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The Make: Science Room is our DIY science destination. Here you'll find how-tos on setting up a home lab, evaluating and buying equipment and supplies, and conducting all manner of fun and educational home science experiments. We also provide a forum, through Comments, for our readers to share their ideas and collaborate on their own experiments and discoveries. Robert Bruce Thompson is your host. He's the author of the best-selling Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments (O'Reilly/Make: Books, 2008) and the (not-yet-published) Illustrated Guide to Forensics Investigations. We'll be including modified content from these books as well as creating original content. As time goes on, we'll expand the Science Room to include sections on astronomy, Earth sciences, biology, and other disciplines. We already have dozens of additional articles on deck and will be posting batches of them each week, so check back often.

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Robert Bruce Thompson, author of books on everything from PC Hardware to Astronomy, is working on a new book for Make: the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. So, we've got chemistry on our mind here, which led Dale Dougherty, the Publisher of Make, to ask Robert:

I read a story last week about the alarmingly high levels of mercury found in fish in the top sushi places in Manhattan. Ever since, I've been wondering is it possible/feasible/reasonable to test for mercury in fish -- a DIY mercury test kit. I doubt you could do this in restaurant so let's presume that this is a test kit for store-bought fish.

The answer for mercury is a bit complex:

The problems are that mercury is toxic at unbelievably low levels and that it is a cumulative poison, which is to say it isn't excreted. Accordingly, the allowable levels are set so low that there's no chance they could be detected by any wet chemistry test with a sample of any reasonable size. I was pretty sure of my facts, but just to be certain I ran them past organic chemist Dr. Paul Jones. His response was, "Maybe you could use a wet chemistry test if you had an entire 500-pound tuna for your sample, but otherwise you'd have to use instrumental tests." Organic chemist Dr. Mary Chervenak points out the Reinsch Test for mercury (which also produces a positive for several other heavy metals). You dissolve the sample in dilute HCl and put a copper strip in the solution. Any mercury present plates out on the copper as a silvery mirror. The trouble is, if enough mercury is present to produce a visible mirror with the Reinsch test, that sample has enough mercury in it to poison everyone in a radius of several blocks.

Robert's got more details over at his daynotes journal, and a couple of other tests have come to our attention since Dale's original question. Dale sent a link to a Heavy Metals Test (Robert posted his thoughts on this test in his journal as well), and Popular Science just posted a link to a portable blood test for heavy metals. Have any of you come across some interesting tests for poisons in your body, food, or environment? What results have you had?

From The Maker Store: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments by Robert Bruce Thompson Price: $34.99 Pre-order/Buy: Maker store - Link. For students, DIY hobbyists, and science buffs, who can no longer get real chemistry sets, this one-of-a-kind guide explains how to set up and use a home chemistry lab, with step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in basic chemistry. Learn how to smelt copper, purify alcohol, synthesize rayon, test for drugs and poisons, and much more. The book includes lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab, along with 17 hands-on chapters that include multiple laboratory sessions.

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Street Techie Alberto Gaitan writes "Some birds (and maybe newts!) may have HUDs:"

Published on the Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) website, a paper describes how one team of scientists in Germany studied a specie of nocturnal migratory bird to test the hypothesis that birds of that type may be able to visually detect the earth's magnetic field providing them with what may amount to a head-up display (HUD). Birds trained to orient to magnetic fields managed to do so quickly when tested in white or short wavelength light (i.e., blue and green) but had a hard time doing so when tested in yellow or red light. These previous findings, along with new neuronal tracing data that shows that the part of their brain most active during magnetic orientation is their visual thalamus, suggests that they used visual cues to hop into proper position when the magnetic field changed during the lab experiments.

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From Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. physicists have coaxed tiny artificial atoms into communicating in an advance that may lead to super-fast quantum computers, the researchers said on Wednesday.

Quantum computers hold the promise of being enormously powerful, capable of solving in seconds problems that take today's fastest machines years to crack.

So far, physicists have worked mostly on developing the most basic of elements that can store information known as quantum bits, or qubits.

But a series of papers in the journal Nature suggest researchers have found a way to get these qubits to communicate over a distance, for instance, across a computer chip.

In the past, the best qubits could do was talk to neighboring qubits, much like the childhood game of telephone.

