Mark Oeltjenbruns: Science

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 13:05:04 GMT

Smartgun with authentication and minicam. A new South African gun comes equipped with a biometric authentication system (so it can only be fired by its owner) and a built-in minicam (so you can document the circumstances of each shot fired). Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]

Great, I can just see the new TV series now, "Gun Shot." Showing all the footage of people getting shot at from the gunners POV, of course for TV, no one ever dies. Maybe the cops can review the footage and understand why these highly trained officers are such bad shots most of the time. "One shot, One Kill."

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 12:50:49 GMT

hong kong flu. BBC: A global warning has been issued about a virulent flu and pneumonia sweeping hospitals in Hong Kong and Vietnam. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

This worries me since it seems to be an airborne virus. Easy to spread, hard to stop.

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 12:48:11 GMT

Is the Brain Equivalent to a Turing Machine?. From the NewScientist.com: "The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing. The prosthesis will first be tested on tissue from rats' brains, and then on live animals. If all goes well, it will then be tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease." [kuro5hin.org]

Wow!

Now we have brain and Face implants, what's next?

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:04:42 GMT

Scary first-person account of martian Hong Kong pneumonia. SARS -- the mystery pneumonia that's sweeping Asia and has been spotted in Canada and elsewhere -- is unbelievably scary. Check out this message from a Hong Kong doctor to Dave Farber's Interesting People list:

Unresponsive to various combinations of cefotaxime, chlarithromycin, levofloxacin, doxyclycline and Tamiflu. All microbiology is NEGATIVE (after one week)...
So far 2-3 of our older patients with chronic disease have deteriorated fastest. Medical staff - younger and fitter have faired better. Their radiological findings have deteriorated in all but one case...
We receive 2-3 admissions per day. So far no-one has shown any improvement. Once intubated however they remain relatively static but very oxygen and PEEP dependent. Those ventilated have solid lungs. Interestingly one patient developed a pneumothorax on the medical ward and after chest drain and re-expansion his pneumonia involves only the side without a chest drain. Another patient (ventilated) has developed surgical emphysema.
ICU is now closed for all but atypical pneumonias. All our other "clean cases" have been transferred to other ICUs. All elective surgery is being cancelled and wards are being closed and evacuated. Al ambulances are being diverted...
Masks are worn throughout the hospital. Staff are not going home to children.
Please take the warning below seriously. My impression is that even with minimal contact with an infected person people have been becoming ill.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 12:59:42 GMT

Face Transplant Soon. A very brave sixteen-year-old Irish girl looks set to become the first person to undergo a face transplant operation. [Antipixel]

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 02:21:53 GMT

SETI@Home identifies 150+ possible alien intelligences. The SETI@Home distcomp project has borne fruit: 150+ signals that match SETI's criteria for probable alien intelligence have been identified, and the project is going back to the Arecibo radio-telescope-array to take a closer look at them.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."
SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.
Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom) [Boing Boing Blog]

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 12:44:29 GMT

Irish Researcher Speeds Up Fight Against Bio-Terrorism.

The University of Ulster reports that one of its researchers has pioneered new DNA fingerprint techniques that could save thousands of lives in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

Dr Colm Lowery, from the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, has developed a revolutionary method of detecting the killer bugs that could be used to wipe out entire populations if terrorists strike.

Current methods of tracing potential bio-terrorist agents such as Cryptosporidium or Clostridium botulinum can take up to five days, Dr Lowery’s new DNA Finger Printing technique takes only 15 minutes, a vital time saving mechanism that would save countless numbers of lives in the event of biological warfare.

Dr Lowery’s work is so significant that he has been awarded a prestigious Winston Churchill Fellowship and invited to the Centers for Disease Control Prevention, Atlanta, USA, to work alongside the world’s leading scientists in the fight against bioterrorism.

Please note that the Winston Churchill Fellowship Awards will be publicly announced sometime after March 14, 2003.

"Current scientific practices take several days to establish whether or not there has actually been an outbreak. These new cutting edge techniques will act as an early warning system for detecting these killer bugs in our water supplies. The method can equally be applied to routine monitoring of food and drinking water quality for the natural occurrence of these deadly pathogens," explained Dr Lowery.

He also added that "Because the DNA finger printing technology is so fast it will be invaluable in the event of a biological attack, allowing the quick detection of the source and type of agent that has been used. Subsequently, it will be easier to treat victims and prevent more outbreaks. The bottom line is that the introduction of these new technologies will help save lives."

