Phase III - Stealth Is.

A new “tea bag” uses nano-fibers to suck contaminants and bacteria out of water, providing a desperately-needed, cheap solution for the billions of people without clean drinking water.Researchers at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University made the device from the same material used for the bags of the country’s popular rooibos tea. Inside the sachets are two tiny destroyers of all things unsafe: ultra-thin nanoscale fibers, which filter harmful contaminants, and bacteria-killing grains of carbon.

To use the device, a person simply has to place the bag in the neck of a water bottle, and the bag cleans the water as he or she drinks. A single bag can filter up to a liter of even the most heavily polluted water. The bags are thrown away once used.

Without Ruth Drown, it is likely that American radionics would have ended with Abrams, a novelty from the dawn of our electrical age. Her efforts helped to push Abrams’s discipline into the realm of the vitalistic, seeking out the connective tissue between the ancient Hermetic sciences and the new science of Radionics.

It was in 1923, the year before Abrams death, that Drown, then head of the Southern California Edison Company’s mechanical addressing department, was first introduced to the radionic theories that would so impact the rest of her life. She attended a lecture on the use of radio energies in disease treatment, presented by a Dr. Frederick F. Strong, and was so moved that she immediately sought to work for him, resigning her high-paying job with Edison to take on a post as a part-time office assistant. This, in turn, led to her employment by Dr. Thomas McAllister, under whose encouragement Drown briefly studied osteopathy, before she eventually became licensed as a Doctor of Chiropractic.

First as a student and then as a doctor, Drown extensively experimented with the radionics that Strong’s lecture had introduced to her, but found problems in the theories as they had been expressed. Influenced partly by a long interest in metaphysics and Kabbalism, she came to believe that, while Abrams had touched on an underlying truth, electricity proved too coarse to be truly useful in effective diagnosis and treatment— there had to be some more subtle force at work. Further, the means of detection had to be refined to reduce the kinds of errors that had plagued Dr. X, allowing the practitioner to lock on to a very specific, individual frequency.

The answer, she speculated, might be found by studying radio technology. In her own words: “When placed on a blotter, the blood is crystallized, even as ice is crystalized steam, and each small atom is the precipitated crystallized end of an invisible line which reaches out to the ethers. This invisible line passes through the body over the nerves and through the blood vessels and the electrons from the air, water and earth supply the body structure, attaching themselves to that line, which holds the pattern of the body.”

With this understanding of life forces as a basis, it made sense to “cut the cord” between the Electronic Reactions of Abrams and a new, more overtly vitalistic radionics, replacing “ohms” with “rates”, electronic responses with human vibration radiation. Likewise, the reagent medium once used to feel out the diagnosis, too imprecise and open to interferences, could be replaced with the simpler, more sensitive radio-like mechanism of the Homo-Vibra Ray.

An excellent overview of the early history of Radionics care of the Kook Science Resistance. Thanks for your noble efforts in research, guys!

Reto Meier, an “Android Developer Advocate for Google,” recently laid out a forecast of where computer (or at least mobile) interfaces are headed:

Five years from now: first widely available flexible displays and built in HD projectors

10 years from now: transparent LCD patches that can be applied to regular glasses, and full virtual keyboards and voice input eliminate physical keyboards entirely.

20 years from now: contact lenses that project a visual feed directly onto your retina, and we’ll interface with computers through mind control.

The article goes onto explain how most of these technologies already exist and/or are being developed.

“According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates,” theoretical physicist Michio Kaku tells NPR’s Guy Raz. Kaku is a frequent guest on the Science and Discovery channels. “When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that’s when all the fireworks start.”

This is where quantum entanglement — sometimes described as “teleportation” — begins. “An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”

This process happens even faster than the speed of light, physicists say.

Quantum entanglement isn’t a new idea — Einstein once famously referred to it as “spooky action at a distance” — but it wasn’t until the past 30 years that scientists were first able to observe this process.

It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy. Scientists aren’t quite ready to beam up Scotty yet, but this is the technology that one day may lead to such a feat.

Mirrors and lenses direct lasers at atoms to catalyze entanglement.

The work is being pioneered at places like the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. In a basement lab, scientist Christopher Monroe has successfully managed to “entangle” two atoms approximately one meter away from each other.

“It’s fun being on the fringe,” Monroe says. “This discipline, we don’t know where it’s going. And that drives me every day.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a contract for up to $34.5 million to The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to manage the development and testing of the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system on human subjects, using a brain-controlled interface.

APL scientists and engineers developed the underlying technology under DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program, an ambitious four-year effort to create a prosthetic arm that would by far eclipse the World War II era hook-and-cable device used by most amputees. The program has already produced two complex prototypes, each advancing the art of upper-arm prosthetics.

The final design — the MPL — offers  22 degrees of motion, including independent movement of each finger, in a package that weighs about nine pounds (the weight of a natural limb). Providing nearly as much dexterity as a natural limb, the MPL is capable of unprecedented mechanical agility and is designed to respond to a user’s thoughts.

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The team will develop implantable micro-arrays used to record brain signals and stimulate the brain. They will also conduct experiments and clinical trials to demonstrate the ability to use implantable neural interfaces safely and effectively to control a prosthesis, and optimize arm control and sensory feedback algorithms that enable dexterous manipulation through the use of a neuro-prosthetic limb.

