Category: Biotechnology
The internet is making your brain better and creating a new master race of geeks
Good at filtering information but only have pretend friends you’ve never met in real life? That’s good! That means you have evolved. You are better than other people. You are the next level of mankind.
That is according to neuroscientist Gary Small, who reckons that our brains are already changing and evolving thanks to modern technology. 24/7 access to facts, trivia about Star Trek, text messages and weather forecasts is making People 2.0 better at filtering out rubbish data from useful fact, making us all much better at instantly deciding what to keep/remember and what to bin/forget…
Scientists invent brain-wiping tool for use on feeble mouse brains
If you’ve just been caught doing something by a mouse, science has come up with a useful way to get you off the hook – it can now erase the memories of mice.
This would also mean you could tell a mouse a joke, erase its memory, then tell it the joke again. A mouse could also watch “Total Recall” and be amazed, then erase its own memory of ever having watched “Total Recall” and be amazed by it all over again. Plus you could buy your mouse the same present for Christmas every year and it would never know. The real-world applications for this technology are boundless…
Robot Plant Pot seeks out the brighter side of life
This is a “Solar seeking botanical augmentation”, to quote the Play Coalition, who are building the thing. It’s basically a plantpot on legs which has a light sensor and moves around your room in order to find the best, brightest spot…
Philips working on microbubble technology for more targeted cancer treatment
Philips is currently researching into a less invasive procedure for treating patients with cancer and other conditions, using drug-loaded microbubbles.
These bubbles are about the same size as red blood cells, and can be injected into a patient’s bloodstream and then tracked via ultrasound imaging.
Drugs would only be released once they reached the required place – a tumour growth, for example. Not only might this increase the effectiveness of the drug, but cut down on unpleasant side-effects…
Midori-san – the world's highest-profile blogging houseplant
A company called KAYAC has developed a kind of “botanical interface” that allows plants to speak and emote with us little humans. And, as is any sentient life form’s right, the plant has now started up a blog to air its inner angst.
Midori, as the plant is known in the Japanese blog-o-sphere, has an auto-generated blog which can be found here. It’s in Japanese, so won’t make much sense, but should you have an understanding of the squiggly language you’ll be able to read Midori’s feelings…
Humans hit evolutionary limit – here's how SCIENCE should intervene and make man BETTER
According to some scientist, humans have stopped evolving. This means we’re not going to get any better – at least not naturally.
So I propose science steps in to make us better, seeing as Mother Nature can’t be bothered any more. Here’s how. These are the evolutionary steps scientists need to introduce to our gene pool ASAP.
1. SIDE EYES
Seeing as our ears are always in use listening to MP3s of 1980s cover versions, it’s hard to hear cars, bicycles and lorries coming toward you. I therefore suggest moving our eyes to the sides of our heads, like horses, so we’re less likely to step out in front of buses because we can’t hear them coming. You never hear about horses never get run over because they’re too busy listening to the new Oasis album to listen out for cars, do you?
2. WIDER EAR CANALS
Dunno about you, but my ear holes are never big enough to accommodate all these so-called “in ear” earphones. You know, the ones you’re supposed to ram right in. I ram them in so hard it hurts and my brain pops, yet they still fall out after three minutes when the cable snags on my shirt. I therefore suggest we evolve wider ear holes for better audio clarity and comfort “on the go”…
Sony working on "Annihilation Assisted Upconversion" – bendable OLED screens
OLED development race winner Sony has announced its plans to start making OLEDs less than 1mm thick – that are flexible enough to be bent and wrapped around angles.
This’ll come in handy for when you need to… bend a screen. Or, these thin, semi-transparent OLEDs could be piled on top of each other to make 3D displays, used as HUDs in the windscreens of expensive cars, or even used as a way for Sony to carry on charging us lots of money for new TVs that aren’t particularly different from our existing TVs…
Guess what The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium is up to these days?
It is sequencing the DNA of a potato.
The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium, who we would very much like to work for, reckons it will have the white potato perfectly sequenced by 2010, which will help with things like making them grow in the apocalyptic desert wastelands of the future.
It’s not an easy task – even something as seemingly simple as a potato is made up of 840 million DNA pairs. One pair tells it how thick the skin is. One pair tells it what leaves to grow. Another pair is in charge of telling it to grow the potatoes underground instead of on branches…
And finally… brave GPS-equipped turtle foils amateur drug grower
A keen marijuana user hit upon the great idea of using some off-the-track American park land to grow himself a few special plants.
In these environmentally worrisome times, you’d think he’d be applauded – but no. When a box turtle equipped with a GPS tracking device stumbled into his little outdoor hydroponics lab, the park ranger followed, found his stash and…
Touchy-feely Robot-Skin for Robots (and maybe us)
Everyone loves a robot. Especially a sensitive robot. Just look at WALL-E or Johnny-5. When it comes to a robot who has the capacity to feel, we all go a bit gooey inside. The cold, unfeeling, emotionless robot is a metaphor for that fear we have of losing what it is to be human.
Okay, so i'm playing loose with the double-meanings behind the word 'feel' and 'sensitive', because we're not talking emotional robots, or robots with 'feelings' but rather robots which can feel. Like in objects, and surroundings. LIke we can, physically.
Yes, some rather smug looking Japanese researchers/scientists/tech-bods have stumbled upon the perfect answer to the problem of making Robots completely sensitive to their environment. Be it cold, hot, hard, or soft. The skin they've developed looks like tin foil, gold tin foil like the stuff they wrap around marathon runners at the end of the race. Space Blankets i think they're called. Anyway, it looks like that, but it's not. It's a fine rubbery material that has hundreds and thousands of tiny carbon particles inside which allow conductivity of electricity. The skin can be stretched to 2.3 times it's normal size, allowing it to bend around a robot's metal frame and move with joints like a glove.
