Technology
You might recall that a few years ago, lots of athletes wore magnetic bracelets in the belief that their performance would improve. Like much woo, be it homeopathy or organic food or skull drilling, it proceeded from a reasonable basis; in the case of magnets, are we not governed by inductance? What if we could more optimally guide our bodily functions using mass-produced magnets? Then throw in a bunch of stuff about negative ions and tourmaline and get rich.
Today you can pick up those used for a dollar on Ebay.
But there is obviously science involved in magnetism and nanoparticles, even if…
You probably recognize that there are no objective measures to creating those "Top 10" and "Top 100" lists. There is a generous sprinkling of personal bias and subjective decisions.
Yet the assumption is that rankings of median home prices and crime rates and the "best places to live" aren't being done deceptively. Still, a way to account for unintentional bias would be great, and so Harvard researchers have created LineUp, an open-source application that empowers ordinary citizens to make quick, easy judgments about rankings based on multiple attributes.
In what they are billing as the…
DNA sequencing technologies continue to make bold strides, and that means a lot for the plant sciences.
Genome-scale data sets obtained from these new technologies will allow researchers to greatly improve our understanding of evolutionary relationships, because studies of phylogenetic relationships among different plant species have traditionally relied on analyses of a limited number of genes, mostly from the chloroplast genome. Limited data often means limited ability to fully or accurately resolve phylogenetic relationships.
New methods of DNA sequencing have made it possible for…
Because I blog, speak, and comment in support of various agricultural technologies, I am routinely accused of being a "shill for Big Ag" or for some company which you can probably guess. They believe that I am somehow paid to say what I say. If I am a "shill," I'm clearly not doing it right. Either that, or there is in fact no money in the shill business.
When I've met some fellow farming and technology advocates, we often joke about this. "Did you get your Big Ag check yet? Mine doesn't seem to be coming?" While I'm sure there are people who will never…
Hank |
When you think of systems biology, you don't ordinarily think of process verification and methodology.Sure, there has been data verification in biology and clinical trials in pharmaceuticals, but best methods and best practices don't really exist for systems biology.
And when you think of systems biology, you really don't think of Philip Morris, the cigarette folks.
It may be time to rethink both.
One-size-fits-all science does not work, it is often said. Well, first things first, we can argue it certainly does. Dramatically different fields use the scientific method and 'method' is the…
The Nazis studied everything to gain an advantage. Those stories about mysticism and artifacts aren't wrong, and the advanced weapons projects are well known, that is why US President Harry Truman authorized "Operation Paperclip" to recruit their scientists and engineers, rather than just kidnapping them the way Communist leaders in the USSR did.
But they weren't just interested in big weapons, they studied small ones, like bugs, though not to use them for biowarfare or weird experiments. Hitler had a ban on that.
Yet documents from the period showed the existence of a Waffen-SS Entomological…
A program that allows a single autonomous robot to navigate an uncertain environment with an erratic communication link is difficult and the difficulty for writing code to handle multiple robots that may have to work in tandem is even harder.
Control programs for such multiagent systems, teams of robots or networks of devices with different functions, have generally restricted themselves to special cases, where reliable information about the environment can be assumed or a relatively simple collaborative task can be clearly specified in advance. But MIT's Computer Science and Artificial…
People who gravitate toward the latest technology regard themselves as progressives mavericks on the cutting edge - and then they stand in a line outside the Apple store.
Apple products don't look good, and they aren't particularly original - having to jailbreak your phone to use it the way you want and being told you can only use their power supply is more Soviet gulag than 21st century technological freedom but a lot of people still consider them cool. And perception matters most. If a product appears to be losing its coolness, it's over, Friendster.
Who better to know what cool is than a…
Nine years ago, Dennis Aabo Sørensen of Denmark lost the use of his left hand handling fireworks during a family holiday.
Now he has become the first amputee in the world to feel sensory-rich information, in real-time, with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm.
Silvestro Micera and a team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and SSSA (Italy) developed the sensory feedback that allowed Sørensen to feel while handling objects.
A prototype of the bionic technology was tested in February 2013 during a clinical trial in Rome under the supervision of Paolo…
For decades, scientists have been pushing toward the goal of creating artificial building blocks that can self-assemble in large numbers and reassemble to take on new tasks or to remedy defects. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have taken a step toward that.
"The potential of such new man-made systems is almost limitless, and many expect these novel materials to become the foundation of future technologies," says Dr. Maik Hadorn from Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zürich. "We used short DNA strands as smart glue to link preliminary stages of…