01 – Dude, you had me at ‘light sabers‘.
02 – Two off the shelf medicines combine to form a cancer Terminator. All you have to do is label all your tumors ‘Sarah Connor’. Couple the treatment with this, and you’ll make sure it sticks around to get the job done with no pesky lovesick heroes getting in the way.
03 – A cheap way to make hydrogen from water. Cheap in that it is efficient and the catalyst is not exotic or expensive.
04 – Blue Pee, Malaria free!
05 – The Turducken of particle physics. This is pretty neat, actually, although I have no idea if anyone has any clue if such a state is useful beyond expanding the frontiers of physics.
06 – I see this as simply a new artificial eye, but I wonder if it can’t be the first step towards advanced corrective lenses for human vision. And by advanced, I mean Super-Vision(TM)!
07 – Robots are getting into the custom furniture biz.
08 – Uber is being smart. Sure, they’ll turn a profit, but getting people to medical appointments is an obvious good for the service.
09 – Good for you Lego! My only question is, the bricks are still polyethylene, so while they may be sourced from non-petroleum feedstock, are they still a landfill issue (the parts are not biodegradable)? One problem at a time, I guess.
10 – DARPA would really like it if you didn’t die on the battlefield.
11 – Keeping satellites in LEO by sucking air. Or by dragging their tails.
12 – Google sees Intel’s 49-qubits and raises them 23-qubits. Oh, man, the World Series of Quantum Poker is getting tense here, folks.
13 – Overall, I give Renault’s concept car an ‘eh’, but I do like the way you enter and leave, where the roof pops up and away. Gotta open the interactive press kit to see what I mean.
14 – Is ball lightning the key to fusion power? Probably not directly, but I think ball lightning is cool.
15 – I’m thinking we’ll be needing these in the next 25-50 years. Unless the GMO haters have their way. Oh, what am I saying, in 25-50 years, the GMO haters will be dead of starvation because everything we grow will have some kind of GMO tweak to it.
16 – Don’t worry, Tin Man, we got you covered.
17 – Researchers in Northern Ireland have created a gamma ray burst in the lab. In entirely unrelated news, there are unconfirmed reports of the largest and angriest leprechaun ever seen roaming the Irish countryside.
18 – Last one, and it shows that despite popular belief to the contrary, scientists have a sense of humor.
04: Methylene blue, is there anything it can’t do? (Also used to treat methemoglobinemia, amyl nitrate poisoning, and also a fun fraternity prank to put in the punch. Ahem. I may watch more “Untold Stories of the ER’ than is good for me.)
(We do use it in lab for staining cells with the intro classes, because it works, it’s non toxic, and it’s cheap)Report
[12] — Cool, but like, I’ll actually believe we have something when we can factor big primes.Report
Hence my poker reference. At this point, they are mostly just figuring out chip architecture (or whatever the equivalent is for a quantum processor). Not a whole lot of actual work is being done with them.Report
[18] — This is relevant to my interests. Next time someone looks askance at some of the — shall we say — implements lying around my room, I shall say, “I like spiders.”Report
No categories? But science itself is built on structure!
That Uber idea is really good. The company could use the positive press.
A question about the Renault: are those front seats backward-facing? It looks that way. I can understand the conversational benefit, but a lot of people get motion sickness riding backwards.Report
Chaos theory, baby!
I thought the Renault had bench seats running the length of the car. If it has front seats, they probably swivel.Report
Re the mode of entry to the Renault… Have you ever noticed that the artist’s renderings of spiffy openings always show them being used in warm, calm weather? I usually ask myself, “How practical would this be in an afternoon thunderstorm in Denver, with rain, maybe some pea-sized hail, and wind gusting to 25 mph?”Report
Well obviously, it would suck for that, but (IIRC) Renault wasn’t planning on selling it outside France.Report
France doesn’t have bad weather?Report
Like the French would do anything so pedestrian as tolerate bad weather….Report
[1] I’m not sure how rubidium atoms at a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero can form a “cloud” at least not under earth gravity? Wouldn’t that be more like a “puddle”? Or is my physics flawed?Report
My guess is that you don’t have enough atoms in the experiment to develop anything resembling surface tension, hence no ‘puddle’, only cloud.Report
Yeah, extremely diffuse gas in a magneto-optical trap of some flavor. Experimental physicists build some of the strangest gadgets…Report
5 sounds more like one of the urban planning articles we get around here. An outer beltway + increased population density = a city with cities inside it.Report
09 – How many LEGO bricks end up in landfill?Report
Judging by my basement? None. None LEGO bricks ever leave.Report
My brother reclaimed all his leftover lego bricks from his childhood for his daughter, and now she builds with them. So they’re going on their second generation. Of course that required my parents to save them (and even move them when they moved) with the thought that one of us would have kids and would want them….
FWIW: I still have some of my childhood stuffed toys. No, I do not have children and won’t be at this point.Report
They put them all in one giant square landfill.Report
I’m not sure, but Lego reports they recycle in-house something on the order of 70 million bricks a year.Report
Are those defective ones? LEGO works because every piece you get fits with every other piece anyone else has ever gotten. Even if they’ve achieved an insane hit rate, I still reckon they’re producing many misses just because of volume. If they melt and reform them and count that as recycling, that could be a big part of that.Report
07:
This caught my eye:
I also see this, that AI we are moving away from the era of mass production into something like bespoke production, where it is as cheap to make a million one of a kind items as it is to make a million identical ones.
The consequences I think, can be enormous.
Mass production shaped our politics and society, and helped determine the physical form of our cities, determining where and how we lived and moved.Report
On the optimistic side, if this opens up machine based competition vs. industrial mass production, then broadly distributed AI Machine platforms could greatly diversify production and wages and revolutionize our relationship to work, production and supply chains.
On the less optimistic side, riiiiight.Report
Related
Mattershift is working on nanoscale 3D printingReport
18 – LOL That is awesome. However I’m afraid to let my son see it for fear of what may be done with our tea strainers…
12 – If only it were qualoos instead of qubits, that would be a great Star Trek referenceReport