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Ender’s Game?
Animal Controlled Computer Games, a graduation project by Wim van Eck, is a Pac-Man-style game in which humans can play against real insects.The article goes on to ask, “Is it possible to replace code with creatures?” Now that’d be an AI I’d like to see….Link
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Russia Studies Space-Elevator Clusters For Moon
Russia has entered the space tether slingshot race – a ‘space railway’ that will reduce the cost of boosting payloads to the Moon.Link
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Mars Still Has Water?
Recent photographs seem to suggest that water could have been present on the surface of Mars as little as five years ago. The discovery resulted from images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor which first recorded gullies and trenches that could have been made by fast-flowing water coursing down cliffs and crater walls. Scientists in…
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“Elevate Me!”
This ladybug is trying to fly, but she’s trapped by the ultrasound field in which she has been levitated: After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to…
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Nations Sign Pact to Make Fusion Reactor
The United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Japan and South Korea have signed a pact to harness the fusion process that powers the sun to make clean, safe and limitless energy.Link
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New Scientist’s 50-Year Forecast
As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, New Scientist published brief comments by more than 70 scientists about what the next 50 years may hold. A few clips from longer essays: The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life.— Freeman Dyson Within 50 years, lives will be significantly…
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Milky Way Shaped Life On Earth
Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2400 million years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. Harvests of bacteria in the sea soared and crashed in a succession of booms and busts, with an instability not seen before or since. According to new results published by Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the…
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HOWTO: View the Transit of Mercury on November 8
The Exploratorium has instructions for building a projector to view the transit of Mercury across the Sun, an event that occurs only 12 times a century. Link (via BoingBoing)
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“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…
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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…