Technology

Next in my series commenting on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet” is part 3, “How big is the net?”, by Colin Barras. That the internet is vast is undoubted. In July 2008, web surfers were introduced to Cuil.com, billed by its designers as “the world’s biggest search engine”. It indexed an impressive 120 billion pages, but shortly before its launch Google announced that its systems had registered a trillion unique pages (see Internet census 2007 and 2008). Even this might represent a fraction of what is out there. Some estimates suggest that…

Duplicating our organic tissue synthetically isn't as easy as it sounds.   Our bodily tissue is both soft and tough but modern implants - and replacement organs - will need to be as close to natural as possible to be effective. A team of Australian and Korean researchers led by Geoffrey M. Spinks and Seon Jeong Kim has now developed a novel, highly porous, sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues.  It consists of a robust network of DNA strands and carbon nanotubes.  Soft tissues, such as tendons, muscles, arteries, and…

Today I’ll continue my series commenting on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”. Part 2 is “Could the net become self-aware?”, by Michael Brooks. Mr Brooks opens with this: In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet’s complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It…

New Scientist magazine has posted an eight-part article titled “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”. As someone who knows about the Internet, I thought I’d comment on the various parts. Today, part 1: “Who controls the internet?”, by Michael Brooks. Mr Brooks gives his answer to the question in terms of ICANN: The official answer is no one, but it is a half-truth that few swallow. If all nations are equal online, the US is more equal than others. Not that it is an easy issue to define. The internet is, essentially, a group of protocols by which computers communicate, and…

A new machine developed at North Carolina State University makes an animal heart pump much like a live heart after it has been removed from the animal's body, allowing researchers to expedite the development of new tools and techniques for heart surgery. The machine saves researchers time and money by allowing them to test and refine their technologies in a realistic surgical environment, without the cost and time associated with animal or clinical trials. Currently, most medical device prototypes designed for use in heart surgery are tested on live pigs, which have heart valves that are…

A new low-bandwidth, high-frame-rate videoconferencing technology that creates the appearance of three-dimensionality and a strong sense of co-presence without the use of expensive motion-tracking devices or multicamera arrays could eventually become available for cell phones, laptop computers and personal digital assistants, according to a researcher at the University of Virginia. The technology was presented Friday in London at the International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services. According to Timothy Brick, the U.Va. researcher who will make the presentation,…

The creation of large-area graphene using copper may enable the manufacture of new graphene-based devices that meet the scaling requirements of the semiconductor industry, leading to faster computers and electronics, according to a team of scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin. Graphene, an atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded to one another in a "chickenwire" arrangement of hexagons, holds great potential for nanoelectronics, including memory, logic, analog, opto-electronic devices and potentially many others. It also shows promise for electrical energy storage for…

A University of California, San Diego team led by 2008 Nobel-Prize winner Roger Tsien, PhD has shown that bacterial proteins called phytochromes can be engineered into infrared-fluorescent proteins (IFPs). Because the wavelength of IFPs is able to penetrate tissue, these proteins are suitable for whole-body imaging in small animals. Their findings will be published in the May 8 edition of the journal Science. "The development of IFPs may be important for future studies in animals – to find out how cancers develop, how infections grow or diminish in mice, or perhaps how neurons are firing in…

Worried about how to protect yourself from swine flu (oops, Influenza A H1N1 - stop persecuting pigs!) ? Wondering what you can do to prevent spreading swine flu?  Need an up-to-the-moment break out of where the latest outbreaks have occurred, just in case deaths from swine flu exceed 1/1,000th the deaths of regular flu or 1/10,000th the deaths of malaria? If only an internet company would capitalize on this hysteria to generate traffic! Oh wait, here's one.   Internet News Distribution Channel "Feedzilla", which updates news and information around the clock, says they can help…

As long-time readers know, we like to celebrate various holidays and events by making subtle changes to the site.    Sure, sometimes it involve ninjas taking over and writing our science but mostly it is more like sneaking in a logo and seeing who notices. That doesn't mean all of them get used.    Our first logo, for example, was just something thrown together as a mockup so we knew where it would have to go.   It looked like something a programmer/me would put together: Then we had a few revisions, by someone who knows what they are doing, and arrived at the one…