The home of Mac info for New Zealanders, mac-nz serves daily Mac, iPhone and related news from the world of Apple Inc.
Futurology
Monday, 23 November 2009
Flooded Times Square: After the sea levels rise, airships, rowboats, and gondola lifts with replace New York's subways and taxi cabs. The Aqualta series by Studio Lindfors imagines New York 40 years into the future, when the city's once-crowded streets have filled with quiet waters (that's a detail of one of the images).
The series imagines how New York and Tokyo would be transformed by rising sea levels, and how residents might adapt to life in their watery cities, says IO9.
[Comment: what about when the sodden buildings collapse?]
Worms carry Earth's intergalactic flag: Space Shuttle Atlantis took to the skies this week, carrying thousands of microscopic worms to be used in muscle-degeneration research. The worms are British, from Britain's University of Nottingham, where biologists hope to use their tiny lab subjects to gain insight into the ways that muscles develop and atrophy. Though the worm-testing will take place in zero gravity, it has applications here on the homeworld: people who are bedridden, or who have muscular dystrophy or diabetes, are among those who stand to benefit from this week's research.
[Comment: Come on you worms! Do they get little space suits?]
Haydron Collider goes into action: Discover has a blow-by-blow account of today's tests on the Large Hadron Collider, the massive physics experiment that will eventually recreate the conditions during the Big Bang. Everything worked perfectly. Particle collisions will follow.
Algae and light helps crippled mice walk: In 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse had a fiber-optic cable threaded through its skull and the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.
Optogenetics has proved that light is far more precise than current neural implants. Wired has the full story.
[Comment: in the early ’90s it was discovered light influenced cells directly, leading to development of this field of research.]
Evolution witnessed – birth of new species: On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.
The split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song. This miniature evolutionary saga is described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports Wired.
[Comment: this was thanks to efforts of Rosemary and Peter Grant, who have spent much of the last 36 years studying a group of bird species known collectively as Darwin’s finches.]
The split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song. This miniature evolutionary saga is described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reports Wired.
[Comment: this was thanks to efforts of Rosemary and Peter Grant, who have spent much of the last 36 years studying a group of bird species known collectively as Darwin’s finches.]
Penguins speed up their evolution to cope with warming: A study of DNA from ancient and modern Adélie penguins suggests that scientists may have miscalculated the rates at which genetic clocks tick off evolutionary time.
A team of researchers has been collecting mitochondrial DNA from penguins currently living in rookeries in Antarctica and from bones of penguins that had lived in the same spot as long as 44,000 years ago, reports Wired.
Analysis of the DNA reveals the penguins are evolving on a molecular scale two to six times faster than standard calculations indicated, the team reports in the November Trends in Genetics.
[Comment: In a few generations they'll be lounging on the beach in Brazil, featherless and with built-in sunglasses]
[Comment: In a few generations they'll be lounging on the beach in Brazil, featherless and with built-in sunglasses]
Civvy supercomputer blows away the pros: A retooled Jaguar supercomputer blew away the competition on the latest list of the 500 fastest computers in the world, clocking an incredible 1.759 petaflops – that's 1759 trillion calculations per second.
[Comment: US$2 million well spent ...]
The Cyborgs are almost upon us: Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed ultra slim and flexible electronic circuits on silk that dissolve once implanted inside the body ... leaving the electronics behind to do their thing.
Until now, implanting electronics into tissue required the circuitry be encased to protect it from shorting out from moisture or irritating the tissue. Using nanometre-thin silicon etched onto silk means that circuits can work fine inside a body without any irritation. The Independent collates further evidence that our cyborg future is almost upon us.
[Comment: The London newspaper got the story in turn from the NZ Herald's Pat Pilcher of Wellington]
[Comment: The London newspaper got the story in turn from the NZ Herald's Pat Pilcher of Wellington]
Intel's brain implants to turn TVs on: Chipmaker Intel is spending lots of money on developing brain implants to help people send text messages with their minds. They are also predicting these implants will be the main way you turn on the TV in 10 years.
Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains – IO9 has that story.
[Comment: I already have this great way of turning the TV on. I stand up, cross the room, and press the button, burning about 12 calories. Seems to work fine ...]
[Comment: I already have this great way of turning the TV on. I stand up, cross the room, and press the button, burning about 12 calories. Seems to work fine ...]
Scientists build massive brain as smarts as ... a cat: Scientists have built the biggest artificial brain of all time using a supercomputer powered by 147,456 processors, 150,000 gigabytes of memory and millions of watts of electricity. And it's about as smart as a house cat.
Scientists at IBM’s Almaden research center created the brain simulation, which is said to run at one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain, to make advances in neuroscience and computer processing, writes SmartPlanet.
[Comment: God forbid if it's as smart as my particularly stupid – if lovable – cat!]
Scientists at IBM’s Almaden research center created the brain simulation, which is said to run at one-eighty-third the speed of a human brain, to make advances in neuroscience and computer processing, writes SmartPlanet.
[Comment: God forbid if it's as smart as my particularly stupid – if lovable – cat!]
Gone Fishing – on Jupiter: New evidence has come to light that the vast, ice-encrusted oceans of Europa, a Jupiter moon (pictured left, reproduced from the IO9 posting that carries this report), may be harbouring Earth-like life that lives on the oxygen-rich waters. The oceans of Europa are fed with more than 100 times more oxygen than previous models suggested.
[Comment: It's hard enough organising a fishing trip on Earth]
