Farlops Industries

• The workings of ICANN grow steadily less open and less democratic. It’s just a tool for industry now.
• With the possible exception of Ian Stewart’s Mathematical Recreations column, Scientific American has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. Science News on the other hand is still kicking bottom and takin’ names. Read Ivars Peterson’s Math Trek to see why.
• I’ve made a few mentions of the Knoppix distribution here. Slash has story about how to install Knoppix to your HDD.
• Chemists have built a tiny fuel cell that runs on glucose and oxygen that produces voltages comparable to a watch battery. The device could have zillions of medical MEMS applications.
• In related news, chemists have finally figured out how to make a full-spectrum photovoltaic cell. This means solar cells can finally reach efficiencies greater than 70% without all the expensive and fragile cell stacking that they used to do.
• Optical traps (sometimes used to supercool atoms, molecules and other tiny particles,) have gotten so good you can play Tetris with them!
• The Peacefire group has been compiling a list of methods that defeat various Internet anti-censorship tools in order to improve those tools–sounds like an arms-race to me.
• Adrian has written a neat little tool that parses a page and then gives you a content versus markup ratio.

Proponents of creationism and vitalism have the hardest time wrapping their heads round the idea that life might have emerged from natural chemical processes or that mind can emerge from mindless computation. But with each passing day, in these modern times, I think Darwin’s dangerous idea gets more and more evidence to support it. Today, in fact, scientists have announced that they will attempt to create a novel form of life. Besides, the creationists should be careful, they might get what they want.

• Now that mid-term elections have given the Republicans the majority of governorships and control of both houses of Congress to go along with their control of the Executive, there really isn’t a heck of a lot they can’t do if the various factions in the party agree. The average science nerd in the street wants to know how this regime change will affect science and technology policy.
• In an attempt to improve the durability and security of the Internet, technicians decide to move the root servers that control the DNS system. I talked a little about the root servers of the DNS many months ago. It’s all this quiet, behind-the-scenes foundational stuff of the Internet that really interests me.
• Here is an interesting page of optical illusions that I found on Blogdex.
• As handed out from the Manky Paw, comes news that they are planning to film Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Thoughts are that Chou Yun Fat will play the part of Louis Wu and sophisticated computer animation will play the part of Nessus and Speaker-to-Animals. Nanotechnology and cyberpunk has, in some ways, seriously dated much of Niven’s work but I look forward to seeing what Hollywood comes up with.

I’ll probably have sidebar RSS feeds one day but until then, here they are:

• Nano news from around the planet as compiled by Google.
• The earliest entries at Nanodot.
• News on nanotech and MEMS as compiled by SmallTimes.
• Gina Miller’s nanotech news.