The Tablets of Our Dreams [Tablet]

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Computers in movies look nothing like the beasts we lug around today. They're thin and light, a single pane that jumps to life when touched. Technology follows Hollywood dreams; here's hoping this montage is a portent of what's coming soon.

The world will be shocked if Apple doesn't reveal a tablet computer next week. It won't be the first, not by any stretch, and it won't be the first multitouch device, naturally. But as we envision it, the tablet represents the fusion of two of the most steadfast dreams of sci-fi nerds and ordinary people alike.

This reel, compiled for Giz by Mike Byhoff and Frank Cozzarelli as a celebration of sci-fi's longstanding love affair with tablets and touch interfaces, is pretty self explanatory, but there are a few things to think about:

• The greatest literary device in sci-fi history, the actual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was, in fact, a tablet.

• Gene Roddenberry was—like some tech analysts these days—in favor of the tablet coming in large and small sizes.

• The Incredibles, created by Steve Jobs' Pixar, not only has the most Apple-like vision of a tablet, but shows it sliding out of a manila envelope, three years before Steve drew the slender MacBook Air out of the same.

• We're not sure what Bart Simpson is doing to that iMac either, but apparently "Mapple" beat Apple to the punch with touchscreen all-in-ones.

• It is physically impossible to craft a montage of sci-fi interfaces without showing Tom C. in Minority Report.

• You may say that the tablets of Moses weren't exactly interactive. Fine, believe what you will, but take our advice and stay the hell away from golden calves.

There are plenty more crazy touch computer sightings in TV and movies—if you can track any down, be sure to post them in comments.

Special thanks to Mike Byhoff and Frank Cozzarelli of Gawker TV for working overtime to pull this reel together. The catchy music—chosen for its sci-fi-friendliness, its nice buildup, and its utter lack of resemblance to 1990s techno—is "Lovely Allen" by Holy Fuck, which you can (and should) buy here at Amazon, or here on iTunes.


The Internet is now (officially) in space

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Here on Earth, we’ve grown used to having the Internet available almost anytime we want it.  As of December 2009, 74% of American adults use the internet.  60% of American adults use broadband connections at home.  55% of American adults connect wirelessly through laptops or handheld devices like smartphones.

So, what about Astronauts in space?  Do they have internet?

When I posted “The First *Human* Tweet from Space” back in May 2009, some rightly pointed out that this technically wasn’t a tweet from space.  At that time, @astro_mike wrote an email that was sync’d to the ground later in the day (email is sync’d twice a day from the space).  The email was sent to PAO and a ghost writer copied/typed the “tweet” word for word on @astro_mike’s twitter account.

Although this was a big step for NASA at the time, the agency took an even bigger step forward today when Astronauts on the International Space Station received a special software upgrade that provides personal access to the Internet. Although the internet service is still limited (no pictures or big files yet), it does allow for real time updating! TJ Creamer made the first use of the new system about eight hours ago with an update to his Twitter account (@Astro_Tj), inviting questions from those of us still stuck on Earth:

“Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s”

Here’s a little more information from the official NASA press release:

This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system will provide astronauts with direct private communications to enhance their quality of life during long-duration missions by helping to ease the isolation associated with life in a closed environment. During periods when the station is actively communicating with the ground using high-speed Ku-band communications, the crew will have remote access to the Internet via a ground computer. The crew will view the desktop of the ground computer using an onboard laptop and interact remotely with their keyboard touchpad.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m really looking forward to this new participatory era of human spaceflight.  The challenge for all of us is to think about how we can use social media everyday to create a direct, personal connection with people who don’t usually think about spaceflight and help them experience space travel as we see it!

IBM Sets Magnetic Tape Data Density Record: 35TB of Storage [Storage]

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IBM and Fujifilm have spent the last three years working to improve magnetic tape data density, and the result is a prototype with a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch—enough to hold 35TB of data.

