Category Archives: Science and technology ramifications

Soon, decayed tooth may repair itself – The Times of India

British scientists have discovered a technique which can make a decayed tooth repair itself. The technique, developed at King’s College, London, effectively reverses decay by using electrical currents to boost the tooth’s natural repair process. Soon, decayed tooth may repair … Continue reading

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Swarm and Fuzzy | Newsweek

When the first human colonists land on Mars several decades from now, their habitat will already be waiting. They may not even have to don a space suit, instead simply walking down the gangplank in their civvies into a warm, … Continue reading

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Transistors that wrap around tissues and morph with them | KurzweilAI

Electronic devices that become soft when implanted inside the body and can deploy to grip 3-D objects, such as large tissues, nerves and blood vessels have been created by researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and the University … Continue reading

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Butterfly Wings Inspire Better Sensors

Imitating nature is not a new idea. When the GE team put Morpho wings under a powerful microscope, they saw a layer of tiny scales just tens of micrometers across. In turn, each of the scales had arrays of ridges … Continue reading

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Artificial intelligence ‘will take the place of humans within five years’ – Telegraph

Mr Aksenov, now 21 years old, founded technology company London Brand Management in 2011. The company provides an AI service for big brands who want to outsource customer or staff interactions to computers. Customers send questions in to LBM’s system … Continue reading

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Multiverse Controversy Heats Up – Scientific American

The multiverse is one of the most divisive topics in physics, and it just became more so. The major announcement last week of evidence for primordial ripples in spacetime has bolstered a cosmological theory called inflation, and with it, some … Continue reading

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The Dream of Intelligent Robot Friends – Carla Diana – The Atlantic

Karotz is an Internet-enabled console in the shape of an abstracted rabbit. One sits on my coffee table, continuously connected to WiFi, programmed to broadcast certain bits of live information such as Twitter messages, news headlines or weather reports by … Continue reading

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A World without Scarcity?

An intellectual property lawyer considers the philosophical and legal consequences of a world where anything can be printed and copied. …new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical goods and even services what the Internet has already done … Continue reading

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What Would Plato Tweet? – NYTimes.com

…For the past few years I’d been obsessed with trying to figure out what lay behind the spectacular achievements that had occurred there. In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, … Continue reading

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The Future of Brain Implants – WSJ.com

What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, … Continue reading

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The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Your Cherished Beliefs – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Anyone with a basic grasp of biology knows that all animals have immune systems that battle pathogens—be they viruses, bacteria, parasites, or fungi—on the cellular level. And it’s also fairly well understood that animals sometimes exhibit outward behaviors that serve … Continue reading

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The Youngest Technorati – NYTimes.com

Ryan [Orbuch]… is among the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged by tech … Continue reading

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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine

An interview with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner… In most places in the world, you live your social life and your ordinary life in the lab. You don’t know anybody else. Sometimes you don’t even know other people in the same … Continue reading

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1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR

A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation. The survey of 2,200 people in the … Continue reading

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Tiny technology creates a buzz | News @ CSIRO

What if I told you that insects in the environment may be able to tell us about the world they live in? Imagine it; they could reveal changes in climate, the presence of dangerous gases or even the arrival of … Continue reading

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Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram : Nature News & Comment

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in … Continue reading

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▶ Is Futurama the Best Argument Against Transhumanism? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube

▶ Is Futurama the Best Argument Against Transhumanism? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube.

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▶ Are Memes & Internet Culture Creating a Singularity? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube

 

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Supporting Good Teaching

It’s a 50-year-old physics textbook that runs to 1,500 pages and whose contents were declared a failure by its famous author. It is also, according to various online reviews “spellbinding” and “an extraordinary book written by an extraordinary man”. One … Continue reading

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Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference … Continue reading

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Udacity, Coursera: Should celebrities teach MOOCs?

Free online courses do big numbers these days. So-called MOOCs, or massive open online courses, typically get tens of thousands of sign-ups to watch video lectures delivered by tweedy academics, some more photogenic than others. But imagine how many students … Continue reading

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Science’s rightful place is in service of society | Dan Sarewitz

Science policy must concentrate less on how much money is spent, and more on how to translate investments into public good via Science’s rightful place is in service of society : Nature News & Comment.

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A Wizard of Oz Moment for the Web: Pull back the Curtains

Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency. Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers … Continue reading

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How Higgs owes his Nobel to an editor and a biologist | Science News

In his talk, describing the events that led to the prediction of his boson, he provided an enlightening case study about how science really works. As with so many good ideas in science, Higgs had trouble getting his paper published. … Continue reading

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Metrics 2.0: who will be the ‘Google of altmetrics’?

An interesting summary of presentations on altmetrics, including a set of interesting questions: BMJ Group blogs: BMJ Web Development Blog » Blog Archive » Metrics 2.0: who will be the ‘Google of altmetrics’?.

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