But researchers from Yale University have found a way to move information stored in a stationary quantum bit via a microwave photon to another stationary quantum bit on the same chip.

Read the rest...

Thanks, Ron!

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This is incredible:

Lockheed Martin is looking to supply the Pentagon with flying cameras .... A miniature payload module about the size of an Altoid can be carried by this single-wing Nano Air Vehicle (NAV), sized and shaped like a maple tree seed. The minuscule vehicle is packed with navigation and communications equipment, imaging devices, and sensors that sniff the air for chemicals or detect signs of life such as body heat and breathing.

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From New Scientist:

For the first time a solar-powered plane has flown through two consecutive nights, UK defence research company QinetiQ claims. In a secretive weekend mission, their craft Zephyr took off from a US military base in New Mexico and landed 54 hours later.

The solar craft seems to have taken the next hop towards everlasting flight...

Read the rest (and see video)...

[Via /.]

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This video, from a presentation at SIGGRAPH, shows a demo of a technology that can dynamically edit the content of an image so that it can be resized and still look "correct," regardless of dimensions. It seeks out and removes areas of an image that have the least amount of a given "energy" in them (say the gradient magnitude function). The process is known as "seam carving" and looks quite extraordinary. At the end of the demo, the authors show how these techniques could be applied in a photo editing program.

The SIGGRAPH paper explaining this image tech can be found here [PDF]

Thanks, Ron!

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Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Thanks, Ron!

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I have a new piece on Wired.com, entitled: "Fifty Years of Hovercraft: The Tech That Barely Takes Off." The title pretty much tells you what you need to know. Here's an excerpt:

Post-Apocalyptic Crowd Control
If ever there was a craft that looked like it had slipped through a time portal, from some steel-hearted, robot-dominated future into our all-too-fragile, meat-based present, it's SRL's Pulse-Jet Hovercraft. The sound this thing makes, like millions of angry robotic bees gearing up to swarm, is indescribably creepy ... and awe-inspiring. The all-aluminum construction weighs about 350 pounds, with four 4-foot long pulse-jet engines providing 70 pounds of thrust. At 150 decibels, it's billed as “the loudest robot in the world.”

Read the full piece here.

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Microsoft astounds me, or confounds me, might be the better verb. Certain companies have corporate instincts that seem utterly off the mark to me. Microsoft is chief among these. I just did some tech support this weekend for a friend, working on a new Sony Vaio I'd helped him buy. It was my first experience working with Vista. I expected Vista to be much better looking, easier to understand and operate, etc. than XP. I hated nearly everything about it. And the numerous security messages and dialog boxes that popped up as we attempted to get an external HD and a scanner to talk to the machine were as befuddling and muddling as any in previous MS OSes. This is a company that just don't seem to get user functionality for normal humans.

I took this weekend experience with me (and all attendant prejudices) to a video the Wall Street Journal sent me this morning, a sit-down with MS's new chief research-and-strategy officer, Craig Mundie. This is the guy who's supposed to be looking into the future, getting MS and the rest of us excited about technologies in the pipeline. I was bored senseless watching this video. Maybe there's a lot more here than meets the eye, but Mundie seems like he has all of the charisma and innovation mojo of an '80s mid-level executive at Big Blue. He makes Bill look like a party animal.

Here's the WSJ video.

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From TreeHugger:

Japan's Clean Venture 21 has developed a new spin on solar with their Spherical Silicon Solar Array. Texas Instruments evidently first made them in the '80s but efficiency was only about 10% and the costs were high; Clean Ventures puts each little 1mm ball into a little reflector. It still is only 12% efficient, but they claim that it has only one fifth the amount of silicon and should only cost one fifth as much to make, using half as much energy as conventional solar cell manufacture. Evidently silicon balls are made by dripping rather than cutting, so little raw material is needed, there is no cutting, and the optical properties are good.

::Diginfo movie here; Japanese ::Clean Venture 21

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In the future you might paint your home, not with standard paint, but rather, with a nice coating of energy-generating solar cells. In one of the most interesting developments in solar panel technology so far, researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology, directed by Somenath Mitra, claim to have developed a way to create a solar cell that can be painted on flexible plastic sheets.