That's about 39 times the areal data density of today's best products and 44 times the capacity of today's IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. Plus, tape has cost advantage over flash and HDD, which makes it an attractive option for businesses that need to store large amounts of data. UPDATE: A video discussing the achievement has been made available. [PR Newswire Image via IBM Flickr]


Anthony Atala on growing new organs [TED]

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Anthony Atala's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs -- from muscles to blood vessels to bladders and more. At TEDMED, Atala shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that "prints" human tissue.

Boogie Board Tablet Runs On A Watch Battery, Costs Less Than Paper [Tablets]

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If you thought a boogie board was a salt-water vessel that lets you skim the waves, think again. Improv Electronics' Boogie Board is a pressure-sensitive tablet that uses a watch battery for power. It's like a digital blackboard!

The Reflex LCD doesn't need any power to keep the scribbles and drawings on the screen, with the watch battery only being put into use when the screen is erased. The watch battery will last for 50,000 erases, which makes the $29.97 board cost 15 times less for each erase than a normal sheet of paper. It's ideal for kids, or perhaps artists who care about the long-term saving associated with the Boogie Board. [Improv Electronics via CrunchGear]


Bing Adds Food Recipe Search to Make You Drool [Food]

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I'm liking Bing more and more every day. Not only it looks and feels better than Google, but its specialized searches are great. Like the new food recipe search. Check out the nice results, and the useful criteria bar.

As a long-time amateur chef, I see myself using this on a daily basis. If I weren't so lazy and there weren't so many great restaurants and bars around me, that is. But since I'm getting married next week, maybe it's time to start organizing food at home again.


Canon 7D Loaded With $6 DIY Follow Focus [Mods]

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In film and video, if you want to rack focus, a "follow focus" makes the job a lot easier. Attaching to the focus ring, a follow focus can be as simple as a stick or as complicated as a gearbox.

Ultimately, the purpose is always the same: Make it as quick and simple as possible to rotate that focus ring from one spot to another. And make the job one-handed.

But while follow focus is basically a standard in motion film and video cameras, it's nonexistent in the modern day, video-wielding dSLR world. So one flickr member made his own follow focus with a $6 steel hose clamp from Home Depot. Padded with a rubber band, it clamps right around the focus ring. And hey, it works great!

Look for the official, $200 versions from Nikon and Canon some time in the future, I'm sure. Unlike the Home Depot version, they will be powder coated black. [flickr]


Fabric Dipped In Carbon Nanotubes Could Be Turned Into Wearable Batteries [Science]

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Wouldn't it be great if we could recycle all those old clothes lying in the back of our wardrobes, turning them into flexible batteries? By dipping fabric into an ink comprised of carbon nanotubes, their electrical properties are transferred over.

It's being worked on by some Stanford University scientists, and follows their efforts in turning paper electrical. Because of the nature of fabric, it's still flexible and can even be washed in water without affecting the carbon nanotubes residing in the fibers.

At its present state, it can't do much, but the Stanford University bods will be working on it some more to actually turn it into a functioning battery, or even solar panel apparel. If they can make a hoodie that charges your smartphone as you're in the sun, that'd solve a lot of problems. [BBC]


Brainless Slime Mold Builds a Replica Tokyo Subway | 80beats

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SlimeMoldWhen scientists talk up learning about transportation networks from nature, it’s often ants that get the praise for being so much more organized and efficient than we humans with our silly gridlock. But a team of Japanese researchers found, for a new study in Science, that you don’t even need a brain to be to a traffic genius. Single-celled slime molds, they found, can build networks as complex as the Tokyo subway system.

The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients [Science News]. To test how efficient the mold could be, Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s team duplicated the layout of the area around Tokyo: They placed the slime mold in the position of the city, and dispersed bits of oat around the “map” in the locations of 36 surrounding towns.

The mold explored slowly at first, but like any good transportation engineer it began to figure out traffic patterns. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear [ScienceNOW Daily News]. When the mold got its system settled, researchers say, it looked rather similar to the actual Tokyo subway system, as you can see in the illustration.