For more information about DNA fingerprinting, check this National Science Foundation page.

Source: University of Ulster, March 10, 2003

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 01:30:04 GMT

China will colonize the moon. China's announced an ambitious project to explore and exploit the moon.

Ziyuan said exploring the Moon "probably holds the key to humanity's future subsistence and development". Chinese officials have previously said that some sort of permanent, most likely unmanned, base could be established on the Moon's surface by 2010...
"The prospect for the development and utilisation of the lunar potential mineral and energy resources provide resource reserves for the sustainable development of human society," he told the newspaper.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 12:54:08 GMT

Lotus Leaf Inspires Waterproofing Scheme [Scientific American]

Is it just me or do we seem to be coming up with more breakthroughs like this? I never really followed the material science front before, but lately I've come across some really cool ideas that really seem poised to change the way a lot of things work.

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 13:22:24 GMT

Snowflake Photos [Slashdot]

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:22:37 GMT

GNU Radio's got your DTV transition *hangin'*. GNU Radio is a software-defined radio project implemented in Free Software. Using an ossciliscope, an analog-to-digital converter, and software that can pick out individual transmissions from the results, GNU Radio can be adapted to receive analog or digital TV, AM or FM radio, cellular traffic, 802.11a, b and g, and anything else that runs over the electromagnetic spectrum, subject to the speed of the analog-to-digital converter, the CPU, and the ability of codec authors to write decoders for different apps. Eric Blossom, the lead on GNU Radio, envisions a $65 FireWire peripheral in five or ten years that can handle every radio application you use today, all at once.

Except that under the terms of the Broadcast Flag mandate that the FCC is considering at the moment, all digital television demodulators will have to be designed to be tamper-resistant (i.e., not GPLed). If Hollywood gets its way, in other words, GNU Radio would be illegal.

Which is a damned shame, 'cause Eric just got DTV tuning and demodulation running. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog]

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:52:31 GMT

How many parents call their baby "it?".

This is funny as hell. Via Metafilter.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

This is just so funny. I saw so much of myself in this one, and it was only the first volume. A must read. Wanna see my Photo Album B?

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 19:53:29 GMT

Mutants live longer. ...and not just happy mutants. Turns out many people who live past the age of 100 share a specific mitrochondrial mutation that gives them additional resistance to oxidation. I wonder if my entirely self-sufficient grandmother (who lives alone and tends to her garden and bakes a killer Thanksgiving dinner) is a mitochondrial mutant? Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:54:46 GMT

Your Moment of Ewwwwwww.

"Most Common Creature On Earth" Affects Global Warming

"Thought for the day: More bacteria are alive in your mouth right now than the number of people who have ever lived on Earth. And if you're swimming in the ocean and take an accidental gulp of seawater, some of those bacteria in your mouth are the very ones that may control global warming." [Sci-Fi Today]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:44:19 GMT

A Bioweapon Worse Than Anthrax?. Tularemia, a seldom-mentioned but extremely infectious pathogen, could pose as great a bioterror risk as anthrax and smallpox, some experts say. Others, including the Centers for Disease Control, aren't so sure. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News]

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:29:50 GMT

IBM Grid Computing: Join with us to fight Smallpox. Through the smallpox Grid project, potentially more than two million personal computers will be linked to create a virtual supercomputer that could deliver processing power greater than the most powerful supercomputers in use today. Researchers will use this massive computing power to analyze the active proteins in smallpox and screen approximately 35 million molecules to find drugs that will target these harmful proteins, and effectively treat or prevent smallpox infections [Smart Mobs]

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 02:15:55 GMT

Slashdot | Terahertz Imagery Progresses.

ke4roh writes "Since Slashdot last discussed terahertz imaging, the European Space Agency's Star Tiger project has taken terahertz images of a human hand. Some of the pictures show just how useful the imagery might be for peering through walls and such - one of the images is through a 15mm pad of paper." --- The EE Times has another story.

[Privacy Digest]

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 11:26:36 GMT

New Energy Device?. I believe that sooner or later we'll be switching over to totally different energy production devices. Not burning old dinosaurs, but rather drawing a charge from the quantum field, or something along those lines. And there has been no lack of people who seemed to have invented over-unity devices. But either somebody managed to buy off or murder ALL of them, or they didn't really work when put under scrutiny. So it is with some caution that I pass on news about 'free' energy devices. But Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project has his head screwed on fairly well, and even though he likes being the center of attention, what he presents is normally very solid. A while back he set up a company, Space Energy Access Systems, for the purpose of locating and marketing such devices. And he believes he has something now. See transcript of an interview.

