The Army’s goal is to come up with a uniform by 2008 with helmet that enhances hearing and protect ears from battle cacaphony and heads-up display built into the visor to display infrared images. A wheeled robot “mule” would follow a soldier around with equipment for purifying water and recharging batteries.
The Army warfighter of 2025 will have lightweight body armor made with nanomaterials to deflect a bullet with… read more
Xerox researchers are developing an experimental polymer that can be used to make organic transistors on a plastic substrate and could be easier to manufacture at lower cost.
Immobots (immobile robots), a new breed of cost-effective intelligent machines, are beginning to crop up in situations where autonomy is important, such as distant space probes, copiers, and cars.
Using “model-based programming,” these systems “have a commonsense model of the physics of their internal components and can reason from that model to determine what is wrong and to know how to act,” said Brian Williams, a professor at MIT’s… read more
China’s transformation is trickling even into the poor interior, dragging all 1.3 billion people into the world economy. When historians look back on our time, I think they’ll focus on the resurgence of China after 500 years of weakness — and the way America was oblivious as this happened. For most of human history, China was the world’s largest economy and most advanced civilization. Then it stagnated after about 1450,… read more
Solaris, a movie adapted from the brilliant scifi novel by Stanislaw Lem and set on a space station, features shape-shifting reality, a mysterious planet that reads minds, and replicants, but lapses into slow-paced, soporific gloom.
Reviews:
New York Times
Slashdot
Salon
Chicago Sun-Times
Worldwide semiconductor sales increased to $12.52 billion in October, a 1.8 percent jump from September and a 20 percent rise from 2001.
Major segments: chips for personal computers and wireless devices, flash memory and digital signal processors.
Cloning enthusiast Severino Antinori claims the first cloned human will be born in January. The scientific community is skeptical and many researchers warn that a human clone would carry a high risk of death and deformity.
However, Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, the leading private company in human therapeutic cloning, said, “All those stories about cloned animals being abnormal is just silliness.”
There has been what one researcher calls “tremendously rapid progress” in quantum computing in the last year. A device for overcoming quantum “decoherence” has been developed at the University of New South Wales, using two phosphorus atoms precisely embedded in a silicon crystal.
Other researchers at Innsbruck University in Austria have achieved a quantum computation using a single trapped calcium ion, the first calculation made on a system proven… read more
The reliability and strength of internet connections can be assessed by converting the latency of a series of pulses into musical sounds, according to Chris Chafe, a cellist and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University in California.
University of Oklahoma researchers have found a way to store 1024 bits of information in 19 hydrogen atoms in a single liquid-crystal molecule. The data are stored in the interactions of the protons’ magnetic moments, activated by firing an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies (each with amplitude modulation on or off) at the molecule.
Researcher Bing Fung hopes the “molecular photography” technique could one day be used… read more
That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn’t feel like we knocked into information. But that’s the idea many physicists are formulating. The new science of digitalism says that the universe itself is the ultimate computer — actually the only computer. Weaving together… read more
Physicist Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara has developed a way to connect relativity with quantum theory – while making sure that cause still precedes effect. The unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum theory to explain the nature of space and time is probably the single greatest challenge of modern physics. Kalamara’s work suggests networks that do not live in space and are not made of matter. Rather their very architecture gives… read more
Proposed stem cell experiments would involve creating a human-mouse hybrid to test different lines of human embryonic stem cells for their quality and potential usefulness in treating specific diseases.
Any animals born from the experiment would be chimeras — organisms that are mixtures of two kinds of cells, such as a mouse with a brain made entirely of human cells or a mouse that generated human sperm. However, Dr.… read more
The controversial Italian doctor Severino Antinori has announced that the first human baby clone will be born in January 2003. Speaking at a news conference in Rome on Tuesday, the researcher said three women he has treated are now carrying foetus clones in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Later on Wednesday, a company in the US claimed it too had women that were pregnant with baby clones – one of… read more
Scientists say they have genetically modified rice to withstand drought, salt water and cold temperatures by borrowing a gene from the E. coli bacteria. They hope the new stress-tolerant rice will help farmers in poor countries grow more food under the worst conditions. The research team added to the rice a gene for trehalose, a sugar that helps plants withstand stress.