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There is an excellent selection of articles (and quite a few related scientific papers) in a special edition of Nature magazine on interpretations of the multiverse theory. 'Fifty years ago this month Hugh Everett III published his paper proposing a "relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics" — the idea subsequently described as the 'many worlds' or 'multiverse' interpretation. Its impact on science and culture continues. In celebration, a science fiction special edition of Nature on 5 July 2007 explores the symbiosis of science and sf, as exemplified by Everett's hypothesis, its birth, evolution, champions and opponents, in biology, physics, literature and beyond.'

FYI: Hugh Everett III is also the father of Mark Oliver Everett, a.k.a. "The Man Called E," leader of the grossly under-appreciated (IMNERHO) band Eels. Eels's 1998 album, "Electro-Shock Blues," deals with suicide, death and loss, after Hugh Everett III died of a heart attack, his schizophrenic daughter committed suicide, and his wife died of cancer, leaving Mark Everett as the only surviving family member. And, I just discovered on Wikipedia, that E's cousin was a flight attendant on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon on 9/11. Man, I guess this explains why so many Eels records are so sad, cynical, and dark.

The utterly bizarre thing is that, in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, put forth by Mark's father, none of these things have happened (and every possible variation on them has also occurred), in infinite "universes next door," as Robert Anton Wilson dubbed them. No wonder the dude's so strange. I'm feeling messed up just trying to ponder all of this weirdness in the same posting!

BTW: A paid sub is required to read most of the articles in Nature, but this one, Many lives in many worlds, by Max Tegmark, is free.

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As part of this ordeal, they went through my journal, notebooks, papers, etc., sometimes snickering at what they found there. They took particular interest in a COMIC BOOK called "Adventures in Synthetic Biology," by Drew Endy, something I picked up at said unspeakable location.

Drew is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and one of the people behind The BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit org of engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, UCSF, and elsewhere, "encouraging the development and responsible use of technologies based on the BioBrick standard of DNA parts that encode basic biological functions. You can read more about Drew's work here, and more about BioBricks here. And if you want to see the comic book that entertained my new best pals at the TSA, an online version can be found here.

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Yeah, I know. At this point you're probably thinking Foo Camp/Schmoo Camp. I'll stop with the Foo Camp postings soon. But not just yet...

I love when you're at a conference, or otherwise meet someone, and then you go home, google them, and the true import of who you were talking to becomes apparent. Such was the case with Jeff Han. He and I got a lift from Camp to SF/SFO with Erin McKean (thanks for the lift, Erin!). We chatted about this and that over burgers and double-frieds at In-N-Out Burger. He said he was a multi-touch interface designer. He talked a little bit about the finer points of finer points (e.g. how multi-touch can also read degrees of pressure as an input variable). Nice guy, cool job, great lunch. And he was off. I got home and wanted to find out more. I ended up at this mesmerizing video and had my mind suitably blown. Yes, you've already seen this in Minority Report, but this is real-world tech (and there's no need for the Michael Jackson glitter gloves). Coming soon to a Pre-Crime Sector Station near you (or hopefully some less ominous, more human-beneficial application). Also, check out Jeff's TED presentation for a more nuts and bolts look at the tech involved.

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Bill Gurstelle is someone associated with Make and the Maker community to whom, through various circumstances, I'm drawn ever-closer. Bill is the author of Backyard Ballistics and Whoosh, Boom, Splat. He is a mad genius, a scholar, and a gentleman (at least he's gentlemanly enough to warn you that he's about to tell you something dirty or disgusting before he proceeds to do so). I spent a bunch of time with him at Foo Camp and had a blast (and no, that's not an attempt at bad pyro punnage).

Bill, seen above in a Brian Jepson photo, gave a talk on "Living Dangerously in a Risk-Obsessed World." It was a fun, sort of think-out-loud session for his next book, which looks at risk and thrill-seeking and its role in human evolution.

Here, Eric Wilhelm (foreground), of Instructables, tells us about the time he boxed a kangaroo. No, seriously. Also in the photo (L to R): Charles Platt, moi, Mark Atwood (standing), Mark Frauenfelder (behind Eric), and Avi Geiger (by a nose).

Brian has a few other photos of Foo in his Flickr sets.