The scientists didn’t just marvel at the slime mold’s mapped-out network; they also tried to capture its technique in math, Wolfgang Marwan added in an accompanying piece in Science. Marwan called the mathematical model “beautifully useful.” He added that: “It quantitatively mimics phenomena that can be neither captured nor quantified by verbal description alone” [Scientific American]. But will slime mold subways start to show us how we ought to be building our transport systems or other networks? Perhaps not so fast, says Portland State University’s Melanie Mitchell. “This paper uses only one relatively simple example,” she cautions. “It’s not obvious that similar experiments would work as well for matching other transport networks” [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Related Content:
Discoblog: Ant Intelligence Could Help Us Steer Clear of Traffic Jams
DISCOVER: Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence
DISCOVER: The Truth About Traffic

Image: Science/AAAS


The Growing Reality of Aquaculture | The Intersection

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aquacultureThis is the second in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Here in Southern California, we’re enduring an extended period of heavy rains and high winds, or as Floridians would call it, “July.” People from harsher climates may laugh at our predicament, but the truth is that San Diego and its residents are ill-equipped to deal with rain. Streets flood almost immediately because drainage is almost non-existent. Traffic slows to the kind of crawl I experienced during white-out blizzards while growing up in Maine.

Most San Diegans know not to swim in the ocean during and after a storm. The rain washes an assortment of chemicals, fertilizers, oil, and garbage straight down the hills and into the sea. How would you feel knowing the fish you ate for dinner came from a farm that similarly inundated the surrounding waters with bacteria? The discharge of waste is just one of many controversial issues concerning aquaculture, our most recent class topic here at Scripps.

Globally, aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production system, increasing by 8.8% per year since 1985, according to a 2007 report by the FAO. Aquaculture already accounts for around one-third of global fish production and may soon rival wild-caught fisheries as our primary source for fish. A shift to reliance on farmed fish could also lessen the burden on over-exploited wild stocks. It’s difficult to talk about aquaculture without mentioning the growing human population: simply put, we’re going to need more protein to feed an estimated 9.2 billion people by 2050. Proponents of aquaculture call it a possible solution to our potential food crisis.

Unfortunately, aquaculture is not the silver bullet that will magically save us from overfishing and global food shortages. Unless the farms are a closed system, effluent from fish pens will pollute the surrounding waters. Escapees can transmit diseases to wild stocks—they become parasite-bearing fish on the lamb, terrorizing the innocent locals. Plus, we need to catch millions of tons of wild fish, like the Peruvian anchoveta, to grind into fish meal to feed the farmed fish. It’s like hunting seagulls off the coast of Africa and using the gull meat to feed chickens on a farm in Arkansas. Despite these problems, we’re going to have to find ways to lessen the environmental impact of aquaculture as the industry continues to grow.

It was pointed out in class that a variety of U.S. government agencies regulate aquaculture, depending on where you are and why you’re doing it. A good start to better management of aquaculture in our country would be to streamline the regulatory power to a single agency. Then we can shift our focus to the rest of the world: to China, to India, to Chile, and every other country hoping to feed its people with farmed fish.


ISS Astronauts Get Ultimate Wireless Network, Send First Tweet From Space [Space]

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ISS Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer has sent the first tweet from space. Did he use his pointy nipple antennas to transmit data back to Earth? No. According to NASA, he used the "ultimate wireless connection", which actually is quite clever.

The new network is called Crew Support LAN, a software update that allows astronauts to personally use the internet as they will use it from their own home. This can only happen during times in which the ISS is transmitting data to the ground stations at high speed, using Ku-Band communications. However, it's not as simple as firing up Firefox from space.

The astronauts get into a remote desktop program on their laptops to control a desktop computer on the ground. So, while the computer on the ground access the internet openly, but the ISS's astronauts don't really "touch" the internet with their laptops. A simple, but very smart way to avoid security problems on board the space station.

