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.

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.

“Our only chance of long term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space,” Stephen Hawking said in an interview Friday with Big Think. “We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.”

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.

“I see great dangers for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully. But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space.

“If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.  But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.  That is why I’m in favor of manned, or should I say ‘personed,’ space flight.”

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.

“In podcast episode 87, we’re joined by Kephra from Occult Digital Mobilization to discuss the free dissemination of esoteric texts on the web.

Kephra explains that Occult Digital Mobilization,or DigiMob, is a collective of individuals virtually gathered together to compile and facilitate the distribution of occult and esoteric texts. He tells how it works, including the intention and mission of the group, the submission process for the quarterly digests, the volume of content, and the technology which allows decentralized distribution, specifically BitTorrent.”

Listen to the podcast at Occult of Personality
Visit the Occult Digital Mobilization site

A team led by Stefan Heller of Stanford University set out to elucidate basic principles of how the inner ear detects sound. But they also created batches of cells that can potentially replace damaged ones in the ear.

Heller’s team treated cells taken from mouse embryos with various signaling molecules that coaxed them into becoming cells that looked and functioned like normal hair cells. The team used a scanning electron microscope, which forms high-resolution images by bombarding items with electrons. The images revealed that cells of varying height linked together and formed bundles. When the bundles were mechanically stimulated with a slender piece of glass, the cells generated electrical currents that resemble those produced by young hair cells.

A variety of studies by numerous investigators are demonstrating that gold nanoparticles have real promise as anticancer agents. When irradiated with light, gold nanoparticles become hot quickly, hot enough to generate explosive microbubbles that will kill nearby cancer cells, a physical process known as the photothermal effect.

Hsien-Rong Tseng and his colleagues reported their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Dr. Tseng is a member of the Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.

Archinode studio makes a very interesting suggestion concerning the use of 3D printers and industrial-scale recycling:

New York City is disposing of 38,000 tons of waste per day. Most of this discarded material ended up in Fresh Kills landfill before it closed. The Rapid Re(f)use project supposes an extended New York reconstituted from its own landfill material. Our concept remakes the city by utilizing the trash at Fresh Kills. With our method, we can remake seven entirely new Manhattan islands at full scale. Automated robot 3d printers are modified to process trash and complete this task within decades. These robots are based on existing techniques commonly found in industrial waste compaction devices. Instead of machines that crush objects into cubes, these devices have jaws that make simple shape grammars for assembly. Different materials serve specified purposes; plastic for fenestration, organic compounds for temporary scaffolds, metals for primary structures, and etc. Eventually, the future city makes no distinction between waste and supply.

Thanks to Brainsturbator for bringing this article to our attention.

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college.

…

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

…

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

…

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

…

The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Thanks to Klintron of Technoccult for bringing this article to our attention.

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Sauber Considering Name Change « The F1Fanatics Blog

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Webcuts Music » Interviews » Singing The Pop Aesthetic With The …

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Shlok Vaidya's Thinking » The Dropout Economy

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl

A memristor is a device that, like a resistor, opposes the passage of current. But memristors also have a memory. The resistance of a memristor at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behaviour can be used to recall past voltages.

Now memristors are being used in a US military-funded project trying to make brain-like computers, says Wei Lu, who led the team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that demonstrated the new behaviour

…

Memristors lend themselves to the task because the way that their resistance gives a glimpse of an earlier voltage is analogous to the way that a synapse’s electrical behaviour is dependent on its past activity.

Lu and colleagues have now provided the first demonstration that the analogy stands up. What’s more, their memristors were built with materials already used in the manufacture of computer chips.

Lu’s team used a mixture of silicon and silver to join two metal electrodes where they cross. The junction mimics a particular behaviour of synapses that allows neurons to learn new firing patterns, and is believed to allow memories to be stored.

In the brain the timing of electrical signals in two neurons affects the ease with which later messages can jump across the synapse between them. If the pair fire in close succession, the synapse becomes more likely to pass subsequent messages between the two.

Read more at New Scientist

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Neurdon » Robotics and memristors

• Generated by LinkCurl

“Eventually, the day will come when life on Earth ends. Whether that’s tomorrow or five billion years from now, whether by nuclear war, climate change, or the Sun burning up its fuel, the last living cell on Earth will one day wither and die. But that doesn’t mean that all is lost. What if we had the chance to sow the seeds of terrestrial life throughout the universe, to settle young planets within developing solar systems many light-years away, and thus give our long evolutionary line the chance to continue indefinitely?

According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation.

…

Mautner says that “directed panspermia” missions can be accomplished with present technology.

“We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life,” Mautner explained “Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose.”

…

the strategy is to deposit an array of primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets and protoplanets throughout the universe. Like the earliest life on Earth, organisms such as cyanobacteria could seed other planets, digest toxic gases (such as ammonia and carbon dioxide on early Earth) and release products such as oxygen which promote the evolution of more complex species. To increase their chances of success, the microbial payloads should contain a variety of organisms with various environmental tolerances, and hardy multicellular organisms such as rotifer eggs to jumpstart higher evolution. These organisms may be captured into asteroids and comets in the newly forming solar systems and transported from there by impacts to planets as their host environments develop.”

Read more at PhysOrg

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Panspermia – space exploration for the very small?

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl

• Generated by LinkCurl

Building a space elevator would require anchoring a cable on the ground near Earth’s equator and deploying the other end thousands of kilometres into space. The centrifugal force due to Earth’s spin would keep the cable taut so that a robot could climb it and release payloads into orbit.

Though building a space elevator might require an initial investment of billions of dollars, proponents say once constructed, it would make for cheaper trips into space than is possible using rockets. But huge technological hurdles must first be overcome, including how to supply power to the robotic climber.
…

Now, a robotic climber has made a prize-winning ascent worth $900,000, making it the first to win money in the competition

…

Ted Semon, a volunteer with the Spaceward Foundation, a non-profit that organised the competition, and author of the Space Elevator Blog, says the feat shows space elevators are one step closer to getting off the ground. “We’ve done a lot here to demonstrate that this technology is possible,” he told New Scientist. “This is just enormously exciting.”

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl

Electrical signals from different parts of the same cell have been simultaneously recorded for the first time, thanks to a new technique for attaching nanowire probes. This could aid the study of how heart, muscle and brain cells function and communicate.

The method uses a device called a nanowire field effect transistor (NWFET). This consists of a silicon wire just 20 nanometres in diameter attached to metal electrodes on a substrate of silicon dioxide. The nanowire, which sticks out by 30 to 40 nanometres, can be used as a probe to amplify the electrical signals produced by anything it touches.
….
They grow heart cells taken from chicken embryos on transparent polymer substrates and then transfer the cells to the nanowire array. Each cell is then positioned over up to 10 nanowires with the aid of a microscope. “We can do measurements that weren’t possible before,” says Lieber.

Besides making simultaneous measurements from different parts of the same cell, the wires can record the signals produced by several cells in the same tissue culture at the same time.

Modern wetware is a less disappointing field to look at all the time.

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl