Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

  • Video surveillance: Who is watching you?
    Video surveillance: Who is watching you?

    London pioneered video surveillance in public, but it’s catching on fast. Many major cities have systems, and more are coming. What do these cameras learn? How do they interact with other sources of data? In this culture of disclosure should we even worry about privacy?


    Thursday, March 11th, 2010
  • Bottoms up!
    Bottoms up!

    People have been controlling fermentation for at least 9,000 years. What were the ancients brewing, and how did alcohol change society?


    Thursday, December 24th, 2009
  • Buried charcoal: Global warming star?
    Buried charcoal: Global warming star?

    Buried charcoal stimulates microbes and plant growth, helping farmers on poor soil. Studies show that charcoal is stable for hundreds of years.


    Thursday, December 10th, 2009
  • Internet: The fastest teacher?
    Internet: The fastest teacher?

    MRI scans of older people show major differences between searchers and non-searchers. After seven hours of Internet experience, those differences disappear. Honest? Could changing the brain be this easy?


    Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
  • Driving while blabbing
    Driving while blabbing

    How many dead? Research and real-life experience prove that people die when drivers pick up the cellphone. Even worse: texting on the road!


    Thursday, September 17th, 2009
  • Nanotech
    Nanotech

    Adding nanotubes makes a stronger plastic, but adding several nano-structures greatly increases the benefit, according to a new study from India. Read about the frontier of material science.


    Thursday, July 30th, 2009
  • New battery technology allows fast charge and discharge
    New battery technology allows fast charge and discharge

    By tweaking the conventional recipe, researchers have sped up electricity movement in a lithium battery by 100X. Want to charge your electric car in minutes or your phone in seconds?


    Thursday, March 12th, 2009
  • Economic stimulus = just pouring concrete?
    Economic stimulus = just pouring concrete?

    Obama decides that current and new grant applications at the National Institutes of Health are an effective economic stimulus. People get jobs. Inventions get invented. What’s not to like?


    Thursday, December 18th, 2008
  • Green as a garbage dump? Waste rots, makes energy…

    Decay is part of life, and death. When garbage decays in a landfill, or manure decays in a tank, the result is methane. Is this natural gas a problem — or an opportunity?


    Thursday, November 6th, 2008
  • Reading the brain; controlling the muscles
    Reading the brain; controlling the muscles

    A single neuron in the brain may deliver enough information to control a muscle. These results could eventually help bypass the spinal cord, allowing paralyzed people to control their own muscles.


    Thursday, October 16th, 2008


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Image courtesy of Pete Mouginis-Mark, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawaii at Manoa

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