CIA’s spy tools make Maxwell Smart’s look like toys
May 28, 2004
The CIA’s future information analysis technologies will make Google look like a toy. In-Q-Tel’s investments provide a glimpse of what they might do.
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MOVIE REVIEW — ‘THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW’
May 28, 2004
Smart hero. Dumb officials. Huge sheet of ice. The Day After Tomorrow,” a two-hour $125 million disaster movie opening nationwide on Friday, proposes an apocalypse that covers the Northern Hemisphere in a sheet of ice and snow.
Some environmental groups are using the release of “The Day After Tomorrow” to raise awareness of global warming but agree that the conditions could take hundreds of years to develop.
Looking back into the future
May 28, 2004
Tales of Future Past is a collection, with commentary, of early magazine covers and other speculative illustrations — portraying life on distant planets and in the distant future…like the 1970s.
Thirty years with computers
May 28, 2004
“According to Moore’s Law, computer power doubles every 18 months, meaning that computers will be a million times more powerful by 2034,” estimates computer useability expert Jakob Nielsen.
“According to Nielsen’s Law of Internet bandwidth, connectivity to the home grows by 50 percent per year; by 2034, we’ll have 200,000 times more bandwidth.
“That same year, I’ll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a… read more
Search engines try to find their sound
May 28, 2004
Consumers armed with broadband connections at home are driving new demand for multimedia content and setting off a new wave of technology development among search engine companies eager to extend their empires from the static world of text to the dynamic realm of video and audio.
StreamSage has developed speech recognition technology to transcribe audio and video content and contextual analysis to understand the language and parse the themes… read more
Researchers zero in on a cause of aging
May 27, 2004
Taking a major step toward identifying one cause of aging, researchers have shortened the life of mice and created signs of old age by injecting a small genetic defect in the mice’s mitochondria, the tiny power plants within each cell.
The New ‘Molecular Economy’
May 26, 2004
A new “molecular economy” is on its way, while the information economy hasn’t completely matured. As the information economy comes of age, a surprising thing is happening: Information systems are starting to take their cues from biological ones. Information is converging with biology, and business is following suit.
(Excerpts from IT’S ALIVE: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business by by Christopher Meyer & Stan Davis.)
The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide.
The calculation is based on the calculations that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. So one might assume that the diameter of the universe is 27.4 billion light-years wide. But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, bringing the estimated diameter to 156 billion light-years.
Malformed Proteins Found in Sheep Muscle
May 24, 2004
Prions have been found in sheep muscle, scientists announced Saturday — the first time they have been discovered in animal flesh that many humans normally eat.
The animals were infected with scrapie, a prion disease that is not the same as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Scientists believe that mutated scrapie prions may have caused the British epidemic of mad cow disease of the 1980′s, but no case of scrapie transmitted… read more
Deep-brain stimulators (“pacemakers for the brain”) are at the forefront of research by neuroscientists seeking to treat a variety of difficult conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and other types of tremors and movement disorders.
Conditions may eventually include depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome.
The devices inhibit syncronized nerve impulses in parts of the brain that are too active.
In the Era of Cheap DVD’s, Anyone Can Be a Producer
May 21, 2004
Independent filmmakers, specialty magazine publishers, artists, educators — all those with a video to sell, no matter how narrow the niche –are turning out DVD’s and distributing them through the mail.
It’s a trend that began in the era of videotape but has accelerated with DVD’s because they are inexpensive to duplicate and ship.
Semantic Web Ready for Phase Two
May 21, 2004
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Semantic Web is ready for a new phase of development that will lead to the creation of new tools, languages and applications, Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C’s director, said.
He predicted a future where enterprises would adopt the Semantic Web and be startled by the dramatic way in which data can be collected and formatted in order to help humans and machines interact with… read more
Tonsil tests suggest thousands harbour vCJD
May 21, 2004
Almost 4000 Britons aged between 10 and 30 may be harboring the prion proteins that cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human form of mad cow disease.
The estimate is speculative since it’s based on extrapolation from only three infected tonsil or appendix samples.
BioCDs could allow for rapid disease tests
May 20, 2004
While-you-wait medical tests that screen patients for thousands of disease markers by detecting proteins could be possible with “BioCDs” –compact-disc technology patented by a team of Purdue University scientists led by physicist David D. Nolte.
CDs ordinarily store digital information as billions of tiny “pits” in their surface. The test transforms these into miniature test tubes that can hold a trace quantity of a chemical that reacts to a… read more
Nanobacteria revelations provoke new controversy
May 20, 2004
Mayo Clinic researchers have found evidence for the existence of controversial “nanobacteria” — a possible new life form. The research suggested that the organisms are self-replicating in culture and could be identified with an antibody and DNA stain.
Some scientists say nanobacteria are responsible for a wide range of diseases, including calcification of the arteries.
Others say they are simply too small (50 to 500 nm) to be… read more