Last week we wrote about the coming age of in vitro meat. Here’s a major step in that direction, People for the Ethical treatment of Animals (PETA) is offering a $1,000,000 push-prize for the development of vat meat: PETA Offers $1 Million Reward to First to Make In Vitro Meat Scientists around the world are […]
This Reuters article: Centennial time capsule car found ruined | Oddly Enough | Reuters Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute “an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of […]
Recent discoveries suggest that Brown Dwarfs, the get-no-respect Rodney Dangerfields of stellar types, act kind of like those mysterious pulsars with their super-powerful blasts of radiation, only on a smaller, brown-dwarf-appropriate scale: How pulsars produce their radiation has been a problem in astrophysics for 40 years. This is because we have little understanding of how […]
It has all the trappings of a pretty standard science fiction story. A mysterious weather phenomenon occurs in India — red rain. A scientist from Mahatma Gandhi University gathers a sample of the mystery substance and, examining it under a microscope, discovers that it contains microbes. The microbes deny easy classification. They seem healthy and […]
So what really killed off the dinosaurs? How about poisonous mammals? Small prehistoric mammals may have looked like easy pickings for their fearsome contemporaries, but a new study suggests many matched might with venom. The theory could explain how the fox-sized mammals of the Mesozoic Era 225 to 65 million years ago defended themselves against […]
Here’s a major development from this week that I never got around to writing anything about. Patients receiving lab-grown organs. WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The first human recipients of laboratory-grown organs were reported today by Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. In The Lancet, Atala […]
It makes sense that the new year begins in January — a little ray of hope in the dead of winter. One thing I’m sure most of us in the Northern Hemisphere are looking forward to is the days getting longer over the next few months. Then in springtime for those of us in the […]
It occurs to me that the “mathematical approach to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another” mentioned in the “Utility Fog” post might be a great way to produce carbon nanotubes. If you could essentially put carbon on a conveyer belt and move it through […]