In a plan that cannot possibly go wrong, Japanese scientists are releasing wild monkeys into the radioactive area around the Fukushima nuclear plant. Their goal is to equip the monkeys with radiation-tracking collars which can be used to test contamination in the area without endangering human lives.
As if giant, radioactive, killer monkeys aren’t a danger to all human life.
Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla!
Though Edison gets most of the credit for electrifying the early 20th century, Tesla’s inventions have had more lasting impact. He was the father of alternating current, as well as doing much of the founding research on electromagnetic waves and three-phase motors. Nearly all the electronic devices in use today are built on principles developed by Tesla. Happy birthday, you weird genius.
Update: Here’s a great three minute video that breaks down the highlights of Tesla’s career.
Allow me to geek out for a minute. The image above is an artist rendering of of a carbon nanotube/TiO2 structure cultivated by a custom-designed virus. This structure, in large quantities, boosts the output of a cheap, low-efficiency solar cell by 30%. The result is still too inefficient to revolutionize our energy production or anything like that, but think about the underlying technology for a minute:
It’s a useful nano-device.
Built by a virus.
That we made.
How fucking cool is that!? Sure, we’ve been able to create nano-scale mechanisms for a while, but we have to use huge SEMs and do it one atom at a time. A virus can be made to do it all at once, and trillions of individual virii can be cultivated in a matter of hours. When you can make (essentially) designer molecules mechanically instead of chemically, there are no limits. This particular breakthrough won’t change much, but this sort of thing will change the world more than anything else we’ve come up with so far.
It’s shit like this, science. It’s shit like this that makes me love you.
I don’t usually bother with sappy stuff like this, but damn if this isn’t the most uplifting video I’ve seen in a long time. If you’re not choked up at the end, you probably shouldn’t be reading my posts in the first place.
Sorry for the dearth of posts lately, but full-time employment has really cut into my wandering-the-intarwub time. Hope this video makes up for it.
It may seem like a silly gimmick, but a computer that can understand and answer jeopardy questions is a Really Big Deal. If the exponential technological improvement curve from the last five decades continues, then cutting-edge software running on the worlds most powerful supercomputer today will be on everybody’s cell phones in 5 years. Get ready for common electronic devices with which you can hold a normal conversation.
Although construction started a couple years earlier, 10/2/2000 was the date that the first astronauts stepped aboard the ISS. It’s been continuously occupied ever since. Click the link for NASA’s retrospective of the first decade of this incredible international project.
Science Kicks Nature’s Ass, Creates New Species From Scratch
No, that isn’t the plot of a new sci-fi movie. It actually happened. A group of scientists at the JC Venter Institute have successfully designed a complete genome for a living, self-replicating creature and brought it to life in a lab. Luckily, it is not the shark-bear-octopus pictured above, but a lowly bacteria. Still, this is an entire new species of bacteria, designed on a computer and brought to life. This has never been done before, and is a big fucking deal. Designer micro-organisms are now real, and the implications for this breakthrough are staggering. For better or worse, shit is about to get interesting.
These are the things that amuse me.
I am easily amused.
