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Futurology #127
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Cheap, pack flat, recyclable bike helmet: The Tatoo Helmet (pic), designed by Julien Bergignat and Patrice Mouille, is an easily stored, totally recyclable bike helmet.
'Tatoo' is derived from tatou, the French word for 'armadillo', and that's what the design evokes. Rather than a single carapace, it comprises several recyclable polypropylene strips which come into the helmet shape after the joints are clicked together, writes Fast Company.
[Comment: since I cycle in Auckland, I'd like some pack-flat, recyclable body armour too, please.]
Do you buy songs because they're listed as 'hits'? Maybe you do. Duncan Watts, the network-theory pioneer and a scientist at Yahoo and Columbia University – wanted to test the strength of self-fulfilling prophecies in pop culture.
So Watts devised a clever way to test a theory. He and his collaborator, and Salganik ran a deliciously devious experiment. They took the song ratings of one group and inverted them so bottom-ranked music was now at the top. Then they gave these rankings to a fresh set of listeners. In essence, they lied to the new group: They told them that songs that weren’t popular with previous listeners actually were.
The new listeners dutifully took their social cues from the bogus popularity rankings – they ranked the fake-high ones high, even downloading them, while snubbing the fake-low ones. Apparently, flat-out lying works – but only for a while. Wired has more detail on the experiments.
[Comment: advertising execs have known this for a long time.]
Full-colour night vision for drivers: Thanks to a little inspiration from the eyes of nocturnal insects, scientists have developed a digital image-processing algorithm that allows for the capture of full-coloor images at night by cars moving at speed, reports The New Scientist.
Currently, night vision only allows for monochromatic images using infrared light, which is invisible to our eyes.
[Comment: Will cars be able to see bug spray, though?]
Alligator breath is birdlike: New insights into the breathing habits of alligators may explain how the dinosaurs' ancestors thrived after a Permian-Triassic extinction that eradicated 70% of all land life and 96% of all sea life some 251 million years ago.
A University of Utah study published in Science discusses how the structure of alligators' lungs may have allowed the dinosaurs' archosaur ancestors to survive Earth's low oxygen environment after 'The Great Dying', a massive extinction which killed off most of the synapsids, reptilian precursors to the dinosaurs that eventually evolved into mammals. IO9 has more info.
[Comment: They might need those low-oxygen lungs again, soon.]
Ant species gets rid of males completely: a South American ant species has completely eliminated males from its population. Mycocepurus smithii, a fungus-gardening ant, reproduces without any males whatsoever, and has been doing it for millions of years.
Ant species gets rid of males completely: a South American ant species has completely eliminated males from its population. Mycocepurus smithii, a fungus-gardening ant, reproduces without any males whatsoever, and has been doing it for millions of years.
Technically these ants reproduce asexually, not through some kind of lesbian parthenogenesis. They are, however, one of the only known all-female animal species.
[Comment: Maybe fungus gardening was just too hard for the males, so they went off to the grasshopper's concert instead?]
Italians make human bones from wood: Italian scientists have come the closest yet to replicating human bone with a process that uses natural wood.
Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology for Ceramics in Faenza, Italy found that if they cut rattan wood into pieces, heat it, add carbon and calcium, add more heat and add a phosphate solution, the rattan pieces transform after 10 days into material strong and durable enough to function as an inexpensive bone substitute, posts Smart Planet..
[Comment: Gipetto would be so proud!]
Synthetic skin grafts could help deliver gene therapies: Patches made from artificial skin could help deliver gene therapies to patients with diabetes and cystic fibrosis without the need for injections, according to new research.
Jon Vogel and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, cultured the principal cells of skin and introduced a gene for atrial natriuretic peptide into them. It naturally occurs in heart cells and reduces blood pressure by dilating blood vessels and lowering blood volume. Mixing the cells in a gel matrix, Smart PLanet reports the cells formed layers that imitate those found in human skin.
[Comment: what about acne?]
Seven tech advances to make Minority Report a reality: In the book by Phip K Dick, upon which the Tom Cruise movie is based, the Justice Department’s elite Pre-Crime unit can, yes, flawlessly predict crimes before they occur. Smart Planet says the movie version "is a drool-inducing look at futuristic science fiction technology, from automated urban vehicles to displays that can be manipulated with a wave of a hand" and says that much of the “futuristic” technology shown in the film is already a reality.
[Comment: Predicting crime should be easy. Just keep people poor, disenfranchised from their societies, and ignorant.]
Surprise! Our way of life is not sustainable: Ditch the dog; throw away the takeaway menus; bin bottled water; get rid of that gas-guzzling car and forget flying to far-flung places. These are just some of the sacrifices we in the West will need to make if we are to survive climate change, says an article in The Independent.
The stark warning comes from the renowned Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based organisation regarded as the world's pre-eminent environmental think tank.
Its State of the World 2010 report published this week outlines a blueprint for changing our entire way of life. "Preventing the collapse of human civilisation requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism... and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability," states the report.
[Comment: Once again, hasn't this been obvious for a long time?]
