Category: Science
Users of Bebo have sent their messages into space
Of all the people in the world you’d like to have communicating with alien leaders in a potential “first contact” scenario, would Bebo users really be the #1 choice? Well, that’s what’s happening, as the social networking site’s users’ suggestions for images and text to send into space as part of its ‘A Message From Earth’ project have been… sent into space.
501 messages from Bebo users – including photos of Richard and Judy and pop band McFly’s opinions on Cheryl Cole – were sent off from Ukraine’s National Space Agency yesterday in a fantastic waste of everyone’s time. Here’s Bebo’s sensational illustration of how sending messages into space works:
The messages will take a shade over 20 years…
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”…
Uniross High Speed Charger takes battery recharging time down to a STUNNING 15 minutes!
The battery-charging scene continues to amaze with its innovation. It is surely the most technologically advanced area of science today. Forget the Large Hadron Collider – it’s the battery world that should be creating the headlines right now!
The latest RED HOT battery development comes from renowned rechargeable expert Uniross, which has today announced the High Speed Charger, a device capable of – brace yourselves! – fully recharging batteries in an unbelievable 15 minutes. And that’s not just one or two batteries…
Mathematicians discover the largest prime number… EVER!
Scientists claim to have discovered the largest prime mumber yet – it’s 2^43,112,609-1. That’s just a short way of typing it – it’s actually 13 million digits long. It nets them a prize of US$100,000 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation…
There are different kinds of power cable! Including the Furutech Powerflux Power Cord which costs $1,800
There is, we can exclusively reveal today, more than one kind of power cable in existence. Some power cables are better than other kinds of power cable. And the Furutech Powerflux Power Cord, which costs $1800, is presumably being pitched toward the high end of the power cable scale.
Here is why this cable is worth more money that a perfectly usable second-hand car…
"Pre-crime" detector detects "hostile thoughts" before they become actions
This is a little concerning. A year ago, the US Department of Homeland Security reckoned that it had worked out how to read people’s minds, and detect “hostile thoughts”. They’ve just announced that they think it actually works.
Japan set to cross another invention off Arthur C. Clarke's list – sets aside £5bn for "space elevator"
A mere 30 years after Arthur C. Clarke first mooted the idea of running super-thin, lightweight cables into space and tethering them to a satellite in his book The Fountains of Paradise, Japanese scientists reckon they’re ready to bring all the parts together and make it happen.
For a relatively low in space travel terms bill of £5bn, the boffins think they’re close to solving the carbon nanotube technology issue that could make the existence of 22,000 mile-long cables possible. That amount of rope or even Ethernet cable…
Terrorists planning their next deadly attack using… World of Warcraft?
That’s the 100% crackpot theory being investigated by the US military at the moment, as senior officials worry that shifty-looking foreign people are massing on WoW servers to practise unleashing death.
A man called Dr. Dwight Toavs, who is a professor at the US National Defence University, gave a presentation (PowerPoint file here) on how a virtual world…
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…
Google planning offshore, tax-evading, auto-powering, floating data warehouses
Google is planning to launch a fleet of ships to house its search operations. These ships will power themselves by harnessing wave energy. The “water-based data centres” will cool themselves using the sea.
This staggering and frankly unbelievable lurch into piracy was revealed by The Times, which says Google will also benefit by avoiding paying tax on its data warehousing spaces by housing some of its facilities in international waters…
