Fu-sion! Fu-sion! :)

''Low-Budget Fusion Reactor ... 
General Fusion's reactor design consists of 220 pistons that simultaneously ram a metal sphere. This creates a shock wave inside the sphere, so that plasma rings in the center create a fusion reaction.  '' [source]

'' Need a weekend project around the house? Mark Suppes, web developer by day, has built his own nuclear fusion reactor in a Brooklyn workspace. ... While all the components of Suppes' machine – including the deuterium gas – were acquired through legal channels, some of it is somewhat dangerous. His power supply provides 30,000 volts, and his reactor does put off a negligible amount of radiation as it smashes neutrons together.
Suppes' reactor does not generate any more power than he puts into it, and as such is not the golden fusion generator scientists hope will fuel the future with clean, cheap energy.'' [source]

''It’s amazing no one thought of it before: nuclear fusion from a levitating tire-sized magnet surrounded by 10-million-degree plasma. ...
a joint project between MIT and Columbia University  ... The MIT project offers a unique alternative to the two existing approaches to nuclear fusion that dominate the field. Tokamaks attempt to manipulate atoms by surrounding a central plasma-filled chamber with magnets. In an inertial fusion reactor, high-powered lasers bombard a fuel pellet in the center of the device to set a fusion reaction in motion.  ... '' [source]

BTW...
''On the ITER side of the fence, you'll have the largest and strongest magnets in the world: some 14 meters high; some as heavy as a fully-loaded Boeing 747; some 24 metres in diameter. A stone's throw away, on the CEA-Cadarache side, their microscopic counterpart: no more than 50 nanometres in size (50 billionth of a metre!). Magnets by the hundreds of millions packed into one single drop of water. ...  Magnet-producing bacteria are nothing new.  ... Genetically-modified MTB could be used for environmental clean-up or as intelligent contrasting agents in medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) ...'' [source]

Recent Human Evolution Detected

''Though ongoing human evolution is difficult to see, researchers believe they’ve found signs of rapid genetic changes among the recent residents of a small Canadian town.

Between 1800 and 1940, mothers in Ile aux Coudres, Quebec gave birth at steadily younger ages, with the average age of first maternity dropping from 26 to 22. Increased fertility, and thus larger families, could have been especially useful in the rural settlement’s early history.'' [source]

Mixed news

''Soldier Re-Grows Leg Muscle After Experimental Procedure'' [source]
''Lytro Camera Lets You Focus Photos After You Take Them'' [source]
''Say cheese! Taking photos with a wave of the hand'' [source]
''Hipmunk is a travel search engine that wants to reinvent the way people search for flights online [...] The service lets people browse flights by a combination of factors that include pricing, travel duration and number of stops on a given flight. It also offers creative options, like the “agony” factor, which calculates the least amount of hassle for a trip.'' [source]
''MONSTER CHINESE TELESCOPE THE NEXT ET HUNTER?'' [source]
''Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers at The University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually executed.'' [source]
''100 YEARS AGO, A CHUNK OF MARS HIT EGYPT (AND A DOG)'' [source]
''Deadly animal disease that shaped history is eradicated.
It decimated herds and caused disaster, devastation and death associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and the colonization of Africa.
But after years of global efforts, rinderpest -- German for cattle plague -- doesn't exist anymore. It is the first animal disease to be eradicated and only the second disease ever, after smallpox in 1980. '' [source]

Bacteria have a wood-digesting enzyme

''identified the gene for breaking down lignin in a soil-living bacterium called Rhodococcus jostii...
By making woody plants and the inedible by-products of crops economically viable the eventual hope is to be able to produce biofuels that don't compete with food production.'' [source]

After all the XXI century was supposed to be the "bio" century :)

Mixed news

''India Introduces $30 Laptop Computer'' [source]
''Bring a seemingly-dead laptop battery back to life, to a usable condition, although not quite like-new. It could be almost as good as a replacement laptop battery and a lot cheaper than a universal external laptop battery. Using a Freezer, the same place you put your frozen peas and TV dinners, you could restore a dead laptop battery.'' [source]
''World IPv6 Day: firing up the engines on the new Internet protocol
'' [source]
''Dr. Sudoku Prescribes: Konkat-kuro'' [source]
''CHICKENS MODIFIED TO NOT SPREAD BIRD FLU
These genetically modified birds can get bird flu, but can't pass it on to other chickens.'' [source]
''FACES OF OUR ANCESTORS'' [source]
''SMOKING CAUSES GENE DAMAGE IN MINUTES
New findings should serve as a "stark warning" to those considering taking up cigarette smoking, say scientists.'' [source]

Mixed news

''4D cityscape'' [source]
''First Glimpse at Studio Ghibli's Karigurashi No Arrietty (The Borrowers)'' [movie trailer]
''RPG like Diablo'' [source]
''World's Smallest Battery Created'' [source]
''POOP, NOT THE PILL, CAUSES ESTROGEN POLLUTION'' [source]
''The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on Dec. 13th and 14th, is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth.'' [source]
''AMELIA EARHART'S FINGER BONE RECOVERED?'' [source]
''Project Scheduling Tools for Google Spreadsheets'' [video]
''Project Euler'' [source]

Just browsing...