This connection is purely for personal use, as the crew already has e-mail, IP telephone, and videoconferencing. According to NASA, the personal use "will be subject to the same computer use guidelines as government employees on Earth." So no porn or torrent for the space dudes. [NASA]


How to Replace a Lost Cellphone Charger (For Free) [Cellphones]

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From an AskReddit member: "Go to a hotel and say you think you lost it there. It's the #1 most left behind item at hotels, so most places have a big bin filled with every phone charger imaginable. [Reddit] UPDATE

UPDATE: I just received this note from a reader on the subject:

"I work for the second largest conference hotel in my city. You have no idea the size box we have of chargers left behind. 90 percent are idiot blackberry chargers. This works 100% of the time, we never verify that anyone stays here we just let them go shopping for there charger. Hell we even will give people a charger if they call down to the front desk and say they forgot theirs!"

Nice!


Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike? | 80beats

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NEXT>

1-world

In the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, nervous citizens can be forgiven for wondering where the next Big One will hit. Major quakes strike with alarming regularity: Earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater occur approximately 18 times a year worldwide. They usually originate near faults where tectonic plates —tremendous fragments of the earth’s crust—collide or push above or below each other.

Geologists suspect that Haiti’s destructive quake resulted from 250 years of seismic stress that has been building up between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. In fact, a group of U.S. geologists presented a study in the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti) in 2008 saying that the region was at risk of an earthquake potentially even bigger than last week’s magnitude 7.0 quake. Part of their presentation is particularly chilling in light of what would happen less than two years later: “This means that the level of built-up stress and energy in the earth could one day be released resulting in an earthquake measuring 7.2 or more on the Richter Scale. This would be an event of catastrophic proportions in a city [Port-au-Prince] with loose building codes, and an abundance of shanty-towns built in ravines and other undesirable locations.”

Earthquakes are still impossible to predict with precision; in the words of one of the geologists who predicted the Haiti quake, “It could have been the next day, it could have been 10 years, it could have been 100… This is not an exact science.” But researchers have identified a handful of seismic zones around the globe that are storing up especial amounts of stress and are particularly hazardous. Browse through the gallery for a world tour of the planet’s most seismically vulnerable regions.

By Aline Reynolds

Image: USGS


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Heating Fatty Acids in Tanks

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We receive Rice bran fatty acids transported in oil tankers.The melting point of the fatty acid is around 45c. Presently coil connected to live steam at 40psig using hoses is used (pushed in the tanker from top manhole)

We have many times failures in hoses ,also the time taken for heating

Lawsuit Claims Jenny Craig’s Diet Isn’t Backed by “Serious Lab Geeks” | Discoblog

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You’ve seen this ad before.

Weight loss program Jenny Craig’s spokeswoman, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is hanging out in a gleaming white “lab,” surrounded by guys in thick-framed glasses and lab coats. She gleefully announces that people on the Jenny diet lost two times as much weight as those who were on the other big diet program (read: Weight Watchers). She also claims that the results were an outcome of a “major clinical trial run by serious lab geeks.”

Now, Weight Watchers has lashed back, dragging Jenny to court–alleging that the ad campaign makes “deceptive claims” about its success rate.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to AdWeek, and it said in part:

“The trials cited by Jenny Craig (available on its Web site) are, in fact, two separate studies, conducted 10 years apart for entirely different purposes than comparing the efficacy of the Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers weight-loss programs … The Jenny Craig ‘trials’ do not relate to WW’s current offerings.”

So a New York court has now granted Weight Watchers International a temporary restraining order and has prohibited Jenny Craig from using these comparative claims of superiority in its current ads.

In the ad, Bertinelli cheerfully declares, “I love science.” We might suggest she say instead, “I love putting a patina of scientific authority on whatever flimsy claim our marketing people are peddling today.”

Related Content:
Discoblog: Fast Food Joints Lie About Calories (Denny’s, We’re Looking at You)
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?
80beats: Diet and Exercise in a Pill: Experimental Anti-Obesity Drug Could “Trick” the Body
80beats: A Victory for the Atkin’s Diet? Not so Fast.

Video: Jenny Craig