Read My Mind!

New Tissue While You Wait

BBC is reporting a new technique for growing tissues which may eventually allow surgeons to produce new tissues for grafts during the surgery itself.

UK scientists say they can cut the time it takes to grow new tissue from days to minutes.

The lengthy process can be accelerated by simply removing the water present in the starting material, the University College London team discovered.

Following such shrinkage by a factor of at least 100, tissues could be created in 35 minutes.

This speed may one day allow doctors to make tissue implants at the bedside, Advanced Functional Materials reports.

BBC NEWS | Health | New tissue 'grown within minutes'

Owning a Pet Tornado

All of my life, I've dreamed of owning a pet Tornado. Now an engineer from Canada may have found a way to capture one.

WEATHER systems, as the world has recently been reminded, have awesome power. The energy released by a large hurricane can exceed the energy consumption of the human race for a whole year, and even an average tornado has a power similar to that of a large power station. If only mankind could harness that energy, rather than being at its mercy. Louis Michaud, a Canadian engineer who works at a large oil company, believes he has devised a way to do just that, by generating artificial whirlwinds that can be controlled and harnessed. He calls his invention the “atmospheric vortex engine”.

Alternative energy | The power of spin | Economist.com

Louis Michaud's Website: Atmospheric Vortex Engine

The Skeptic's Dictionary

Buy your own "mysterious artifact!"
You've surely heard of the "Mysterious Crystal Skull," but did you know their are dozens of them? And what about their unkown origin? The Skeptic's Dictionary has a great article on these and more.

There isn't a shard of evidence that these crystal skulls are mysterious in any way. What is mysterious is their continued popularity.

(crystal skulls)

The Skeptic's Dictionary is a great source of the "Rest of the Story" concerning every psuedoscientific hoohaw you can think of.

Featuring nearly 400 definitions, arguments, and essays on occult topics ranging from acupuncture to zombies, The Skeptic’s Dictionary is a lively, commonsense trove of detailed information on all things supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific.

(more)

Star Goats, Tofu-Spam and Time Travel

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New model 'permits time travel'

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated.

Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present.

According to the probability arguments in this article, changing my personal future by going into the past should have no limitations because the future hasn't happened. In other words, if a great Star Goat were to threaten Earth, I could nip back in time and feed it tofu-spam until it fell asleep and missed Earth entirely. This would not violate the model because I have not yet observed the goat's behavior in my near future. I could not make the goat dissappear or change trajectory, because I would have already observed these thing in my present.

M.I.T. Hosting Time Travel Convention May 8th

The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT, 2 hours past sunset (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

What is it?

Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in two weeks, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Bigby's Interposing Hand Indeed!

The Escapist - Random Encounter - It's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
The Escapist explores the possible dangers to body and soul associated with spells in such hoary, Satanic grimoires as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the D&D Player's Handbook.

Here we see the intrepid reseacher about to test the first level spell "mage armor." This should either give him a +4 to armor and nicely deflect that large pipe wrench, or do nothing as poor HPLs face is permanently joined to our researcher's lungs. (Nice t-shirt, by-the-way.)

So, I'm going to settle this for everyone. I am going to take my Harry Potter books and my Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook and attempt to cast the arcane spells contained within, all in the name of science, and at great risk to my body and soul.

You heard right. These claims of authentic, functional magical abilities will be put to the test before your very eyes. Do these spells really work? Will your kids be able to cast them after a casual read? Will I survive unscathed? Stay tuned to find out.

Maybe this would have all ended differently if he had had the Wizard's Wearable?

And the Rebuttal

Skeptic News: Global Consciousness Project reveals human foolishness
Skeptic News has a very different view of what's going on here.

Anyone else suspect they know what's going on here? Various scientists claim to be baffled, so maybe I can help them out. Here's what's probably happening -- humans are being human. You see a spike in the numbers, you scan the news headlines to look for some big event. If you find something, then you can say that the spike you saw detected it...

Could it be as simple as seeing images in the clouds or hearing voices in whitenoise?

Experimental Evidence of the Collective Unconscious?

Huh? :: RedNova News - Can This Black Box See Into the Future?
At first glance this looks like just another crackpot story for the archives, but looking closer this appears to be a serious experiment by serious researches with some mind-bending results.

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream...
...'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.
'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

Luke: "What's wrong, Obi-Wan?"
Obi-Wan: "A great disturbance in the Force. It was like a million voices crying out in unison, then suddenly silenced."

Electric Tornadoes and Invisible Walls

Bill Beaty has a great page from 1998 which suggests bizarre experiments with ionized air. Give it a look if your sense of wonder needs a jumpstart.

Giant Squid Are Taking Over the Earth!

Well the election is over and Cthulhu won, so I thought we would take a moment to pay tribute to our new Cephalopod Overlords.

GIANT squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger.

According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.

thanks to Neil Gaiman.

Junk DNA Actually Firmware?

Sciscoop spotted a Scientific American article on so-called junk DNA that implies is has a much more complicated (and interesting) role than just separating useful genes.

The previously prevailing view, that proteins are in control, succumbs to a problem of "combinatorial complexity" - the more proteins involved, the proportion of the system devoted to regulation increases, and there's an intrinsic "complexity limit." The rise of multicellular organisms evidenced in the "Cambrian explosion" suggests a transition to a new control structure that could transcend previous limits - and this direct role for regulatory RNA could be the explanation.

SciScoop || Genes != Proteins

O'Reilly is coming out with a "Brain Hacks" Book!?!

Matt Webb besides having an cool, oddly symetrical name, is writing an O'Reilly book in the "Hacks" series called "Brain Hacks." He's working with a cognitive neuroscientist named Tom Stafford. I am so buying this one! And if it's really good, then with my nifty new Safari membership, I may just make it a desktop reference too.

Rock Paper Scissors and Reptile Mating Strategies

Interesting observations about what at first looks like a zero-sum game, but isn't.

Scissors-paper-rock is a game that children play, mathematicians analyze, and a certain species of lizard takes very seriously.

Ivars Peterson's MathLand

Good Luck and Godspeed, SpaceShipOne!

Mike Melville will be flying into history tomorrow. All of my best, and let's hope this starts us back on the road to the stars!
SpaceShipOne - June 21 launch event FAQ for general public and press

Woooohooo! They did it!

How to Build Friendly AI

Creating Friendly AI Is an interesting and detailed "developers manual" for compliance with the SIAI (Singularity Intsitute for Artificial Intelligence ) Guidelines on Friendly AI. This is intended to serve much the same purpose for HAL and Skynet as the Foresight Institute's Molecular Nanotechnology Guidelines serve for Shoggoths.

Uploading Sea Slugs

I read "Lobsters" by Charles Stross last night, a story where lobster nervous system states are uploaded to a neural net. If you know me, you know I'm an enthusiastic extropian. Following the logic that upload technology would probably proceed from simpler nervous systems to more complex, I thought I would look into what's been happening with Pleurobranchaea which I vaguely recalled from Godel Escher Bach as having simple nervous systems with big neurons making them a favorite for experimentation in the lab. R. Gillette Lab has a nifty model of Pleurobranchaea behavior they call Cyberbranchaea. This isn't uploading, but it's a big step in the right direction.

We are still a very long way from knowing what to upload but we seem to be learning more about how. I'm not a scientist, but I think we'll have to do quite a bit more than simulate neurons to faithfully reproduce an evolved lifeform. There's the endocrine system for one thing which greatly influences our emotional state, and the full set of senses and appendages which make up a large part of what we think we are. There's the whole granularity question of digital simulation of analog systems. What's an acceptable A/D conversion for a thought? It may be that we'll find most of this can be treated as a black box where we can simulate just the neuron firing in a given situation and indirectly capture the entire state of the organism due to the influence of all other factors being reflected in the neuron state, but that seems like wishful thinking.

The nice thing about science is that my opinion is irrelevant. The tough part is the ethics of the experimentation. How can we tell if a simulation "feels" alive? What rights does a simulation have? Do Cyberbranchaea Dream of Electric Flabellina?
I'm wrong about first reading about Pleurobranchaea neurons in G.E.B/E.G.B. Anybody have an idea what book it might have been?

A Viral Cure for Cancer?

Along similar lines to the earlier article about a possible cure for HIV, New Scientists has an article about a genetically modified virus which fails to spread in healthy cells but destroys cancer cells. The ingenious part is that the virus takes advantage of the behavior that makes the cell a cancer cell.

Viruses spread by infiltrating the cells of their host. Their detection causes the cell to commit suicide in a process called apoptosis, which prevents the virus from spreading further. However, viruses can carry genes that allow them to slip past this cell death process in normal cells, thus causing infection. As New Scientist reports, researchers at Cancer Research UK and Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London have devised an ingenious new strategy--they deleted one such gene in an adenovirus, causing it to be immediately detected by normal cells and unable to spread. But in cancer cells, which grow uncontrollably and ignore the cell death process, the virus was able to thrive and spread rapidly. It then multiplied so rapidly that it killed the cancer cells by making them explode.

SciScoop || Could This Be The Cure For Cancer?

Beer Company Produced Cow Immune to Mad Cow

This is a perfect example of why it is becoming increasingly difficult to write plausible Science Fiction. The real world is already to weird to believe.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Kirin Brewery Co, Japan's number-two beer maker, has succeeded in producing a cow that is immune to mad cow disease, but experts said it was too early for livestock producers to celebrate.

Yahoo! News - Scientists Produce Cow Immune to Mad Cow Disease

HIV Cured and the Cure is Contagious?

SciScoop is carrying a story about researchers who may have found a cure for HIV that is itself a communicable, replicating virus. A person so treated would not develop AIDS and could "infect" a partner with the cure. SciScoop || Fighting HIV With HIV
This is at once hopeful and terrible. A cure could save millions and be too attractive to control (free global innoculation, no less!) But mutations will occur, social controls on risky behavior are likely to deteriorate, and we could be left with an even worse epidemic as a result. The technique also lends itself to development of biowarfare agents.
Pandora's box is a gene splicer.

If an Asteroid Traveling 17 km/s Leaves Topeka in the Afternoon...

The University of Arizona has a morbidly fascinating Impact Effect Calculator which allows you to input various parameters and produces (a much simplified) model of the devastation from an asteroid, comet or even a planetoid.

"This program will estimate the seismic, blast wave, and thermal effects of an impact as well as the size of the crater produced by the impact. The crater size is determined using pi-scaling."

It doesn't model subsequent damage from tsunami's, politicians or "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" in giant baby walkers.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

This sounds like something straight out of "Singularity Sky."

Yahoo! News - Flower-Power Could Help Clear Land mines

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years.

UPDATE: Slashdot is linking the story now too.

Nanotechnology Art Gallery

This Nanotechnology Art Gallery is a collection of artists conceptions of everything from foglets to artificial red cells. I would love to have a horde of BarberBots.