Researchers at the University of California at Irvine will use an 528 gigaflops (peak) IBM supercomputer to predict the impact of global warming on the Earth up to 300 years into the future.
The Earth System Modeling Facility will enable researchers to simulate how pressures on the planet’s climate — from pollutants and chemicals to the melting of the polar ice and global warming — will affect future changes.
Given the pace of virus development, we are probably going to see even nastier criminal attacks in the future.
Some academics have predicted the rise of “cryptoviruses” — malware that invades your computer and encrypts all your files, making them unreadable. “The only way to get the data back will be to pay a ransom,” says Stuart Schechter, a doctoral candidate in computer security at Harvard.
Antivirus companies… read more
Scientists have created a new kind of mouse by replacing the genetic material in the mitochondria of one species with that from another in a gene-swapping exercise necessary if doctors are to understand several currently untreatable human diseases.
Mitochondrial medicine — how specific mitochondrial mutations and deficiencies lead to disease — deals with trouble with the cell’s powerhouse, the mitochondrion, which affects many diseases that become more common as… read more
Researchers have identified areas of the brain where what we’re actually doing (reality) and what we think we’re doing (illusion, or perception) are processed.
They created a virtual reality video game to trick monkeys into thinking that they were tracing ellipses with their hands, though they actually were moving their hands in a circle.
The research shows how the mind creates its sense of order in the world… read more
The computational worldview — that the universe itself is governed by the laws of computation and is, in fact, a computer — is the death of the notion that technology is applied science.
If both the physical universe and the biological world are best understood in terms of information and computation, it no longer makes sense to think that technology results from an application of science. Indeed, if computation… read more
A “cool helmet” and a corkscrew device that removes clots in blood vessels are among radical new technologies for stroke treatment.
Some people think modern astronomy’s convoluted theory of “dark matter” and “dark energy” is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy’s theory of epicycles. If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.
According to a paper just published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, irregularities in the cosmic microwave background may have been misinterpreted. They may have been… read more
Cybersecurity experts say an increasing number of private or putatively secret documents are online in out-of-the-way corners of computers all over the globe, leaving the government, individuals, and companies vulnerable to security penetration by “Googledorks,” who troll the Internet for confidential information.
The article’s reference to a file that avoids search-engine indexing is erroneous. “robots.txt” is the correct file name. – Ed
“The BBC saw fit to fuel the fires of fear over nanotech in last night’s Horizon. While the web content is quite moderate, the prevailing image of nanotech the program presented was a swarm of CGI grey goo flying like a whirling dervish over a blasted desert (an image straight out of Michael Crichton’s Prey, interspersed with time-lapse shots of reproducing cells and decaying animals as the commentary spoke of… read more
Eating seafood that contains mercury can affect the brain development of children in their adolescence, according to a study of people in the Faroe Islands.
The study contradicts the opinion of researchers who think these compounds are toxic only to babies as they develop in the womb, and that older children are unlikely to suffer developmental problems from the poison.
The group previously found that the children, when… read more
We can avoid the risks of molecular nanotechnology by building “self-regulating assembly” and “disassembly” into nanotechnology from the start, says Douglas Mulhall, author of “Our Molecular Future.”
Self-regulating assembly means built-in controls that limit replication rates of molecular assemblers. Ddisassembly (such as building in biodegradability) ensures that assemblers won’t be fundamentally defective from environmental and military security viewpoints.
Researchers at Harvard University have made a nanotube double quantum dot by gating a carbon nanotube in a number of places. The strength of the tunnel coupling between the dots was tunable, which means the device could have applications in quantum computing.
The total global demand for nanoscale materials, tools, and devices was estimated at $7.6 billion in 2003 and is expected to grow at an average annual growth rate (AAGR) of 30.6% to reach $28.7 billion in 2008, according to a report from from Business Communications Company: Nanotechnology: A Realistic Market Evaluation.
The nanotechnology market is believed to be growing more than twice as fast as either the… read more
Scientists from the University of Copenhagen claim to have made the first electronic hybrid nanotube-semiconductor devices. They encapsulated single-walled carbon nanotubes in epitaxially grown semiconductor structures.
The development opens up possibilities for designing hybrid nanotube/semiconductor devices, where nanotubes act as interconnects in traditional semiconductor integrated circuits or as active devices.
The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence, including just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.
LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project… read more