect of antidepressant drugs. The research finds that deleting the Nf1 gene in mice results in long-lasting improvements in neurogenesis, which in turn makes those in the test group more sensitive to the effects of antidepressants. "The significant implication of this work is that enhancing neurogenesis sensitizes mice to antidepressants -- meaning they needed lower doses of the drugs to affect 'mood' -- and also appears to have anti-depressive and anti-anxiety effects of its own that continue over time," said Dr.
TOKYO (Newscore) - Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people into silence. Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer" gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away. The device works by recording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a 0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes speakers to stutter before silencing them completely. Describing the device in their research paper, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."
Japan invents speech-jamming gun that silences people
The synthetic cell looks identical to the 'wild type' The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms. Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell", although only its genome is truly synthetic. Dr Venter likened the advance to making new software for the cell. The researchers copied an existing bacterial genome.
BBC News - 'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists
Project funded by anonymous individual aims to cut number of cattle farmed for food and reduce greenhouse gas emissions Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells. Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 – this October. He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed. The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
£200,000 test-tube burger marks milestone in future meat-eating | Environment | The Guardian
Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom - NYTimes.com
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University , said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today’s silicon-based machines. In contrast to conventional computers that are based on transistors with distinct “on” and “off” or “1” and “0” states, quantum computers are built from devices called qubits that exploit the quirky properties of quantum mechanics. Unlike a transistor, a qubit can represent a multiplicity of values simultaneously. That might make it possible to factor large numbers more quickly than with conventional machines, thereby undermining modern data-scrambling systems that are the basis of electronic commerce and data privacy.
Yes, you read the headline correctly, and no, I can't believe it either, but apparently scientists have invented a brain machine that dramatically enhances musical performance, thus paving the way for a new race of highly skilled super-musicians. According to the BBC, "the system - called neurofeedback - trains musicians to clear their minds and produce more creative brain waves. Research, to be published in the journal Neuroreport , indicates the technique helps musicians to improve by an average of 17% - the equivalent of one grade or class of honours. Some improved by as much as 50%."
New Brain Machine Improves Musical Creativity | The Dominion
Superhydrophobic spray means no more washing clothes – among others | ZME Science
Ross Technology Corp, a company that focuses on steel products has created a new product based on the spray known as NeverWet – which aside from being useful, is also pretty cool. Now, this doesn’t seem particularly interesting, but it is – at least if you ask me; it is built from nanoparticles and it is hydrophobic – not only that it stops water from wetting it, but it shoots water right of from the surface on which it was applied. Even if at first they wanted to apply this technology to steel, they quickly realized the enormous list of applications this can have, from shoes and clothes that wouldn’t require washing any more, to your phone that could become waterproof, or just on stuff that you don’t want bacteria to get on.