Take frozen cells from a dead animal, reprogram them to become sperm and eggs, then use these to bring endangered species back from the brink.

That’s the aim of a collaboration between the San Diego zoo and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. At the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco last week, Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun and Jeanne Loring of Scripps described how they have created induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from the frozen skin cells of a deceased male drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus), an endangered monkey found in Nigeria, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.

The team’s long-term goal is to coax iPS cells into becoming sperm and eggs. They will be making iPS cells from tissue held by San Diego zoo’s Frozen Zoo project - which has samples from some 8400 individuals representing more than 800 species. The sperm and eggs could be used in IVF treatments to add genetic diversity to captive breeding programmes. “You could actually breed from animals that are dead,” says Loring.

“An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building.

The D-shape printer can create a building four times faster than it could be built by conventional means, and reduces the cost to half or less. There is little waste, which is better for the environment, and it can easily “print” curved structures that are difficult and expensive to build by other means. Dini is proving the technology by creating a nine cubic meter pavilion for a roundabout in the town of Pontedera.

The printer can be moved along horizontal beams and four vertical columns, and the printer head is raised by only 5-10 mm for each new layer. The printer is driven by a computer running CAD software and prints at a resolution of 25 dpi (dots per inch). The completed material resembles marble, is stronger than concrete, and does not need iron reinforcing. The printing process can successfully create internal curves, partitions, ducting, and hollow columns

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Dini will carry out trials in a vacuum chamber at Alta Space’s facility in Pisa to ensure the process is possible in a low-atmosphere environment such as the moon.

The ‘Living Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time.

When it comes to global crises, we’re not short of complex systems that look close to the edge: the climate, the food supply, energy security, the banking system and so on. Add to this the threat of war in many parts of the world and the possibility of global pandemics and it’s a wonder that anybody gets out of bed in the morning.

Science has certainly played an important role in understanding aspects of these systems but could it do more?

Today, Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich outlines an ambitious project to go further, much further.

Helbing’s idea is to create a kind of Manahattan project to study, understand and tackle these techno-socio-economic-environmental issues. His plan is to gather data about the planet in unheard of detail, use it to simulate the behaviour of entire economies and then to predict and prevent crises from emerging.

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Imagine a similar model that uses in real time things like financial transactions, health records, travel details, carbon dioxide emissions and so on to build a model of not just the planet but the entire society that populates it. Helbing calls it ‘reality mining’.

This model will be capable not only modelling the planet in real time but of simulating the future, rather in the manner of weather forecasters.

Helbing’s simulator will look for economic bubbles and collapses, warn of global pandemics and suggest how to tackle them, it will model and predict the outcome of regional conflicts and determine the effect of our behaviour on the climate. He even wants to create ’situation rooms’ in which global leaders can view and manage crises as they occur.

This Google-Earth-on-steroids is to be called the Living Earth Simulator and Helbing’s plan is to have it working by 2022 at a cost of a cool EUR 1 billion, funded by the European Commission. He’s even assembled an impressive team to help, including partners from most of the top universities in Europe.

If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

The construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. if no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

Thanks to John Harrigan of Foolish People for pointing this interesting article out.

and from Borderland Sciences on Tumblr:

Break out the fluorescent light bulbs and dust off your Tesla coils: July 10th is Nikola Tesla Day, marking the birth of that greatest of inventors and visionaries. Here’s to you, Mr. Tesla.

By emulating nature’s design principles, a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has created nanodevices made of DNA that self-assemble and can be programmed to move and change shape on demand. In contrast to existing nanotechnologies, these programmable nanodevices are highly suitable for medical applications because DNA is both biocompatible and biodegradable.

Built at the scale of one billionth of a meter, each device is made of a circular, single-stranded DNA molecule that, once it has been mixed together with many short pieces of complementary DNA, self-assembles into a predetermined 3D structure. Double helices fold up into larger, rigid linear struts that connect by intervening single-stranded DNA. These single strands of DNA pull the struts up into a 3D form—much like tethers pull tent poles up to form a tent. The structure’s strength and stability result from the way it distributes and balances the counteracting forces of tension and compression.

This architectural principle—known as tensegrity—has been the focus of artists and architects for many years, but it also exists throughout nature. In the human body, for example, bones serve as compression struts, with muscles, tendons and ligaments acting as tension bearers that enable us to stand up against gravity. The same principle governs how cells control their shape at the microscale.

“This new self-assembly based nanofabrication technology could lead to nanoscale medical devices and drug delivery systems, such as virus mimics that introduce drugs directly into diseased cells,” said co-investigator and Wyss Institute director Don Ingber. A nanodevice that can spring open in response to a chemical or mechanical signal could ensure that drugs not only arrive at the intended target but are also released when and where desired.

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“These little Swiss Army knives can help us make all kinds of things that could be useful for advanced drug delivery and regenerative medicine,” said lead investigator William Shih, Wyss core faculty member and associate professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at HMS and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “We also have a handy biological DNA Xerox machine that nature evolved for us,” making these devices easy to manufacture.

See also Trevor James Constable’s “Cosmic Pulse of Life”