"It's not very big at all. I picked it up - you can pick it up with one hand. Took it out actually on a sidewalk. This device gathered, very passively, less than one watt of power from the environment - I won't say how it was done, I'm not allowed to at this point - and the machine started up. It generated hundreds of watts of power in usable form. We hooked this up ourselves, so there was no mystery about it. We even selected the things to hook up to this thing. It ran a 300-watt light bulb, a 100-watt light bulb, a stereo and an oscillating fan with an electric motor, all at the same time with literally no artificial manmade input of power."

I hope it stands up to further scrutiny. Getting rid of the oil economy would change everything. [Ming the Mechanic]

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. Carl Sagan said that I belive.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 19:23:26 GMT

"Reclaiming the Everglades" Home Page: "Reclaiming the Everglades, a digital collection of primary source materials, images and publications relating to the history of south Florida's environment" [Brain Off]

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 18:49:13 GMT

Mind bending science Update

Hippos Roam Drug Lords Ranch :: that's an invasive species! Hippos are allegedly Africa's most dangerous animal
Caffeine tracks contamination :: all that coffee and soda makes for an ideal polution tracking agent in the environment
Stones Self-Organize into Circles :: cyclical freezing and thawing account for this. Take that, 2nd law of thermodynamics!
Plant Spirals: Beauty You Can Count On :: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, plants are cool. patterns arise just from the rule of packing in the least crowded space.
Geographically Correct London Tube Map
NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena :: the next iteration of Star Logo. (here's another platform for the unexpected)

[Brain Off]

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 12:34:27 GMT

Genghis Khan: most prolific man in history?. A recent study suggests Genghis Khan's direct patrilineal descendants today constitute ~8% of men in a large area of Asia (~0.5% of the world population). With 16 million living men carrying his Y-chromosome, Genghis Khan had about 800,000 times the reproductive success of the average man of his age. What was his secret? [kuro5hin.org]

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 12:29:26 GMT

The Ecology of Urban Habitats. From Mikel Maron's Brain Off blog:

"Contrary to expectations, urban landscapes are some of the most interesting ecologies. The variety of landscapes and microclimates (roads, parks, gardens, rail, canals, industries), the intense flow of exotic materials for commerce and gardening, and continual disturbance, all contribute towards many opportunities for nature. Due to such variety, cities are often more biologically diverse than the surrounding countryside. Nature is astoundingly creative, and keen to exploit subtle convoluted chance.Nature continues to happen, in more astounding forms, even within our most artificial environments. Some bizarre relations of humans and nature from The Ecology of Urban Habitats

The overall result is that urbanized areas, despite a large reduction in the total vegetation cover, support a higher number of species than the surrounding countryside. [p. 11]
.. tropical fauna and flora occurs in certain canals where water used to cool machinery is discharged. Thermal pollution of the River Don by the steel industry has enabled wild figs to colonize its banks, [p. 118]
In fact all industry, as it gets tidied up, becomes less interesting for wildlife. The very features that allow a rich flora and fuana to survive - the squalor, rubbish, old buildings and machinery, derelict huts, rotting dumps, ineffiecient handling - are becoming unacceptable to management [p. 122]
[Oxford ragwort] A native of Southern Italy, was cultivated in the Oxford Botanical Garden for over a hundred years before it eventually escaped (1794) and soon reported as plentiful on almost every wall in the town. About 1879 it reached the Great Western Railway system where the plumed seed engaged in a new form of dispersal, being carried along in the vortex of air behind express trains, or even inside them [p. 139]
the reasons for caraway being limited to railway verges in Scotland ... caraway cake topped with fresh seeds was pocketed at post-funeral teas ... on the way home they tried to eat it, gave up and threw it out of the window [p. 142]
A more subtle effect of dogs can be observed on the base of street trees against which they urinate. This area, known as the canine zone, carries a different epiphytic flora to the rest of the trunk. [p. 162]
Starlings were successfully introduced into New York in 1890-91 as part of a project to establish in the States all the plants and animals mentioned by Shakespeare. [p. 171]
.. [an] experiment took place in Germany during the Third Reich when exotics [foreign plants] became enemies of the state and for a short time naturalistic planting flourished ... [p. 184]"

