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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.…
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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
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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
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Dammit, Where Are the Flying Cars?
Two pieces on MSNBC today explore predictions about the future that never quite got off the ground. Some predictions about the future remain forever etched in history: Lord Kelvin’s 1895 declaration that “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” or Digital Equipment Corp. head Ken Olson’s 1977 statement that “There is no reason anyone would want a…
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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)
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We’ve Got Lots of Company
As our ability to detect smaller extrasolar planets gets better, we’re finding that our galaxy “teems” with Earthlike planets. The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a trove of fast-moving “candidate” planets in a narrow region near the very center of the Milky Way, and astronomers say there must be billions more of them — including…
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Scientists Teleport “Large” Molecule
Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.“It is one step further…
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Well, That Makes Me Feel Much Better
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are going to attempt to make mini Big Bangs. “These beams will have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier slammed into the size of a zero on a 20p piece,” Brian Cox of Manchester University told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement…
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Mars Rover Opportunity Reaches Rim of Victoria Crater
It was never supposed to get this far, so this is a big deal. The rover beamed black-and-white images back to Earth showing the crater interior complete with hanging rocky cliffs and rippling sand dunes on its floor. Link
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Books In Spaaace
NASA scientist David McKay suggests that the Moon might be a good place for a massive storehouse of digital information, sort of a (less-flammable) Lunar Library of Alexandria. McKay says the lunar library could be stored on computers buried in the ground, placed inside craters, or located in hollow lava tubes. The benefits of lunar…