Now on ScienceBlogs: Will Quantum Fusion Save the Day?
Remember that animation of an inflatable flying windmill? Here's the real thing:...
Friday Fun: How much of a Klouchebag are you? Klout is kind of evil. Basically, it's the impact factor for the Web, where this random company uses a mysterious algorithm to quantify and rank people's standing on social media -- Twitter, Facebook, etc. There's been some interesting commentary about...
Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets...
Helium-filled, high-altitude wind turbine prototype unveiled An American company, Altaeros Energies, recently launched a prototype helium-shelled wind turbine that can be used at high altitudes. While the test run took place at 350ft above ground, the ultimate goal is a height of 1,000ft. Tethers send the converted power back to the...
Are you an IT Professional? Your help is needed. This is the second of two surveys designed to assess Relative Importance of various things in your profession. This survey is for anyone who works in IT, regardless if they are in higher ed, industry, government, etc. The more folks who respond to the survey,...
Without Linux, Life as we Know It would be IMPOSSIBLE Here is why, how, and who:...
Neal Stephenson is a very, very important person, according to him. Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre's ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a "pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist," and...
Why does Google hate Linux? Picasa sucked. Make no mistake about it. Whether on Linux or Windows, Picassa took the worst of all the different photo management software and combined it into a single app that I would never recommend anyone install. Except one thing; Picasa was good at enhancing...
Ideas for development: Playlists on LoveFilm / Netflix So here's a modest proposal for film rental / streaming companies like LoveFilm and Netflix: why don't you have shareable playlists like Spotify? You see, I was reading Time Out's 100 Best Horror Films and I thought, there must be...
To fly like a bird (continued) As fun as it was to think about developing wings to fly like a bird, physics always wins. In case you haven't yet figured it out, the prior video was of course a fake, albeit a really entertaining fake. That...
To fly like a bird... Most birds fly. To aid flight, avian bones are hollow, reducing their mass. In addition, bird wings and feathers are optimally designed for flight. So why can't large birds or mammals fly? One of the problems is that they are...
The Bigger Pink Slime Problem for Business In a matter of weeks, activists have been able to assassinate a popular product through a confluence of events: an...
I want my Gordie, ... er ... Google Glasses! Not really. Do people who design social networking systems really think we LIKE push notifications???????? Seriously? By the way, I'm working at a place these days that seems to produce a correct and incorrect (and inexplicably so) result on Google Maps at about a...
Laptop Has Replaced Umpteen Specialised Devices Junior does pretty much what I did as an adolescent in the 80s, but using different tech - all in one box.
The Hubble Treasure Hunt Many of the Hubble Space Telescope images have never been looked at. You can now browse the archives and win valuable prizes for finding cool new pics....
Weekend Diversion: Here comes the Robot Apocalypse! "You will be able to program a robot to follow a track on the ground and manipulate a hand. You can also write little programs that will give the robots goals." -Bill Budge Ever since the very first robots were...
Attempt at Human Bird-Like Flight John Childs is the very first person to fly in America. He did it in 1757, on September 13th, from the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston. This is the same church from which Sarah Palin hung some lanterns to direct Michel Bachmann...
Skin Crawling Ring Tones Chester Bennington from Linkin Park performing at Sonisphere Festival in Kirjurinluoto, Pori, Finland. {Kallerna} Ring tones that are felt, not heard, could be on their way....
Neutrinos and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence "To use Newton's words, our efforts up till this moment have but turned over a pebble or shell here and there on the beach, with only a forlorn hope that under one of them was the gem we were seeking....
Unity Brings a Lot of Windows Features to Linux It slows my system way down, it breaks my desktop, it makes the browser work very poorly, and it requires me to force the computer to shut down and reboot now and then. It also appears to boot quickly but it is mostly faking it....
Snookered by a Daisey Chain Recently, I posted a blog about disturbing reports on iPhone manufacturing in China. Turns out that I was snookered by a Daisey Chain. Let me explain....
Chrome Trumps Internet Explorer; Microsoft Hegemony Ends On Sunday, Google Chrome surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer in browser market share. I would now like to welcome our new Internety Overlords! (Please don't hurt me.) source...
Another Week of GW News, March 18, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup...
This Week in the Journal of Previously Solved Problems Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals: Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a...
The Costs and Benefits of Bad Ads and What You Can Do About It The problem: You are reading your favorite blog and there is an ad along the top banner or on a sidebar that seems to conflict with the contents of the blog you are reading, perhaps even disturbingly so. Why does this happen and what can...
“I call it Internet Exploder. Like Unikraken, I only use it to download better browsers.” JasonTD on Windows Users: Do Not Press Just Any Key!
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ERV 11.26.2011
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006