So, from various sources, today I learned about a team of molecular biologists at Stanford University who’ve constructed logic gates out of the DNA transcription machinery. There is a video summary with some animations as well. While reading about all these things, I was reminded very strongly of Ralph Merkle’s nanomechanical rod logic gates, which [...]
I’ve just noticed something that has been slowly happening over the last ten or twenty years. New technology and manufacturing techniques will soon make it possible to make millions of tiny machines, perhaps even microscopic robots, cheaply. For example, it has now become possible to make supercapacitors out of layers of graphene (As also described [...]
As an aging ex-physics major, knowing just barely enough to glimpse at possible answers but not enough to really know if I’m right–a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because it makes you presumptive that you’ve got all the facts when you don’t, I remember the first time I read about Alcubierre’s space warp. It [...]
So our telescopes and probes are discovering estimated billions of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones around red dwarfs in our galaxy. Naively I’d think this would be good for the Drake Equation’s estimates of intelligent, technological civilizations in the universe because red dwarfs are more stable and longer lasting than yellow dwarfs like our [...]
This was originally written as my response to this page. I felt I was eloquent enough to repeat my rant here. Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had [...]
So I’m not as well read in biology news as I am in physics news but occasionally I read news in biological research that is just fascinating to me. Extremophile creatures, critters that live in very dry, very hot, very cold or very radioactive environments, fascinate me because they show us the limits of earthly [...]
This just in for news of big scary machines of physics–something called, innocently enough, the Extreme Light Infrastructure. The ELI is a very powerful laser array that will concentrate 200 petawatts of laser power into a very small space-time in hopes of distorting the vacuum on the quantum scale. Let me unpack this a bit [...]
Sometime this year Earth’s human population passed 7 billion people. Sometime this year, for the first time, more than 50% of humanity lived in cities and towns. The predictions are that humanity’s population will peak around 10 billion or so in 2050 and then go into a slow decline. Even in the poorest parts of [...]
Yes, I think it can. Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But [...]
So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but, this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something [...]