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Asshole Driven Development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may be rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

Or, what's found in most corporate structures, regardless of what they do:

Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) - The driving force behind most individual efforts is to make sure than when the shit hits the fan, they are not to blame.

If you want to see a video clip of Scott's "Myths of Innovation" talk (not from Foo Camp), here ya go.

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The Leonardian Library in Vinci, Tuscany has released to the Web Leonardo's Madrid Codices and the Codex Atlanticus, two of his meatiest collections of scientific and technical drawings. The collections are called e-Leo and contain hi-res scans of some 3,000 pages. The goal is to eventually scan 12,000 pages worth of Da Vinci goodness, all searchable, all free. This'll clearly be a boon to both amateur inventor-types and scholars alike.

[Via Wired]

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When well-known biologist and scientific humanist E.O. Wilso accepted his TED Award recently, he made a plea to those listening, to roll up their sleeves and to help him create an encyclopedia of all living things on the planet, called the Encyclopedia of Life. It would be a sort of biological wikipedia where every species of organism would get its own webpage. It's a bold initiative, which will be amazing if it happens. There's already a web site with some test pages and a video intro. I especially like the slider which allows you to dial the extent of your interest (from amateur to expert) and the content morphs to the level you dial. The species geo-location tech is nifty, too.

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The linked-to page on Daily DIY has a bunch of other cool car unlocking tricks, like using the air pressure of a tennis ball with a hole poked in it to unlock a car (haven't tried this one). Tres McGuyver.

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Thanks, Ron!

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[Via we make money not art]

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"'A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development' said Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida, the model shows that everyone looses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs."

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I love all of the ways in which the open source ethos are being applied to other realms beyond computer software, hardware, and Web dev. The Open Source Energy Project is one such example. Protein Feed explains:

"The project is being managed with a similar methodology to Open Source Software Development and the ideas and contributions are being published openly on the Internet without an attempt to secure patents. The hope is that with an open philosophy that the project shows similar Rapid Application Development and success as Linux and other Open Source Software projects and provides a system that can meet future energy requirements in a sustainable manner."

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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!

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"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.

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[Via /.]

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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!]

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More info about the meeting here.

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

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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.

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"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!

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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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The mission is not a trivial one. It could involve up to five space walks and considerable risk to astronauts. What was so touching to me, besides the reversal of the previous NASA admin's decision in general, was the petition that was signed by dozens of astronauts saying they were willing to risk their lives for Hubble. On the news tonight, they had one astronaut who said he talked it over with his family and they all agreed that it was that important.

When I was a teen, dreaming of space, thinking that we would have a significant presence there by the turn of the century, this was the kind of pioneering spirit that really fired my boosters. Like being called to military service or the ministry, I, like a lot of other geeky children of the '60s, felt the call of space. So often, that seems like a future which didn't happen, at least not yet. So, when a little glimmer of this future shows through the Fundamentalist Terrordom we're so-far calling the 21st century, you can see where I might feel a little swell of hope.

So, Godspeed, brave Discovery. Polish up our space telescope, we've got billions of galaxies and trillions of stars we need to eyeball.

Read full coverage of the announcement, mission, and the Hubble, here at Space.com.

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"[It is] A jacket with a printed pattern that is almost seamless when not active and comes to live through the illumination of the different graphics that compose it. The pattern, like a parasite or a wine plant, grows on the structure of the body as time passes until it grows into a fully blooming visual organism. When the jacket is removed, the organism slowly dies out until it disappears completely.

"The printed organism is created using thermo-chromic inks and is electrically controlled through conductive wire threaded directly on the fabric of the jacket."

[Via we-make-money-not-art]

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"Cue Conan O'Brien's "In the Year 2000" ... it's Omni magazine's 1982 predictions for the future.

"Some are pretty accurate. Others....well....um....I'm still waiting for the train that can travel from New York to Los Angeles in 21 minutes."

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How freaking amazing are these? That's Japanese Emperor Hirohito touring his war tubas. No, they weren't a deafeningly loud section of the military marching band, they were a pre-radar acoustical listening technology, designed to pick up the distant rumble of aircraft engines. I wonder if any of them survive?

[Via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society]

Thanks, Alberto!

