-
“Fossil” Virus Resurrected from Human Genome
French researchers have resurrected the “Phoenix virus,” a “fossil” virus that lay dormant in the human genome. The retrovirus infected our ancestors millions of years ago, and is apparently still infectious in its new revivified form. The researchers showed that the newly crated virus could infect a variety of human cell lines and replicate. But…
-
Robots Staff Automated Restaurants
The Bytes restaurant in Canterbury, England is a sit-down restaurant where you order on touchscreen panels (games replace the menu when ordering is complete). Food preparation will be handled by the AIC-AI Cookingrobot–which is forecast to be ready for home use by next year–and food will be brought to the table by Hong Kong’s new…
-
The Next Best Thing to a Replicator
Gareth at STREETtech.com says: I love some of the insanely great things that people are doing with rapid prototyping technology. Here, members of the Swedish design group FRONT use motion capture tech to record the free-handed strokes of their furniture drawing and then a rapid prototyping machine fabs the pieces they’ve drawn in liquid plastic.…
-
The Rise of the Machines
News at Seven is a scary-smart automated news project from Northwestern University. It pulls news stories in from RSS feeds, finds related video and still images, and then composes a story that’s “read” by a video-game character from Half-Life. It even cuts away to a different reader narrating posts from blogs related to the day’s…
-
Isn’t This Pretty Much Why Rome Fell?
The article title is, “Eyelash transplants set to sweep nip tuck world.” “Longer, thicker lashes are an ubiquitous sign of beauty. Eyelash transplantation does for the eyes what breast augmentation does for the figure,” said Dr Alan Bauman, a leading proponent of eyelash transplants. Link
-
Complete Works of Darwin Online for Free
About half of Darwin’s works are now online, with the rest slated to be up by 2009. The material includes one of his Galapagos notebooks, stolen in the 1980’s, which has been reproduced from a microfiche copy made several years previously.Link
-
Romulan Careers in Science
A team of American and British researchers has made a Cloak of Invisibility. Well, OK, it’s not perfect. Yet. But it’s a start, and it did a pretty good job of hiding a copper cylinder.Scientists create cloak of invisibility
-
DNA Computer Masters Tic-Tac-Toe
A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the game tic-tac-toe.MAYA-II, developed by researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico in the US, uses a system of DNA logic gates to calculate its moves.Link (via BoingBoing)
-
Virtual Economies Attract Real-World Tax Attention
Gamers have long had to worry about virtual death in the form of being eaten by a grue. Now it looks like they may have to worry about virtual taxes. Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and…
-
Historic “All Sky” Map
This historic all-sky map is based on the first two years of data from NASA’s COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in November of 1989. The map shows minute temperature variations (red is hotter) imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation by structures in the early Universe. Link (via Neatorama)