I've learned two important things today: I can turn my iPhone into a tiny slot machine, and "appcessory" is a word now. Jackpot Slots—which is both an iPhone app and a dock—just made someone's tech-savvy grandma very happy. More »
Watch the Navy shooting down an airplane over the Pacific ocean using the new LaWS (Laser Weapon System) guided by Raytheon's Phalanx Close-In Weapon sensors. Welcome to the future, where we all die in the hands of angry laser-firing bots. More »
"The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce that Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne has joined the Federation as an Associate Member. With 3,100 employees across Florida, California, Alabama, and Mississippi, including more than 1,800 employees in Southern California, the company is a leading provider of propulsion and power systems for space flight."
In the wake of reports that HP is bagging its Android tablet comes word that the company has filed to trademark the name "Palmpad." Which to me sounds like a great that rumored webOS tablet, no? More »
NASA Names New Director for Lunar Science Institute
"Yvonne Pendleton has been named director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) headquartered at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. Pendleton has served as the NASA Ames deputy associate center director, chief of the Space Science and Astrobiology Division and as a research astrophysicist for 31 years, including nearly two years at NASA headquarters."
A new renewable energy report is good news for Australia!  Now we need this goal in the United States and the political support and will to do it. Why let other countries get ahead of us on renewable energy? (I know it’s too late, but we can still catch up if Congress would get its act together). Especially in the wake of the still on-going Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, renewable energy should be a topic even more supported in the U.S. now than ever before.
The /Zero Carbon Australia/ (ZCA) report is the culmination of 12 months of pro bono work by engineers, scientists and postgraduate university students, performing the research that no Australian government has been prepared to undertake. The result is a truly innovative collaboration the likes of which has never been seen before in Australia. It is a true failure of leadership that our elected representatives have not developed a comprehensive transition plan for the energy sector even though it is at the heart of climate change mitigation efforts. Instead it has been left to a group of concerned citizens to pick up the slack.
Is it possible for Australia to power its homes, office buildings, and factories without adversely affecting our climate? The answer is yes.
The ZCA plan presents a carefully considered analysis of the energy technologies, industrial capacity, and investment required to repower Australia. The report shows that Australia can replace fossil-fuel baseload electricity using commercially available renewable energy technology, with the additional investment required equal to about one cup of coffee per person per day over the ten year transition. Our researchers have found that a 60/40 mix of concentrated solar thermal power and large-scale wind developments combined with an upgraded grid and comprehensive energy efficiency measures can reliably supply Australia’s electricity needs.
Concentrated solar thermal power is the crucial renewable energy technology that will help Australia transition. Power stations are really glorified kettles. You need an energy source to boil water, so the steam can turn a turbine. Coal-fired power stations do this by burning coal. Nuclear power stations use nuclear fission. Solar thermal power stations concentrate the sun’s rays and store this energy as heat, to be used for boiling water day or night. Torresol Energy’s Gemasolar plant under construction in Spain will deliver power 24 hours a day with the same baseload production characteristics as a conventional coal plant. Next time you hear someone say that the sun doesn’t shine at night, tell them it doesn’t matter.
Full report available here. To download the full Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan click HERE (8.4MB). You can also download a 16-page synopsis HERE.
I am doing a comparative study of backward inclined and backward curved centrifugal fans for the extraction of electrolysis pot gases.
my system has a BI fan of 650mmH2O total pressure. I want to increase to 775mmH2O.
Can a BC fan do this job at the same motor power?
For the past couple of months, the iPhone game that Giz editors have been constantly playing against each other has been Words with Friends. I am now trying to switch everyone over to Carcassonne. More »
From Wired:
In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus's brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 12 inches away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-sp
I gave a talk at the President’s Forum at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in May about how I go about telling stories about science. The folks at ASM have done some slick video editing and posted the lecture at their site, where you can also download it in various formats. Or just watch it in the embedded player below. In my lecture, I talk about getting out of bunkers and jumping chasms, as well as the trouble parasites can get you into on a blind date.
