Technology

The Meaning Of Tolerance Tolerance, the ability to 'live with' or 'put up with' something has wide-ranging applications in engineering, and is strongly parallel to the notion of error bars1 in science. I use the terms 'tolerance' and 'addition of tolerances' in my series A Science Of Human Language  to describe minor variations in speech and writing which have no significant effect on the transmission of meaning, but which explain the drifts of word pronunciation and meaning which occur across generations of language users. This article is intended to clarify the concept of engineering…

One of the pleasures of working at Reading University is being able to walk across to our Agriculture Department at lunchtime and join the table talk.  Today, they were discussing the following press release. Rising energy costs give an important role for organic farming in securing long-term food supply The nub of this is as follows: Energy costs are a major constituent of total costs for conventional agriculture. The greater part of energy used in agriculture comes from the manufacture of inputs and indeed, 37% of this is used just in the manufacture of fertilizers. As we have recently…

Stem cell research is a major challenge for medicine. Recently, asymmetric cell division was filmed in vivo in fruit fly germinal stem cells for the first time by the team of Jean-René Huynh at the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université Paris Diderot), now working at the ‘Génétique du développement et cancer' laboratory (Institut Curie/CNRS/UPMC/Inserm). This paper on stem cell behavior was published in Nature Cell Biology. As stem cells can produce any kind of cells in higher animals, they are a crucial focus of research interest. These unspecialized cells are self-renewing, producing…

David Pogue's secrets to his productivity: I use typing-expansion software...I use dictation software...I know where everything is. Years ago, I started using an address-book program that’s now called iData 3. It’s a freeform database,...I use macro software....So I use Shift-Control-W to open Microsoft Word, Shift-Control-C for my calendar program, and so on. The less I have to use the mouse, the faster I fly....I don’t waste time. I travel a lot for speaking engagements—so much that the $60 a month I have to pay for my tiny Sprint USB cellular modem stick seems like a bargain. It means I…

Organ donation would be a lot less variable if they could be grown in the lab and a more effective way to build plastic scaffolds on which new tissues and even whole organs might be grown in the laboratory is being developed by an international collaboration between teams in Portugal and the UK. The researchers say rapid prototyping, or three-dimensional(3-D) 'printing', could enable tissue engineering that replicates the porous and hierarchical structures of natural tissues at an unprecedented level. Scaffold structures for tissue engineering that allow researchers to grow cells, whether…

The clothing industry discovered decades ago that a mix of natural and synthetic fibers, like taking cotton and adding polyester, can make clothing that's soft, breathable and wrinkle free. Now researchers at the University of Washington are using the same principle for biomedical applications. Mixing chitosan, found in the shells of crabs and shrimp, with an industrial polyester creates a promising new material for the tiny tubes that support repair of a severed nerve, and could serve other medical uses. The hybrid fiber combines the biologically favorable qualities of the natural material…

Open Source For New Hydrogen Powered Car A new hydrogen powered car unveiled in the UK is to be developed using open source methods.The Riversimple Urban car was unveiled in public for the first time at Somerset House in London on 16th June 2009.  Image source: Riversimple.com Riversimple pulled the sheet off its ultra-lightweight fuel cell Urban Car today in London and said it delivers a 50-mph top speed, a 200-mile range and fuel economy equivalent to 300 mpg. The company claims it also emits a paltry 30 grams per kilometer of CO2. The car features a 6-kilowatt fuel cell, which is…

John Levine notes that using secure branding can be an effective way to combat phishing. “Secure“ branding, in this sense, means using trusted authorities to verify the credentials of a web site or email sender, and then displaying branding information, such as a logo, in a trusted area of the application window, done in a way that would be hard to attack. John is certain right, in principle, but the difficulty is that principle doesn’t necessarily translate into reality, for a number of reasons. First, I’ll note that the “extended” security certificates that newer browsers recognize and use…

There was a time when offshore platforms were secure communities in which production was controlled by closed processes that were isolated from the external world.   Not so today.  With modern integrated operations, offshore-onshore contact is transparent and may of the processes out on the platform are controlled by onshore personnel via networked PCs. Oil company data security is inadequate, and production systems are at risk of attack by hackers, viruses and worms. Integration and onshore control has several advantages but a big disadvantage is a fall in information…

In 2007, I had a series in my personal blog about technology in Star Trek. I remembered that series the other day, when I read an article in New Scientist about the science in Battlestar Galactica.[1] The New Scientist article focuses on human physiology and psychology, and on gravity and g-forces. It doesn’t look at power, speed, computers, astronomical issues, or any of a number of other things that would have been fun to see covered. Oh, well. But it made me think to come back to the idea of how technology is portrayed — in particular, how computers had been and are depicted in movies and…