Australian billionaire orders additional robot dinosaurs
I love a rich dude who finds ways to spend his money weirder and more extravagant than anyone else. This doesn’t make them a bad person as long as they do other useful things in the world. Keep in mind that Dick Clark had a house made like the one on the Flintstones so…I love a rich dude even more when he doesn’t put me in jeopardy of being eaten by a real T-Rex by creating a stupid island of long since extinct creatures. Of course, now I just want one robot dinosaur to let loose in my house and scare the dogs to death.
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Tag Archives: science
The Bizarre History of Insect Head Transplants
Entomology is one of my favorite mologies. These crazy researchers treat their insects like I did GI Joe’s mixing and matching parts. Of course, my GI Joe’s were only alive to me. Or were they? Seriously though, the process of head tranplanting little critters stretches back to the ’20’s and continues to produce valuable intel into their world.
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new battery in airplane, the first flight is a success
I’m still anti-airplane but at least this is a little stride in the right direction. The way that the airline industry has not changed since it’s inception is really quite sad. The airplane of old, which are still running, destroys the environment. Not that trash in the ocean and aerosol cans don’t do the same but the airline industry could be lived without. Replace all planes with trains, make the trains high speed, and never have to deal with TSA again. Of course, the train industry would figure out their own way to harass their passengers and make it as uncomfortable as possible but that will be at least a year or two away from the beginning. At least it will give us a little break. It’s the little things right?
Monday’s flight was a conventional “functional check flight” performed on all new aircraft prior to delivery, but there was much more than usual at stake. Boeing has for weeks scrambled to address a battery issue that has grounded all 50 Dreamliners worldwide since January, when a battery caught fire aboard a 787 at the gate in Boston. A week later, a second Dreamliner making a domestic flight in Japan made an emergency landing after the crew received messages in the cockpit indicating a battery had overheated and failed.
Boeing has joined experts from the National Transportation Safety Board and their counterparts in Japan in investigating the fires. Although they have not determined the root cause, the NTSB believes a short circuit within a single cell of the 63-pound battery sparked the fire in Boston. Boeing has responded with a plan to modify the lithium-ion batteries by adding protection between each of theindividual lithium-ion cells. The airplane manufacturer also plans to subject the batteries to more rigorous testing and install them in heavy-duty steel boxes that vent outside the aircraft. It says those measures eliminate the risk of battery fires and provide safeguards against future incidents.
reading your mind to play some mood music in your headphones
Ever wished your music player just knewyou needed a Carly Rae Jepsen pick-me-up? Fortunately for you, the Japanese company behind a pair of mind-reading cat ears has your back.
Neurowear announced earlier this month that it’s developing a pair of headphones with an electroencephalography-enabled sensor — that is, a sensor that can read brain waves. The headphones and the sensor read your mind and, in tandem with an iPhone app, play music suited to your mood. The Mico video demonstration promises “music inspiration from your subconsciousness.”
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new battery allows car to drive even further without fossil fuel
“Our aluminum-air energy systems are superior to conventional batteries in terms of energy density and specific energy,” the company said on its website Friday.
Aluminum is a widely available metal that is easily recycled and contains high amounts of energy (8 kilowatt-hours per kilogram). In conventional aluminum-air batteries, aluminum reacts to oxygen and produces electricity. Phinergy’s innovation uses water and recycles the hydrated aluminum oxide to create an anode, a process that enables a closed and sustainable life cycle or recharge.
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the universe just got a little order and little less known to us
Only four percent of the universe is made up of normal matter. That is to say that ninety six percent of the great wide world out there we have no clue what is going on with it. It exists, that much we now but how or why or even in what parameters does it do what it does is still just a mystery. The fact that we have found the universe is older than we most recently had established is just like humans, everyone lies about their age.
The European Space Agency’s Planck mission is what’s going on. Planck has been scanning the entire sky, over and over, peering at the radio and microwaves pouring out of the Universe. Some of this light comes from stars, some from cold clumps of dust, some from exploding stars and galaxies. But a portion of it comes from farther away…muchfarther away. Billions of light years, in fact, all the way from the edge of the observable Universe.
This light was first emitted when the Universe was very young, about 380,000 years old. It was blindingly bright, but in its eons-long travel to us has dimmed and reddened. Fighting the expansion of the Universe itself, the light has had its wavelength stretched out until it gets to us in the form of microwaves. Planck gathered that light for over 15 months, using instruments far more sensitive than ever before.
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Jurassic park has begun
Part of me just hopes this is creative marketing for the re-release of Jurassic Park. I don’t imagine that once we bring back the dinosaurs they are going to eat us immediately but I’m ready to learn how to tame a saber tooth just in case. It will be like man folding back over on itself.
The dodo and the great auk, the thylacine and the Chinese river dolphin, the passenger pigeon and the imperial woodpecker—the bucardo is only one in the long list of animals humans have driven extinct, sometimes deliberately. And with many more species now endangered, the bucardo will have much more company in the years to come. Fernández-Arias belongs to a small but passionate group of researchers who believe that cloning can help reverse that trend.
The notion of bringing vanished species back to life—some call it de-extinction—has hovered at the boundary between reality and science fiction for more than two decades, ever since novelist Michael Crichton unleashed the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park on the world. For most of that time the science of de-extinction has lagged far behind the fantasy. Celia’s clone is the closest that anyone has gotten to true de-extinction.
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TED backs down from censorship
I hope now that everything has been straightened out, we do not look at anyone as the villian in this case. TED felt they did a wrong thing so they corrected because the people said so and that is part of the wonderful global awakening that continues to sprout wings and grow. This never had anything to do with what Graham Hancock’s lectures were about (I’m very biased in this because I am a devote Hancock follower so watch the videos for your own take on their message) the fight was for allowing the message to be heard, period. Let the people take in the knowledge and use it in their own personal puzzle. We are big girls and boys. We can handle it.
Following popular outcry in response to TED’s censorship of recent TEDx talks by leading thinkers Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake – and against the accompanying slanders on their reputations – TED is forced to retract its position and put the talks back online in a “reserved” area of their site. By then, however, pirate copies already existed and from these, in an example of guerrilla action on the internet, hundreds of people independently uploaded the talk to their own Youtube channels. Just one of these many Youtube channels indepently hosting the talk in defiance of TED is here.
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