Daily Archives: September 13, 2004

Welcome (Back) to The Speculist

[NOTE: I'm leaving this message at the top for the next week or so. There is new stuff below!]

We’re back.

Myriad porn spams and a corrupt Bekeley database couldn’t keep this site down for long. We are back in action. We’ll be migrating material from the old site to this new location over the next few months. So if you’re not finding what you’re looking for here, try here.

Commenting now requires TypePad registration. Chek it out. It’s free! Registering will enable you to write comments for many blogs, not just The Speculist.

Oh, and um…live to see it!

PS: Don’t forget to update your bookmarks and blogrolls. That new address is:

https://www.blog.speculist.com

Salvaging Genesis

Check this out.

NASA scientists said they have recovered some critical pieces of the Genesis space capsule intact and are optimistic the wreckage will yield valuable information about the origins of the solar system.

“We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals,” physicist Roger C. Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Friday.

Apparently, the individual compartments that were used to gather sample atoms from around the solar systm got fused together pretty well, but atoms are kind of hard to destroy. So it’s possible that just a few of them will be sufficient to give the scientists the information they’re looking for.

Here’s hoping

Meanwhile, NASA continues to investigate why the parachute didn’t open. While they’re reviewing the matter, they should consider giving some kind of award to the design team for building a probe that can still yield results after such a traumatic crash. And the FAA ought to think about hiring these folks to help them design their next generation of black boxes.

Nanotechnology to Take On cancer

This is pretty cool:

In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.

The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.

The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that “cook” tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We’ve been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It’s gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.

(via Kurzweil AI)