''Universal LCD Game Projector For Wii, PS3, Xbox360, XBox, GC, PS2, iPod'' [source]
''Tim Burton Movie Posters'' [source]
''When Worlds Collide: Spock Confronts the Ultimate Challenge'' [source]
''40+ Cartoon Character Illustration Tutorials'' [source]
''Arsenic-based bacteria point to new life forms
...
We could be witnessing the first signs of a "shadow biosphere" – a parallel form of life on Earth with a different biochemistry to all others. Bacteria that grow without phosphorous, one of the six chemical elements thought to be essential for life, have been isolated from California's Mono Lake. Instead of phosphorous, the bacteria substitute the deadly poison arsenic.'' [source]
''LESLIE NIELSEN'S BOLD TREK TO A FORBIDDEN WORLD'' [source]
''Track Record: Man-Made Footprints on Other Worlds'' [source]
'Apache Foundation to vote down Java 7, protesting Oracle abuses' [source]

Craig Venter unveils "synthetic life" [TED]

''Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they've created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science.'' [source]

"The Day Eugenics Died"

''The Day Eugenics Died

posted by Ronald Ladouceur on 2009.07.03'' [source]

''I was not taught much of the history eugenics in school, but I somehow absorbed that it was an “old” idea, one that had been thoroughly discredited once the horrors of the Nazis were exposed.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to find that many American high school and college biology textbooks continued to discuss eugenics as if it were a non-controversial idea well into the rock-and-roll era. In fact, the most popular textbook published in 1960, Moon, Otto and Towle’s Modern Biology, referred to eugenics “a young science,” (648) and suggested its methods would surely begin to see application once a few more properly studied human generations had passed.''

A very interesting discussion on eugenetics and how it was finally abandoned.


It is my belief that we must honestly and openly confront past ideas, to learn from the past. A kind of meme vaccination.

Just browsing...

Mechanical USB mem-stick

''Space Sniffer is free and a portable software. You just need to execute the application and it will automagically scan through your hard disk and give details of your hard disk storage in spatial form...'' [source]

''OpenLander - Fun With Physics'' [source]

''Go Ahead: Next Generation Java Programming Style'' [source]

''HP touts memristor development, bleak future for transistors'' [source]

''HOARD OF 2,000-YEAR-OLD COINS FOUND IN EGYPT'' [source]

''Hamlet fish sheds light on evolution of marine species.
To evolve or not to evolve? That is the question scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) are closer to answering following a groundbreaking new study into the colourful hamlet fish.'' [source]

''E. Rex Is a 3-Wheeled Electric Hooligan'' [source]

''So, process algebra, what have you done for me lately?'' [source]

"Can a Systems Biologist Fix a Tamagotchi?" L. Cardelli

''Biologists cannot under-stand radios without any knowledge of electrical engineering but, similarly, electrical engineers can not understand mp3 players without any knowledge of software engineering, even though mp3 players play music just like radios.
As it turns out, even the simplest biological organisms have a minimum of hundreds of kilobytes of software, in the form of digitally stored genetic information, and can have as much as several megabytes of it (considerably more than mp3 players). There is no life form that is just hardware circuits; not even viruses, which on the contrary are almost purely software. The role of such genetic software is commonly understood as that of “running the organism”.'' [pdf]

Medical finds...

Regenering Cartilages [source]

Found the longevity gene [source]

Making stem cell from skin [source]

Healing brain injuries by stem cell gel [source]

Anthony Atala on growing new organs

''Anthony Atala's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs -- from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. At TEDMED, he shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that "prints" human tissue.'' [video]

This is totally cool!

Mixed news

* Intel demos 48-core chip [source]
* PAPER BATTERIES COULD POWER ALMOST ANYTHING [source]
* New silicon-germanium nanowires could lead to smaller, more powerful electronic devices [source]
* Dirty babies get healthier hearts [source]
* Linux in a wall-wart [source]: "In fact, prongs and ports are all you'll see on this tiny device, which has 512MB of RAM, a 1.2GHz ARM CPU and a $100 price tag..."
* Flexible solar cell implant could restore vision [source]
* Why Humans Outlive Apes [source]
* SUPER-EARTHS ORBIT NEIGHBORING STARS [source]
* NASA launches sky-mapping telescope [source]
* SOFIA Seeks Secrets of Planetary Birth [source]
* CENTURY-OLD BUTTER FOUND IN ANTARCTICA [source]
* Masterworks in Petri dishes [source]

Meat grown in laboratory

''The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to 'exercise' the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years time.'' [source, and source]

Sticky future for the spider suture

[source]

Cell size and Scale

''How big are cells compared with other objects, molecules and atoms? '' [source]

An interactive exploration of the basic unit of life...

It's time to eat more CHOCOLATE! :D

''In a study that will provide comfort to chocoholics everywhere, researchers in Sweden have found evidence that people who eat chocolate have increased survival rates after a heart attack — and it may be that the more they eat, the better.'' [source]

Mixed news

Large Hadron Collider to restart at half its designed energy [source]

Stream Programming: Luring Programmers into the Multicore Era [source with video]

Nokia888 It uses liquid battery, speech recognition, flexible touch screen, touch sensitive body cover which lets it understand and adjust to the environment. It has a simple programmable body mechanism so that it changes forms in different situations. [source]

Europe and Russia sign Mars exploration deal [source]

Artificial Tongue Is Sweeter Than Real Thing [source]

Scientists Learn To Fabricate DNA Evidence [source]

NASA Developing Nuclear Reactor For Moon and Mars [source, details]

Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean [source]

Muscular blob shows new direction for tissue engineering [source]

Big Bang Could Be Recreated Inside a Metamaterial [source]

Think electric car set to roll out of Norway: report [source]

Mixed bio news

Genetic Mutation Enables Less Sleep [source]
Pearl-Producing Proteins Uncovered [source]
New Strain of H.I.V. Is Discovered [source]
Chinese Clinic Uses DNA Tests To Predict Kids' Talents [source]