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January 2008 Archives
Fashion :: The Future is so Yesterday
by Fashion Week is about to kick off in New York tomorrow, but some of the craziest and most futuristic styles were actually showcased yesterday at the Boston Museum of Science. Dubbed, Seamless: Computational Couture, the show featured emerging designers from around the world who incorporate experimental technology into their designs. Check out a few of these concept pieces below:
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Space Exploration's Beginning In the USA
by Today is the 50th anniversary of the day the US replied to the world-changing Sputnik launch by the USSR almost four months earlier. In some sense, the space race began in earnest with this launch of the craft called Explorer. It also marked the beginning of spacecraft-driven scientific discoveries about the world beyond and our own planet earth.
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Did you double-dip that chip!?
by The science of Seinfeld: does double-dipping a chip really contaminate the chip dip?
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44 Orders of Magnitude
by What a ridiculously large number 44 orders of magnitude is! Yet that is the span of science; the number of the smallest subatomic scale phenomena that we are interested in that span the largest cosmological scale.
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The Anthropocene
The Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky noted 60 years ago that "Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force." In honor of this change, the present (starting perhaps in 1900, or 1945 or 2000) era is already informally called the "anthropocene" in some circles. This may become the formal name for our time soon enough. Here's an interesting example of an unprecedented geological process that could not have happened before our time.
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Marine Mammals... Cute, Cuddly, And In Crisis
by Twenty-five marine mammal populations in the US of A are currently classified as either endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and thirty are listed as depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). While these policies aim to reduce the greatest threats, we've got a long way to go. To get readers up to speed, I've outlined five of the most serious...
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Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi Part III
by In this final installment of my conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi, I find out some of the methods and motivations behind the author's stories in his new book PUMP SIX. Whether it's over-consumptive Southern Californians sucking the Western water supply dry, or neo-feudalists bioengineering their impoverished subjects into living musical instruments like a next-generation "American Idol", Paolo manages to fashion truly terrifying and dystopic landscapes into strangely credible visions of our future.
Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi - Part II
In this, the second installment of my conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi, we turn to the substance of his stories and the origins of his various muses. Paolo discusses his environmentalist tendencies, why it's good to believe in the project of science fiction, and why it's not always so good to believe in our technology.
Planck Meets Fleming
So yesterday at Pinewood Studios they announced the name of the upcoming second James Bond film in the new series that (excellently, in my opinion) re-envisions the Bond movie universe. Last year's first one was "Casino Royale", you may recall. Did you hear what the next one will be called?
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Science Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi
In the last episode of Science Fiction Friday I had a conversation with one of science fiction's elite in Greg Bear and learned how we might all die from bioterrorism. This time around I've turned to SF's new guard in Paolo Bacigalupi and received an education about how we might all die from environmental disaster.
An ounce of prevention...
The rabies vaccine was one of the early public health success stories. Why, then, are millions of people still infected with the rabies virus every year--with a death from the virus occurring every ten minutes?
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Obesity and Greenhouse Gas Addiction
Andrew Dessler makes an analogy between weight problems and greenhouse gas emissions, suggesting that greenhouse gases are to society as overeating is to individuals. As a fat person obsessed with climate change, the analogy has not escaped me.
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Did Yersinia pestis really cause the Black Death?
You were probably taught in your World History course that the Black Death was caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. However, there have been challenges to that assertion almost from the identification of the bacterium. Did Y. pestis really cause plague?
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Coming Attraction
In a world where people read science fiction... That's right, Science Fiction Friday is just two days away and I'm already getting all anxious about it. You too? I've got just the thing for that anxiety: a little preview of what SFF has on offer this week. Paolo Bacigalupi is a sharp and distinctive new voice in science fiction who has a lot to say about our world and where it might be headed.
NC Science Blogging Conference Redux: Science Blogging and Ethics
by I am still recovering from my marvelous (but snowy) trip to North Carolina for the awesome Science Blogging Conference. The first session I attended was entitled Science Blogging and Ethics. I don't believe this session was recorded, like many others, but there are other discussions about it online.
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Framing Science At The NC Science Blogging Conference
I spent Saturday at the NC Science Blogging Conference... but don't let the title fool you. Science bloggers, writers, and journalists from around the world converged in Raleigh, North Carolina to talk about opportunities in new media, our role, and the changing environment.
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Overgeneralizing
Sometimes things we learn in one walk of life can apply to another, and sometimes not...
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The Political Climate
Last night CBS aired the news special "The Age of Warming." Scott Pelley, the "60 Minutes" correspondent did a very "60 Minutes"-like job reporting on the climate science. After the requisite standing at the feet of some receding glaciers, it was off to see some penguins so we could shudder at the thought that they might not have anywhere to march. While it was encouraging to see some mainstream media reportage on science, it wasn't until the investigation turned to the Bush administration's censorship of one of the world's leading climate scientists that I decided that the program warranted a mention here. The revelations are astounding.