MWV39 – Carl Zimmer: Newspapers, Blogs, and Other Vectors: Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New Media from microbeworld on Vimeo.
30,000 years ago a Neanderthal woman died in what would become Croatia’s Vindija cave. Five years ago, 454 Life Sciences and the Max Planck Institute started working together on the tedious and time-consuming task of piecing her fossilized DNA back together. Just over a month ago, they succeeded and, in the process, revealed that most of us are between 1% and 4% Neanderthal. To crudely paraphrase the ever artful Carl Zimmer, knowing where Neanderthals fit into the evolution of Homo sapiens is essential to understanding the development of the human mind.
Knowing where Neanderthals fit, however, also creates a problem. What do we do if what makes humans “human” isn’t from a “human” at all? How do we justify “human rights” in light of evidence that our rational and moral minds are in no small part the result of prehistoric crossbreeding? In short: if human rights are based on being human, what rights would a cloned Neanderthal have?
The problem is, of course, that we don’t have a cloned Neanderthal. Which is why we need to make one.
The argument may seem absurd and offensive at first. Both Zach Zorich, writing for Archaeology, and Andrew Mossman, writing for fellow Discover blog 80beats, explore the idea and come down on the side of “it’d be nice science for science’s sake, but way too unethical to do.” Summarizing Zorich, Moseman says:
As the bioethicist Bernard Rollin points out in the Archaeology piece, there’s more to worry about than the law. While Neanderthals are our close relatives on the evolutionary tree, you’d know one if you saw one. Tulane anthropologist Trenton Holliday argues that they could talk and act like us, therefore eventually they’d fit in. But that seems like wishful thinking. With no culture, no peers, and an unknown capacity to cope with the modern world mentally or physically, a Neanderthal would be adrift—caught between a zoo animal and a human being. The main point in cloning one would be for scientists to study it, but as law professor Lori Andrews says, a Neanderthal could be granted enough legal protection to make doing extensive research on it illegal, not just unethical.
That’s not to say there would be no benefits to science. But some things are best left in the past.
Not so. We have tried, and will continue to try, to resurrect extinct species in the past, such as the Spanish ibex. Why should the Neanderthal be any different? If we assume the ability to clone safely – for a moment setting aside the current, significant flaws with the process – we can focus on the ethics of bringing a Neanderthal into the world without a familiar culture or peers. Maybe the Neanderthal would have trouble adapting, picking up language, and adjusting to a modern existence. Or maybe not. We don’t know, and there’s the rub.
Unlike examples found in science fiction, be it Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the more recent sci-horror flick Splice, it’s not as if our only options are to send the neo-Neanderthal into the world on its own or to trap it in a laboratory where it would be poked and prodded to death. The moral of both of those works is that when one fails to take responsibility for one’s creation, when one fails to nurture and protect that new being, that is when an ethical code is breached and damage is done. We don’t know how a Neanderthal would exist in our world, but we know we are capable of studying chimps and apes outside of their natural habitat without causing them harm or reducing their quality of life flagrantly. We also know that we are surrounded by those who are only partially mentally developed, be they children or the mentally disabled, whom we love and care for without question. The very purpose of cloning a Neanderthal would be to see where it fits in our mental development. Attentive and accurate nurture and care would be central to any scientific effort to study Neanderthal development and mental growth. Allowing the clone to be neglected would upend the very purpose of cloning her in the first place.
To assert that the Neanderthal is between human and animal and is therefore an impossible fit for our world simply not true. The line between human and animal is blurred. Dolphins, whales, chimps, great apes, and other species are already changing the way we think about intelligence and rights; perhaps a Neanderthal, fully developed but so mentally different as to be incompatible with our way of living is the very example our society needs to change our perception of intelligent non-humans. When the technology is safe and the ability to nurture and care for her in place, we owe it to humanity as a whole to clone a Neanderthal and see what wonders she might teach us about ourselves.
