Elminating Death From Cancer By 2015

The National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of ‘eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015′.

Site – http://www.wired.com

Engines Of Creation

The Engies Of Creation full book by K. Eric Drexler is available in its totality online, just follow the link…

Can anyone predict where science and technology will take us? Although many scientists and technologists have tried to do this, isn’t it curious that the most successful attempts were those of science fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke? Granted, some of those writers knew a great deal about the science of their times. But perhaps the strongest source of their success was that they were equally concerned with the pressures and choices they imagined emerging from their societies…

Site – http://www.foresight.org/EOC

LLNL, BlueGene/L

I know this is old, but I love supercomputers. The machine which holds the title of the fastest computer in the world is currently the BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

BlueGene/L boasts a peak speed of over 360 teraOPS, a total memory of 32 tebibytes, total power of 1.5 megawatts, and machine floor space of 2,500 square feet. The full system has 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes. Multiple communications networks enable extreme application scaling

Site – http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegenel

Einstein’s Biggest Blunder Confirmed

The universe has expanded past a point of no return due to a mysterious force known only as ‘dark energy’ that fills more than 70 percent of our universe. The analogy is this: Take a ball and throw it into the air, just when the ball starts to turn to begin its downward journey back to your hand due to the force of gravity, it continues it journey upward faster and faster as time goes by.

When Albert Einstein was working on his equations for the theory of general relativity, he threw in a cosmological constant to bring the universe into harmonious equilibrium. But subsequent observations by Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was not static. Rather, galaxies were flying apart at varying speeds. Einstein abandoned the concept, calling it the biggest blunder of his life’s work.

Now new observations from an international team of astronomers seem to show that dark energy is like the cosmological constant, unvarying throughout space and time. By measuring the distances to 71 far-off supernovae, the scientists were able to ascertain with a high degree of confidence that the effect dark energy exerts on supernovae light does not vary with distance. The researchers also plugged this data into a so-called equation of state, which measures the relationship between pressure and density, and found that dark energy must be less than -0.85–awfully close to Einstein’s cosmological constant at -1.

Site – www.sciam.com

Gravity Probe B Completes Data Collection

Is Earth in a Vortex of Space-Time?

We’ll soon know the answer: A NASA/Stanford physics experiment called Gravity Gravity Probe B (GP-B) recently finished a year of gathering science data in Earth orbit. The results, which will take another year to analyze, should reveal the shape of space-time around Earth.

Time and space, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called “space-time.” The tremendous mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space to check.

The four gyroscopes in GP-B are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren’t so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.

According to calculations, the twisted space-time around Earth should cause the axes of the gyros to drift merely 0.041 arcseconds over a year. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree. To measure this angle reasonably well, GP-B needed a fantastic precision of 0.0005 arcseconds. It’s like measuring the thickness of a sheet of paper held edge-on 100 miles away.

Site – www.gravityprobeb.com

Blogpulse SNA Tool

Blogpulse is a really useful tool to do SNA (Social Network Analysis) by examining people’s blog postings. You can really extract some cool information with this tool to discover market trends and what people are interested in etc… People have started useing Google AdWords in the same way to discover which words trigger the most clicks by people.

Site – www.blogpulse.com

Blogology

I have now officially joined the community of internet Webloggers. This link is a good primer in blogology.

Over the past few years, Weblogs (or blogs) have taken the Web by storm. According to the Wikipedia definition [1], a Weblog is “a Web application which contains periodic posts on a common Webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order.” Basically, if you publish content on a periodic basis, a blogging package may simplify your publishing workflow.

Site – www.sitepoint.com

The Open Mind Common Sense Project

Computers today are just plain dumb! The Open Mind Commonsense project is an attempt to make computers smarter by making it easy and fun for people all over the world to work together to give computers the millions of pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute “common-sense”, all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. This repository of knowledge will enable us to create more intelligent and sociable software, build human-like robots, and better understand the structure our own minds.

Site – http://commonsense.media.mit.edu

Chloé Harris

Chloé Harris is an awesome progressive breaks DJ that has just recently come to my attention. Her website (listed below) has several of her mixes available for download including a mix on John Digweed’s KISS 100 show.

Site – http://www.djchloe.com

National Ignition Facility

Now this just amazed me when I first read about it. When completed, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will be, by far, the world’s largest and most energetic laser and a major international scientific resource. It will contain a 192-beam, 1.8-megajoule, 700-terawatt laser system adjoining a 10-meter-diameter target chamber with room for nearly 100 experimental diagnostics. Designed to study the physics of matter at extreme densities, pressures, and temperatures, NIF experiments will allow scientists to study physical processes at temperatures approaching 100 million kelvins and 100 billion times atmospheric pressure. These conditions exist naturally only in the interior of stars and in nuclear weapon detonations. NIF will use laser beams to compress fusion targets to conditions required for thermonuclear ignition and burn. In the process, more energy will be liberated than is used to initiate the fusion reactions.

Site – http://www.llnl.gov/nif/project/index.html

Universe: The Definitive Visual Guide

Astronomy has always been a hobby of mine. So, I was looking around Barnes & Noble (I know … I know) over the Thanksgiving holiday while shopping for the family, and I found a really good book “Universe: The definitive visual guide”.

Site – http://www.amazon.com

The Future Of Computer R&D

An great article from EE Times:

Experts see important computer breakthroughs and whole new fields of investigation just opening up. Advances will come in natural-language processing, machine learning, computer vision and speech-to-text, as well as new computing architectures to handle those hefty tasks. All of which (with the exception of computer architecture) my company is involved in.

Beyond the decade mark, Edward D. Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, expects computers based on quantum physics.

Site – http://www.eetimes.com/news/