Listening to: Be Natural - Manic Street Preachers

Science/Culture writer Steven Johnson has written a fascinating article about the game Spore and the idea of the ‘Long Zoom’. Johnson uses Spore as an example of “way of seeing of our time”:

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom…

Will Wright on his new game:

“I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”

Listening to: Sweet Lullaby (Apollo Mix) - Deep Forest

Sol Ideas have a great little outline of how you make solar cells.

Listening to: One - Shapeshifter

The BBC program Newsnight has a great interview with Richard Dawkins (mp4 ~25M). The interview covers Dawkin’s new book The God Delusion and the reasoning behind his ideas about God and religion.

Listening to: Music In My Mind (Soul Avenderz Remix) - Craig Obey

As I have mentioned before one of the most shocking things about the war in Iraq is the fact that it has left so many young kids mangled. I’m glad to see that there is something good emerging from the human carnage… research into limb re-growth and progress in the area bionic limbs. From Wired:

The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities. According to Army Medical Command, 411 soldiers who fought in Iraq and 37 in Afghanistan are amputees as a result of combat wounds. If preliminary research is successful, the scientists could receive more funding for up to four years.

From the Washington Post:

Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.

Listening to: Dreaming - BT

Found this over at NewScientist. Allow me to introduce the “emdrive”… a shaped cavity that traps microwaves and uses them to generate a net force in one direction:

Key is the fact that the diameter of a tubular cavity alters the path - and hence the effective velocity - of the microwaves travelling through it. Microwaves moving along a relatively wide tube follow a more or less uninterrupted path from end to end, while microwaves in a narrow tube move along it by reflecting off the walls. The narrower the tube gets, the more the microwaves get reflected and the slower their effective velocity along the tube becomes. Shawyer calculates the microwaves striking the end wall at the narrow end of his cavity will transfer less momentum to the cavity than those striking the wider end (see Diagram). The result is a net force that pushes the cavity in one direction. And that’s it, Shawyer says.

Hang on a minute, though. If the cavity is to move, it must be pushed by something. A rocket engine, for example, is propelled by hot exhaust gases pushing on the rear of the rocket. How can photons confined inside a cavity make the cavity move? This is where relativity and the strange nature of light come in. Since the microwave photons in the waveguide are travelling close to the speed of light, any attempt to resolve the forces they generate must take account of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This says that the microwaves move in their own frame of reference. In other words they move independently of the cavity - as if they are outside it. As a result, the microwaves themselves exert a push on the cavity.

The thing that stops me from whipping out the “anti-crank-handle spray is this (and to be honest… the fact that physics was never my strong suite):

This raises another question. Why haven’t physicists stumbled across the effect before? They have, says Shawyer, and they design their cavities to counter it. The forces inside the latest accelerator cavities are so large that they stretch the chambers like plasticine. To counteract this, engineers use piezoelectric actuators to squeeze the cavities back into shape. “I doubt they’ve ever thought of turning the force to other uses,” he says.

Listening to: You Again - Shihad

An entry over at howstuffworks speculates about the Lockheed win:

While NASA hasn’t offered many details about why it chose Lockheed to build the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, industry analysts are speculating. One theory set forth by people who have seen the two proposals says that Lockheed’s plan is more open-ended, leaving certain crucial decisions to NASA, while the Grumman-Boeing proposal was more technically detailed…

Seems it’s a good idea to leave some of the fun stuff to the client

Listening to: Numb / Encore - Linkin Park

ABC has an article on using artificial chlorophyll as the basis for a solar cell:

The researchers made a synthetic chlorophyll molecule shaped like a soccer ball.

It has a dendrimer scaffold, a highly branched nanosized polymer made of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.

Attached to the dendrimer are synthetic versions of the light-harvesting pigment porphyrin.

Spherical carbon molecules called buckyballs sit between the porphyrin and soak up electrons from the photons of collected light.

Crossley and team have used an array of the synthetic chlorophyll to build a prototype of an organic solar cell.

Listening to: We Major (Featuring Nas & Really Doe) - Kanye West

Scientific American has an article on using noncommutative geometry as alternative to string theory. Importantly proponents of this approach say they can test their ideas experimentally (which I don’t believe has been achieved with string theory).

Listening to: Hallowed Be Thy Name - Iron Maiden

Found this over at Pink Tentacle. A bacteria powered motor:

The 20-micron (1 micron = 1 millionth of a meter) diameter revolving motor has 6 blades, each with a foot that sits in a 0.5-micron deep, 13-micron diameter groove etched into a silicon substrate. The surfaces of the feet and the groove are treated with proteins that cause the bacteria (introduced via a connecting groove) to move in one direction, pushing the feet (and spinning the motor) as they pass through the groove.

Listening to: Blame - Don McGlashan

Researchers as the University of Arkansas have developed a paper made from long ‘nanowires’ of titanium oxide:

Tien says the material could have many applications, including filters against airborne bacterial spores, protective armor, and media for controlled drug release. But another application could be the future of printed paper. “We can, using ink, write things on [the nanowire paper], and when we shine a UV light on that, we can erase it. We can write, erase, re-write, re-erase,” says Tien.

I wonder what the strength characteristics of the material are? I wonder what it might do to the world of origami?