It turns out that people who doodle – a light cognitive load – can recall information better than people who don’t. Presumably because they daydream, which is a heavy cognitive load.

Of course these guys, The Fertility Clinics, are under fire from all kinds of people who don’t think we aught mess with things we know not wot of, but in any case this is clever:
Choose your babies gender, eye and hair colour, as well as checking for diseases, all through the wonders of modern science!

By hooking up an MRI and looking at the visual cortex whilst the subject looks at an object creates a pattern. When the subject recalls that object in short term memory, you can recognise that pattern and tell what object the subject is thinking of.

This has 2 implications:
1) We can read a specific person’s mind; if we build up a library of their memory patterns
2) The part of the brain used to recall memories is the same as the part used when we are looking at something directly. This is important: it means that we really are living in a world created by our imaginations 🙂

It’s been known for some time that eyewitnesses to an unpredictable and violent event have differing and even conflicting memories and testimonials of the event. Interestingly they also suffer from a deep need to conform: eyewitnesses put before a line-up will point out a person if they’ve been told that one of the line-up has confessed, even if the perpetrator is not in the line. If an eyewitness had fingered another person first and then heard about the confession of another, they’d usually change their accusation to another.

Astrometry.net will give you back the celestial coordinates of an image of the sky you upload to them.

The procedure is still to dangerous to be used routinely – around 1/3rd of people die during the op, but this guy, who was transplanted with a mutated form of stem cells (with crippled CCR5 receptors, without which most forms of HIV can’t latch on to the cells, lending a natural immunity) made it and the docs can’t detect any HIV virusses: 2 years after the op!
They’re hoping this will lead to practical cures within 5 years…

Iran is now one of the few countries with a space programme, capable of launching satellites into space.
Of course, the US is now worried that they have developed it specifically to rain down EMP weapons on them.

So I have this bee in my bonnet about wikipedia being used for anything at all. Why? Because it’s not peer reviewed: it’s user reviewed, with users with the most reviews having the most powers – even if they make nonsense edits on things they know nothing about. Then there’s the political infighting and the obvious bias when it comes to certain people, cults or religions. Search the Register for many many examples.

So what then? We need some kind of trustworthy encyclopedia, don’t we? Well there are plenty of specific knowledge resources out there, so I’m not going to start on that, but Brittanica or Encarta are both paid systems, so to find out anything you’re going to need to pay.

Fortunately there are three free, peer reviewed alternatives:

1) Conservapedia, which is still user generated, but they have better rules than wikipedia.

2) Citizendium which was set up by a dissatisfied Wikipedia founder and uses experts in the field as well as strips anonymity.

3) Europeana, set up by the EU itself and with considerable help from a whole load of libraries, should be very good indeed. Unfortunately they had no experience with the scale of the project and they keep implementing new hardware in an attempt to keep up with demand. This means the encyclopedia is broken now and again.

8/9/10
There’s also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where articles are peer reviewed

This guy says he doesn’t believe in global warning and he should know his stuff. He was the boss of Hansen, the guy who crusades the man made global warming theory. Especially upsetting is that data sets were changed in a non-documented fashion, so we don’t know why or how the data was changed.

This is the first time they’ve managed to teleport qubits between ions. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there!

TNO is the Netherland’s premier research institution and these guys should know what they’re saying. They make the point that pirates turn out to be the biggest paying consumers too. It’s time for people to change their business model, instead of scapegoating their best customers!

Ah yes, invisible cloaks!

I keep covering this, in the hope the technology will finally mature at some point.

There’s loads of technologies to choose from

Now, the metamaterias gang has produced a cloak measuring 10 x 50 cm It bends waveforms in a large range of frequencies and is very low loss.

They’ve developed software which allows them to very quickly prototype the placement and layout of the metamaterials over a surface. The technology itself is fairly cheap to implement. So it looks like it’s finally happening for real!

Allergan has gone and invented a drug called Latisse that will make your eyelashes and more prominent.

So people who tend to exhibit risky behaviours do so to increase the rate of dopamine firing in their brain. It’s a pysiological thing, to enjoy bungee jumping, drugs, sex, motorbikes, etc.

Nanoparticles Make Surface Too Slippery For Bacteria To stick to

Even when submerged, the nanotech spikes balance water as balls on their tips, ensuring the material itself never gets wet.

A bunch of Mexican scientists found that the makeup of tequilla is perfect for making diamond film from.

Some people have a natural resistance to HIV due to a genetic mutation. Dr. Hütter transplanted a HIV infected patient’s bone marrow with some from an immune person and the HIV virus, surprisingly, dissappeared. Now they’re looking into whether it’s a fluke or not.

You spit in a tube, post it to 23andMe and get a result on your predisposition for more than 90 traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. So you can select your next partner with even more care than ever before and be scared shitless of having a child for ever more.

Who knew? If you peel away Scotch tape, you emit X-Rays. Well, the Russians found out about 50 years ago. It turns out that unpeeling 3 cm / second emits enough X-Rays to take a picture of a finger!

In addition to gas, liquid and solid we now also have “quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal”, which is sort of 3D, but not quite. Strange stuff, and the boffins are looking at it to see what they can do with it, but as they discovered it in a resistor, there’s a good chance this will be of use to minituarise computer chips, allowing us to make them even faster.

This contains a whole load of free whitepapers, case studies and best practices relevant to IT

The images made by National Geographic are incredible and show baby sharks eating their siblings in the womb as well as cats, dogs, lions, bees, wolves, penguins, etc as they grow in incredible detail

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards.
It’s huge and has loads of physics / mathematical / computer science papers in it.

arXiv.org e-Print archive

For free!