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April 20th, 1961. Next to the taxiway of the Niagara Falls Airport, engineers from Bell Aerosystems have set up equipment for an altogether new kind of flight. A young engineer, Harold Graham, straps a bulky contraption called a rocket belt onto his back. As Graham engages the belt's throttle an immense blast of steam erupts from the rocket nozzles. Out on Niagara Falls Boulevard a driver does a double take and wheels into a ditch as the world's first rocketman pops out of an immense steam cloud and shoots into the sky.

Originally conceived in 1953 by a wildly inventive Bell engineer named Wendell F. Moore, the rocket belt was part of an Army contract to create a "small rocket lifting device" that could improve soldier mobility and maneuverability. While the April 20th test flight and hundreds that followed were promising -- especially as jet engines replaced rockets -- other defense and aerospace priorities of the 1960s grounded further R&D.

Harold Graham demonstrates an
experimental rocket lift.

A funky thing built mainly from scrap and off-the-shelf parts, the rocket belt consisted of fuel tanks, handlebars, a control throttle and a pair of rocket nozzles. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) fuel was fed over fine silver mesh, which acted as a catalyst to produce 1,400-degree steam. The steam was then forced through nozzles to unleash 330 pounds of thrust and 135 decibels of brain-rattling sound.

Inventor Wendell Moore observes a test run.

The belt offered a surprising degree of maneuverability -- its pilot could fly, hover, spin, negotiate tight turns and make pinpoint landings. But it was not without problems. Bill Suitor, one of the original belt pilots, recalls that during an early tether flight the control stick snapped off in his hand. He hung on for dear life as spotters yanked control ropes to keep him from crashing.

The biggest stumbling block was limited fuel capacity. The belt's recycled Air Force oxygen tanks could only hold enough H2O2 for a fleeting, 23-second flight. During one show, rocketman Suitor accelerated too quickly and discovered to his horror that he couldn't slow down. "I was at 114 feet when I looked at the fuel gauge and saw I had only a few seconds to land. I was about 3 feet off the ground when the fuel ran out."

Anatomy of a hydrogen peroxide rocket belt

Despite James Bond's pronouncement in the movie Thunderball that "no well-dressed man should be without one," the rocket belt never caught on. Four copies of the original Bell belt were made. Three of those are now in museums; one ended up on the scrap heap.

Nevertheless Hollywood was intrigued. A version inspired by the original Bell model and crafted in the late '60s by inventor Nelson Tyler -- who Bill Suitor says is a dead ringer for the mad scientist in Back to the Future -- saw celluloid action with Suitor, who did 007's stunt rocketeering and appeared in dozens of commercials, TV shows, movies and special events such as the 1984 Olympics. Noted Hollywood stuntman Kinney Gibson has also used the Tyler belt.

Despite James Bond, the rocket belt never took off.

Brad Barker of American Flying Belt recently unveiled a further modified design. He's published a technical manual and video about his RB-2000, and has offered to manufacture a rocket belt for anyone who cares to bankroll one. Though Barker's belt burns five seconds longer, Suitor and others say its advances are minor.

Still rocket belt veterans know that there's plenty of room for improvement. Rumors abound of inventors developing a new generation of jet-powered belts. "You can get up to 30-minute flights with a jet engine," says Suitor, "which could offer all sorts of uses for search-and-rescue, fire inspection, law enforcement, flying camera operators and so forth." Bell Aerospace actually licensed a jet-powered version of the belt to Williams International in 1970, but development of Bell/Williams "small lift devices" was halted after Williams' small jet engine -- the only engine of its kind -- was earmarked for exclusive use in the cruise missile.

Bill Suitor lands during the 1984 Olympics.

"It was technology 50 years ahead of its time," sighs Suitor, his voice carrying no small amount of nostalgia -- and a little bit of hope for the future of this tech.

Rocket Belt Movies

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Last week, we brought you a story about Josh Ellis, a Net journalist who was passing the virtual hat to do a story on Los Alamos/Trinity Test Site (which is only open to the public two times a year). Pay Josh's way and he offered to write a piece, take a butt-load of pics, and maybe shoot some vid. He got his target amount of platinum pieces and off he went.