Interesting. In urban areas there's greater diversity than in industrialized farm land, so nature has the opportunity for thriving better in many ways. Urban landscapes are aggregates of many individual choices, many small bets on different things. Varied constellations of new things being built, combined with old things decaying. Farm land is homogenized monopolistic monoculture. Maybe the worst crime against nature is not cities, but modern farming methods? [Ming the Mechanic]

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 12:24:02 GMT

Sturdy microbes. I think the world of microbial organisms is really fascinating. For example, there have been various discoveries of how amazingly sturdy microbes can be, and how they can survive in what we would consider the most inhospitable environments.Just recently, scientists discovered that there is plenty of life even deep below the ocean floor. They sampled 3.5 million year old crust 1000 feet below the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. There is an enormous pressure, and none of the normal energy sources that life depends on. But different microbes exist there. Another story here , about rock-eating microbes on the sea floor. It estimates that 10-30% of the Earth's bio-mass consists of microbes deep inside the crust.Bacteria also have amazing abilities to survive for a long time under extreme conditions in a suspended state.

On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria.

Or, even more wild, 30 million year old bacteria have survived in amber:

Biologists Ral Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil. This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago. Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life.

Those last two are from Cosmic Ancestry, a very interesting site supporting the possibility that life on Earth has been seeded from space. Here's another recent article about that, suggesting that life probably exists now on Mars, under similar conditions as what we find in the Earth's crust, and that it is quite likely that the process here was seeded by microbes from Mars. [Ming the Mechanic]

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 16:28:32 GMT

Atkins-MSG compound found in breast-milk. A compound that occurs naturally in breast-milk fools the tongue into ignoring bitter flavors. Naysayers warn that it will allow food manufacturers to use cheap, crappy ingredients and still turn out yummy chow. To me, it sounds like "Atkins-MSG."

Imagine a compound that could dupe your tongue into thinking bland oatmeal was hot-fudge-sundae sweet? Or another that could make kids hoover spinach like Popeye?
"You could make healthy foods taste better," Alejandro Marangoni, a food scientist at the University of Guelph, said of the new field. "Just blocking bitterness has huge potential. Somebody's going to make a lot of money."
Linguagen's "bitter blocker" compound, which received a U.S. patent this month, is the first chemical known to inhibit the taste of bitterness by altering human perception instead of flavour. But it's unlikely to be the last.

Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 14:25:19 GMT

Natural Sight. A number of years ago, after being annoyed about having to wear thick glasses all day since my late teens, I sought out natural methods for improving my eyesight. In particular, I found a vision consultant who taught me principles, methods and exercises, loosely based on the Bates Method. It started working right away, and after a couple of months I could take off my glasses. For years I would only need glasses for driving at night. And I would faithfully do my exercises every day. But at some point I got lazy about it, and didn't keep up the exercises, and my sight has worsened. Not as bad as it was before, but I have to wear glasses if I drive of I'm out shopping.Now, looking around on the net, I found it depressing that the first thing I ran into was a lot of sites where eye doctors were claiming that this kind stuff is complete quackery, that myopia is genetic, and the only answer is glasses or surgery. Hm, I think I have a different opinion about who are the quacks.What I found most profound about the principles of regaining natural sight is that they apply to many things in life. Here are some of them.- Sight is primarily mental. If you can imagine something clearly focused, you can usually also see it like that with your eyes. If your mental picture is fuzzy, so is your eyesight.- Everything in the world is always moving. Natural sight sees that continously, and natural eyes will glide gradually over the scene, rather than jumping around between fixed points. Bad eyesight starts when one begins to see things just as fixed items at fixed distances.- Instead of letting yourself be thrown around by an apparently solid and immobile world, try turning your perspective around, and assume that you're still, and the whole world is constantly moving around you.- The periphery is important. Natural sight sees the periphery, the context, all the time, although not as clearly as the portion being focused on. Bad eyesight starts when we focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and when we insist that everything has to be clearly in focus. The periphery is never in focus - duh - but it is nevertheless very important.- Natural sight is relaxed. You see better by relaxing, not by straining. Just going for glasses or surgery, without changing one's habits, is almost as silly as taking a pain killer because somebody's standing on your foot. I feel bad that I've allowed myself to be so busy and stressed that I've forgotten about some of the fine ways I have of being relaxed and seeing better.Here are some more sites: brief overview, method in a nutshell [Ming the Mechanic]