Category: Sci/Tech

In other space news: Today is Stephen Hawking’s birthday. He is 65. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he told them that one of the things he plans on doing this year is taking a ride on the Vomit Comet (the zero-G airplane), and then, in 2009, to go into space via Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. Sir Richard Branson is picking up the tab for his ride.

The normal retirement age at Cambridge is 76, but the good Professor has no plans to stop teaching. He’s currently also working on two books, George’s Secret Key To The Universe, a children’s book, to be published this fall, and The Grand Design (on the philosophy of science), which will likely be out in ’08. God speed, Stephen Hawking. And Happy Birthday.

Thanks, Ron!

Snarkiest science headline of the year (so far):

“Scientist: NASA found life on Mars – and killed it”

From the piece (on CNN Technology):

Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.

The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn’t recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Thanks, Ron!

Looking for a last minute (or belated) gift? How about sending that special someone to the red planet, or their name, anyway. The Planetary Society’s “Messages from Earth” Project will send the names of anyone you enter and issue a certificate number. You can then print out a certificate with the name of the person so honored. And it’s free! A mini-DVD with the names (and some other material, such as collection of human art and lit about Mars) will travel aboard the Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft, launching in May 2008. Find our more about the “Messages from Earth” Project here.

[Via /.]

‘Tis the season to burn two precious resources: plastic, as in the contents of our wallets, and electrical power, as in turning each of our neighborhoods into a DIY strip of Vegas. Apparently, we show our gratitude to our Gods by sacrificing prodigious amounts of non-renewable resources upon their altars. Light ’em if you got ’em.

To call attention to the inefficiencies of incandescent lighting, BC Hydro sponsored this holiday billboard in Vancouver utilizing 1500 LED bulbs powered by around-the-clock, human peddle-power. Only about 120 incandescent lights could have been lit by the same amount of generated power.

[Via OhGizmo!]

Reminder to Street Techies in the DC area, this Wednesday is the next meeting of Dorkbot DC, 7-9PM at the awesome Provisions Library. Guest presenter will be Paras Kaul, a.k.a. “The Brainwave Chick”, a neural artist and researcher at George Mason University. She’ll be showing how she uses brain wave frequencies to create digital music and computer visuals. Also, Dockbot regular Philip Kohn will be showing his video installation called Your Two Cents.

More info about the meeting here.

More coolness in rapid prototyping news. The Belgian rapid-prototyping firm Materialise has spun off a creative division called MGX whose goal it is to push the envelope of RP and to get artists to explore it as a medium. They recently asked four designers to create something around the theme of “Private.” The piece above, called Detail.MGX, is by Israeli designer Dan Yeffet, and is a lamp built out from his fingerprint. Below is a pen called Download by Ross Lovegrove, which is molded from the negative space of Lovegrove’s hand.

Click here to see the other two creations and more info on the project.

You know, we’re all about the personal flight systems here at Street Tech Labs. So, we thought we’d call your attention to this cool little article about some of the early efforts in engineering hovering vehicles in the ’50s and ’60s.

BTW: This piece is from a website I’ve been frequenting recently called Damn Interesting. It’s sort of a Boing Boing-esque directory of wonderful things. I always find stuff here that catches my interest.

I’m an obsessively visual person. Draw me a picture and I’m ten times more likely to remember something than via any other form of learning. As a result, I’ve always loved video tutorials on things and have been loving the explosion of geek vidcasts, video how-tos, and the large numbers of keynote addresses and lectures that are finding their way online. This weekend, thanks to Lifehacker, I discovered Google TechTalks, a lecture series that Google does on their corporate campus and has made available via Google Video. While there are lots of presentation on Web technologies and other related subjects (e.g. the business of the Web), there are also some really cool science and art talks, such as one on the Archimedes Palimpsest, a collection of Archimedes’s work that was found hidden underneath a 13th century prayer book (monks repurposed the parchment by painting over it). Efforts to restore the original manuscript are yielding never before seen works by the great Greek philosopher and scientist.

Iddo Genuth from the highly recommended The Future of Things sent us a link to an article he did about MRAM, a new type of memory that combines the advantages of volatile and non-volatile memory. He writes:

“In early July 2006, Freescale Semiconductor announced the first commercial availability of a new type of memory with the potential to surpass most existing types in terms of speed, power consumption, and durability…”

“In an attempt to combine the speed of the faster volatile memory with the benefits of non-volatile memory, Freescale (which originated from Motorola Semiconductor about two years ago) created a new type of non-volatile memory – Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, or MRAM. The roots of MRAM can be traced back to the 1940’s at Harvard when physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo and later Jay Forrester and colleagues at MIT worked on developments that led to Magnetic Core Memory and later on to the discovery of the “giant magnetoresistive effect” in thin-film structures by researchers from IBM in the late 1980’s. Like Flash, MRAM retains data after a power supply is cut off, potentially eliminating that seemingly endless boot time of conventional computers when data from the hard drive is transferred to RAM, as well as loss of data when the computer is suddenly shut off. MRAM has much faster write speeds than Flash and has an unlimited endurance, meaning that MRAM is not subject to the degradation suffered by Flash.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

Thanks, Iddo!

Well, it’s that time of the year — no, not that dirty rhyme about frost on the pumpkin — time for the endless parade of end-of-year lists. Yesterday, we blogged about a list that actually didn’t suck, Fortune’s Scariest Tech list.

 

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Today, we present you with TIME’s Best Inventions 2006. Here, the list itself is scary, or at least lame, one of those completely vapid gee-whiz tech round-ups of concept crap and overpriced Hammacher Schlemmer fodder. It’s the kind of hype-infested, “playing to your base” tech reportage that helped inspire Street Tech. And look, it’s our fave perpetually “coming soon” robot, the NEC PaPeRo.