Not Science Fiction
Anti-matter. Seeing the previous word, you immediately glance back at the title, right? Strangely, it has been 80 years since the discovery of anti-matter, and we use it routinely in our technology. Nevertheless, anti-matter is still thought of as something from science fiction (and mostly bad science fiction at that).
It all goes back to one of my favourite theoretical physicists, Paul Dirac, and you might like how he found it [...]
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Images from Mercury
NASA's website for the MESSENGER spacecraft has a growing bank of lovely images of Mercury, recently sent. There are more on the way. So go and have a good look at the solar system's closest body to the sun.
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Boring Macworld Photos PLUS Parting Thoughts!
by My final thought about the event is that it was a big sack of fun to be there, but I'm not all psyched up about the "big" announcements. I shall further express my lack of psyching in list form...
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New Blogger On The Blog: I Used to Love B.I.O.
Hello there, my name is Liz and I am the newest blogger on Correlations. A little known secret is, I am the editor for this blog, so I have been here since the beginning--but behind the scenes like those little mice that keep the wheels turning. Today, I finally come out as a regular blogger, and I'm pretty excited!
Macworld '08: Quicken Redux
Anyone who uses Quicken for PC and then has had the unfortunate displeasure of switching to the Mac version feels an overwhelming sense of castration. Sometimes I feel like Intuit went out of its way to say, "Heeeey, suck it Mac User!" The interface is dreadful, batch editing is a drag and many times I yell at the transaction download system like it was an under-achieving teenage son. You might imagine, therefore, that I was pleased to run into a guy in front of the main showroom handing out flyers for the Intuit booth and its brand new iteration of Quicken for Mac, which will be out this fall.
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Where do our radio waves go?
I was reading on the internet that our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930's have already traveled past 100,000 stars. Which got me to wondering...What happens to these radio waves? Do they degrade? Would it actually be possible to listen to these broadcasts if someone theoretically set up a massive receiver like the one at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in The Quiet Zone segment?
Science is Art.
The arts have a monumental role in culture which is, of course, at the intersection of politics, science... Life. They have always been so intricately connected, they are fundamentally aspects of the same entity. Scientists like Nicolas Devos remind me to look closer at our world now and then.
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'Saved' by MacBook Air
Remember the quandary over Mac or PC?
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Diagnosing disease, the old-fashioned way
Medical technology marries the old with the new to "sniff" out infections and cancer.
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A Cloud Called Smith
There's quite a substantial cosmic collision due to happen. It is between our very own galaxy and a cloud of gas called the Smith Cloud. It's due to happen soon, by cosmological standards, but rather a while away by human standards. There are all sorts of collisions happening in our universe, near and far, fast and slow, always interesting, and often with a lot to teach us. More locally, there's also been an update on the collision of an asteroid with mars that was possible at the end of this month.
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2008 CES: The Neonode N2
While eating at a schmancy sushi place in the Venetian, I noticed a Nordic looking fellow when he pulled out what looked like an iPhone accidentally knocked up a CB radio mic. The bastard device in question was the Neonode N2, a cellular phone of Swedish citizenship with no carrier in the US yet.
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Aliens on Earth or Name that Creature :: Answers
If you weren't able to guess, here are the answers to the mystery creatures!
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Snow: A Northerner Braves The South
Snow: A type of precipitation consisting of agglomerates of snow crystals. It reflects sunlight and even changes the way sound travels. It's fun to eat, pack, throw, shovel, and watch. We humans are so fascinated with snow, we've even come up with little paper weights that imitate the falling phenomenon so we can take it with us.
After our Correlations meet up in LA, my sentiments on the white stuff were to change dramatically...
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2008 CES: 3-D DLP HDTV
Samsung really impressed me this year. From the capable yet stylish Blackjack II cell phone to a powerful virtual surround Sound Bar with a wireless Bluetooth subwoofer to a new Ultra Mobile PC to RSS on your TV to OLEDs and larger smooth HDs to a freaking PERSONAL CELL TOWER, this peddler in electronic delights was probably my favorite overall exhibitor.
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Diagnosing disease--hundreds of years later
Epidemiologists investigate more than just disease in the present day. Biologic samples allow us a form of time travel, diagnosing diseases that killed their victim hundreds of years ago, and symptoms of disease allow us to speculate even on what ailed fictional characters.
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Relating and Correlating
Michael celebrates the improved cohesion, energy and vision of the Correlations team and then messes it all up by foolishly starting an argument with the on-air talent.
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Correlations Correlation
The Correlations bloggers have now (almost) all met! We hung out and brainstormed on Friday in Los Angeles. Also, appropriately, there was a surprising correlation...
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Alzheimer's disease: the viral link
Could a childhood infection predispose you to develop Alzheimer's disease many decades down the road?
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Comets and Meteors for the New Year
The year starts out with the return of some familiar objects in the sky. Comet Tuttle returns, comet Holmes is still putting on a show,and the Quadrantid meteor shower had quite a peak this morning.
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