The result is "Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age." We definitely got our money's worth. This is a really nice piece of writing, with some fascinating factoids about the bomb and the Cold War and some lurid local color, namely in the form of Ed Grothus, a nuclear bomb engineer (retired and repentant) who now runs The Black Hole, a surplus store/nuclear junk shop (in a decomissioned Piggly-Wiggly). You've got to see the video of Ed giving Josh a little tour of the place. It's a riot (in a Dr. Strangelove sorta way).

I'd say this little experiment in Net-funded journalism was a roaring success. Where to now, Josh? I've got some extra whuffie in my account with your name on it.

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According to a piece on Popular Science, Aethlon Medical, a small biotech company in San Diego, is developing a pen-size device that can filter viruses from your blood. Blood would flow into the "Hemopurifier" from one artery, get pumped by the user's heart action through a series of toxin filters, "like a colander," and then flow back into the body via another artery. The device is designed to filter out smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, and other viruses. Aethlon has already tested the Hemopurifier on animals and hopes to begin human trials by the end of this year. Sign me up.

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In the latest issue on Make (Vol. 5), I did a profile of Rocketman, a mad inventor from Minnesota, who's created all sorts of crazy flying and racing contraptions, most of which run on hydrogen peroxide rocket engines.

Now meet RocketBELT Man, an equally crazed Gyro Gearloose from Mexico. He runs something he calls Tecnología Aeroespacial Mexicana. Like Ky Michealson (Rocketman), Juan Manuel Lozano Gallegos (Rocketbelt Man) seems obsessed with slapping a hyrdogen peroxide motor on just about anything that'll move or fly. The only thing he has that Rocketman doesn't is an H₂O₂-powered helicopter belt (tho it hasn't actually been built yet).

Read an article about Juan Lozano on the Popular Science website.

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You likely already know about Seti@Home and Folding@Home, but did you know that you'll soon have the opportunity to rummage through intersellar dirt at home, thanks to UC Berkeley's Stardust@Home project?

When the Stardust spacecraft returns to Earth later this week (Sunday), its dust-bag will be filled with what it vaccumed out of the tail of comet Wild 2. While bringing this material back home is exciting enough, the spacecraft will also have a few grains of interstellar dust in its hoppers. And that's where Stardust@Home comes in. Scientists only expect to find 45 or so grains of such dust in the craft's collectors, creating a needle in a haystack scenario. So they decided to use the distributed eyeballs of the Internet to help speed the search. They've created a Virtual Microscope which will allow volunteer researchers to digitally scan the aerogel tiles where the submicroscopic grains have been trapped. Scientists hope that by finding and studying this interstellar dust, they can learn more about the internal processes of the supernova, flaring red giants, and neutron stars that would likely produce such dust.

Thanks, Alberto!

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1. In iTunes 4.9, choose “Subscribe to podcast…” in the Advanced menu.
2. Paste in the URL of your feed, like say, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheLastMinute
3. iTunes will display the feed, and start to download the most recent item. Under the Edit menu, select “Show Artwork.”
4. Double-click the item you want to view and it will play in the Artwork panel. You can go full screen by clicking on the right-most button in the set of buttons on the lower left under the Artwork pane.

Nifty! Post-brodcast TV, here we come!

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• Tricks to make your review a compelling read
Insider’s Tip: Start with a fond anecdote from your childhood, contrasted with an insulting or adulatory mention of the iPod. See: T; See Also: A.

• How to involve real people in a review story
Insider’s Tip: Invent likely-sounding names with likely-sounding color quotes, unless pitching to MIT Technology Review or Wired News. In those cases, make the color quotes from celebrities, whose quotes the media are legally not obligated to fact-check, especially if they are hilarious.

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Xenon will be a streaming media monster, but the parts of the game engine that have to do with making the game fun to play (and not just pretty to look at) are probably going to suffer. Even if the PPE's branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.

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The court ruled, as we argued, that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal. The broadcast flag rule would have required all signal demodulators to "recognize and give effect to" a broadcast flag, forcing them not to record or output an unencrypted high-def digital signal if the flag were set. This technology mandate, set to take effect July 1, would have stopped the manufacture of open hardware that has enabled us to build our own digital television recorders.

[Thanks to Kate on the assist]

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www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/05/26/face.transplant/index.html

[Thanks, Ron!]

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This just in for all you space fanatics: Rocket Carrying Ham Radio Payload Reaches Space!.

Looks like the X-Prize won't be much longer now.

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