Don't Panic Starman

Elon Musk's brainchild is now live-streaming from outer space! The dashboorad is displaying a Hitchhiker's Guide to teh galaxy reference - "DON'T PANIC!)

According to TechCrunch the Tesla Roadster will be blasting Space Oddity by David Bowie throughout its Journey to Mars! Too bad sound can't travel in space. But it sure can here on earth so crank up your speakers!

IoT - the Internet of Things. Next up? Light Bulbs.

More about IoT from Forbes.



I first heard the term "Internet of Things" from Neil Gershenfeld during a panel discussion titled "Internet Everywhere" at the 2012 World Science Festival.

Earlier -

iNTERNET for ALL

Biking Viking: introducing the Copenhahen Wheel

New chapter in the the "Story of Stuff"

If you have ever seen Annie Leonard's brilliant "Story of Stuff" digital short I thought you would appreciate the phoneblok idea.

Hello Dolly

The New York Times RetroReport (which I've featured previously) focuses its light on Dolly the sheep and the implications of animal cloning. Looking at the legacy of Dolly and all the fear pumped into the mainstream by the media makes me think we really need to stop letting all the chicken little attitudes hog the microphones in the aftermath of biotechnology breakthroughs. I'm talking to you Krulwich!

Self-assembling cube-bots!

I refuse to dignify the recent Tea-Party tantrum and resultant government shutdown with coverage so here is an example of what the future holds. What a society can create when it uses science is phenomenal and yet we have elected congresspeople who do not believe in evolution, climate change, or even embryology. Equally amazing but in a bad way.

GMO OMG! ~ a new film from the director of "Dive"

Director Jeremy Seifert is hosted by Josh Zepp to discuss and debate the public furor over genetically modified food crops. A public discussion that needs to happen.

CLARITY - looking inside the brain

I stumbled across this video yesterday while bouncing around Twitter. Mitch Waldrop had posted the video a few months ago. The technology displayed here is dubbed CLARITY - a new method for looking inside animal tissues. In this case brains. It takes the grey mass you normally think of when you think "brain" and turns it into a jellyfish-like consistency, see-through and all. CLARITY was developed by a team of interdisciplinary researchers at Stanford University lead by Karl Deisseroth. I am constantly amazed at the pace of progress we are witnessing in biomedical science. Just brilliant!

3D Printing Life: Molecular Paleontology and the Potential for Anthropogenic Panspermia.

Here we see Austen Heinz of Cambrian Genomics describing the method and potential future applications of 3D printing living things.
 

Your Brain in the Cloud

If you think this guy is a joke after watching the above video consider this - Ray Kurzweil is the current director of engineering at Google!

When he speaks of having gateways to the cloud in our brains I can't help think we are already there in many ways.

Let me tell you what I did today and yesterday on my iPhone. Along my daily bike ride into the lab I saw a beautiful flower. I had not seen this flower yet this season and was unaware of its identity. However, I knew that either my mother or my girlfriend or both would know the name of the mysterious purple flower.

With photo-text on my phone and the three characters - ID? - I was able to procure the information I wanted within seconds - common name Periwinkle,  Latin name Vinca minor. While I road my bike past another periwinkle in bloom this morning I again took its photo. This time I was armed with the ID so I posted the photo to twitter and facebook and labeled it with time, date and geo-coordinates. This image has now become a phenological data point in the cloud. I hope it will one day be deposited into a massive data-set and mapped to a model of earth's surface so we can look back at the phenological record as captured by citizen-scientists all over the world. If you are not familiar with the word phenology see my earlier post and video on the topic.

The Bee's Knees!

Functional bicycle 3D-printed!

A special thanks to Maria Popova for tweeting such awesomeness this morning.  Though this application for 3D-printing is indeed tantalizing there are many further implications to this technology. I heard a story on the Nature podcast a few moths ago that a 93 year-old woman had an exact replica of her lower jaw bone printed out of titanium. She then had her cancerous bone replaced with the printed metal one! On top of all the terminator body-part upgrades my mind is running wild with the possible effects 3D-printing will have on the economy and the environment. Imagine a manufacturing company setting up decentralized printing factories to save on shipping costs. Good for the bottom line and the environment. I'm sure there are caveats to the technology but watching this video I can't help think about future scenarios where something like the Star-Trek replicator becomes real.

Whoa! This is AMAZING!

Aside from neural implants I can not fathom a more intuitive web interface. Imagine what a Van Gogh of our age might do with this. Imagine designing recombinant proteins with this. Imagine sculpting in the cloud. My mind is running wild!

Happy Birthday Tesla!

Nikola Tesla sculpture located at Queen Victoria Park near Niagara falls, unveiled on July 9, 2006. Tesla stands atop an AC motor, one of the 700 inventions he patented. The monument is the work of Canadian sculptor Les Dryzdale.

Nikola Tesla ushered in the age of alternating current, radio, and television with fanfare. Though his showmanship as a scientist often made skeptics of his colleagues his ideas were eons ahead of their time and are only now receiving the kind of consideration and awe they deserve.

When presenting his new concepts he insisted one of his coils (right) be spouting off the visual manifestations of electricity, popping and fizzling so loudly as to make his words inaudible. If his contemporaries could have heard his voice they would see he had an infectious obsession with progress and the idea that the hidden powers of electricity and magnetism could be unlocked to allow humanity to live more easily. 


He had a vision for free and equitable POWER (in all philosophical and practical definitions of the word) for every man woman and child on earth. His efforts to realize this were thwarted by J. P. Morgan and other financial backers who caught wind of Tesla's scheme to deliver free electricity wirelessly to the public through Tesla's giant telecommunications tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. There was no profit to be made by giving people what the needed freely. But presently, as the internet gains depth and gravity, this vision is being pieced together slowly and perhaps one day will be complete. The ghost of Nikola Tesla breathes life into the very medium in which I pass these keystrokes along. Happy Birthday Nikola!

 If you want to laugh for the rest of the day watch this summary of Tesla's life.

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from Drunk History

Read more about Tesla and enrapturing life story here here and here

Abound Solar - Colorado Company Goes Belly-Up

Abound Solar, a Colorado manufacturer of thin-film solar cells went under this week. Pressure from inexpensive Chinese products combined with poor management drove a promising company out of business in just two years.

The company spun-off research done at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. Before re-branding itself as "Abound Solar" the company was called AVA Solar. AVA or air-vacuum-air, representing the unique assembly method used. 

The thin-film cadmium-tellurium photovoltaic cells produced by the company were the brainchild of Dr. W.S. Sampath. I wrote optimistically about Dr. Sampath and the company when they first announced their business plan. See this post for a more extensive background of the company.

I had hoped Abound...

Paul Otlet predicts internet and iPad in 1934!

In this bit of historical futurism we can all be amazed at the eerie accuracy with which Paul Otlet predicted how people would access information in the year 2012.

Jason Silva on Networks

TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

On Internet Censorship

"When various members of congress become upset with the content they see on the net and want to suppress it, I feel compelled to remind them that they would not be sitting where they are sitting were it not for anonymous tracks published in the 18th century that incited the Americans to revolt against the British."
~Vinton Cerf - one of the fathers of the Internet

Quote from his appearance at the 2012 World Science Festival in New York City.
Speaks directly to the Origin Story of Tom Paine's Ghost!

Extra Soma, Extended Phenoptype

How do you think technology projects our respective genotypes? Is this blog part of my extra soma? My extended phenotype? If you comment is it part of yours?

Thanks be to Matteo for showing me this video and introducing me to Jason Silva.