My 50" LG plasma TV (about 4 years old now) has recently begun showing what I can only describe as 'digital noise' at the top of the screen. It shows up as a field of blue pixels in a randomly shaped band about 1 1/2" thick across the top and sometimes only in the corners, of the viewing area. It on
I did an interview with my old friend Chris Mooney for Point of Inquiry, and it’s now live. We talk about the end of the Earth, punching Buzz Aldrin, Hollywood science, and other topics astronomical and hysterical. Enjoy!
I am trying to figure out what impact on my demand charge there may be after we install a 2.6 MW solar farm? Any help please.
A Microsoft patent shows off a new dual-mode Xbox 360 controller that can be used both wired and wirelessly. Unlike the current play and charge kit, this controller would give you the accuracy of a true wired mode when plugged in. More »
In the future, when humans are extinct and watermelons evolve into sentient beings capable of mastering fusion energy and interstellar travel, someone will find the Marugoto Tamachan—a portable watermelon cooler—and they will be as puzzled as we are. More »
If you used Google to search for the word "Vatican" this weekend, you probably were surprised that the first result was not "vatican.va" but a pedophile site called "pedofilo.com." Well, maybe you weren't that surprised, unlike Google. More »
How do I cancel incoming high technology modulated incoming signals up to and using bandwidths to the microwave, millimeter wave, and light spectrum. A good background in physics, microwave and surveillance systems, and engineering would be required.
Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce that Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne has joined the Federation as an Associate Member. With 3,100 employees across Florida, California, Alabama, and Mississippi, including more than 1,800 employees in Southern California, the company is a leading provider of propulsion and power systems for space flight.
James G. Maser, President of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, stated, “Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is excited to be a part of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Joining the Commercial Spaceflight Federation will enable us to better collaborate with industry to serve both NASA’s new technology and exploration programs and the expanding commercial space market.”
Maser continued, “We believe our proven expertise in rocket engine development, human-rating requirements and propulsion system verification will help contribute to the growth of commercial spaceflight. Since our beginnings in the late 1940s, our company has been at the forefront of the commercial spaceflight industry with a number of private engine developments for commercial launch vehicles, and we are excited to participate in the further growth of this vital sector.”
Maser added, “Clearly, we support the continuation of the U.S. human spaceflight program, as well as fostering a safe, more cost-effective and commercial approach for crew to Low Earth Orbit. Participation with CSF demonstrates our determination to maintain the country’s aerospace technology base with proven commercial capabilities to transport crew to Low Earth Orbit while NASA moves on a course for exploration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit. We are especially pleased to see NASA’s desire to make new investments in liquid propulsion and fundamental propulsion research.”
Mark Sirangelo, Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, commented, “On behalf of the member companies of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, we are proud to welcome Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is respected throughout the industry for its high-performance propulsion systems and the company will be a strong asset to the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. We’re excited to have them onboard.”
Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, added, “It’s very gratifying to see the aerospace industry continue to unite behind a common goal of expanding the commercial space economy. The payoff will be thousands of new high-tech jobs, enhanced access to space for civil, military, and commercial customers, and exciting a new generation of young people to embark on science and technology careers. We are pleased to welcome the entire Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne team.”
About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202-349-1121.
About Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a part of Pratt & Whitney, is a preferred provider of high-value propulsion, power, energy and innovative system solutions used in a wide variety of government and commercial applications, including the main engines for the space shuttle, Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, missile defense systems and advanced hypersonic engines. For more information on Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, please visit http://www.prattwhitneyrocketdyne.com or contact Bryan Kidder at 818-586-2213.
Hey, you with the PC! Instead of sitting there sulking because iPad-as-second-monitor app Air Display is Mac-only, you might want to give MaxiVista a shot. It's the PC equivalent, it works wirelessly, and for now it's your best/only option. More »
