Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers To Build Our Future:
Search engines, virtual worlds, the Internet — ever get the feeling you're living in a science fiction fantasy? Well indeed you are. For more than a century, inventors have been driven to create what sci-fi writers have boldly imagined before. But talk to most science fiction authors, and they will tell you that their work is usually cautionary.
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August 21, 2010
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet:
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.
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In a First, Full-Sized Robo-Copter Flies With No Human Help:
In mid-June, a single-turbine helicopter took off from a test field in Mesa, AZ, avoided obstacles during flight, scoped out a landing site and landed safely. It’s the kind of flight choppers have made tens of thousands of times before. Except this time, the helicopter did it
entirely on its own — with no humans involved. It was the first fully autonomous flight of a full-sized chopper, ever.
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Disasters often stem from hubris:
It's all so familiar. A technological disaster, then a presidential commission examining what went wrong. And ultimately a discovery that while technology marches on, concern for safety lags. Technology isn't as foolproof as it seemed.
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July 12, 2010
Debate over gender disorder drug:
Can it be ethical to give girl fetuses a drug to prevent ambiguous genitalia when the drug may also influence their sexual preferences in later life? The US researchers involved reject the idea of using the drug to "treat" homosexuality.
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July 9, 2010
California Legislators' Effort to Prevent Student DNA Testing Could Come Too Late:
State legislators have lined up a bill aimed at preventing the University of California, Berkeley, from executing a controversial program that asks new students to participate in genetic testing as part of a fall semester orientation program. But even if the bill becomes law, it will likely be too late to halt DNA collection because campus officials began mailing saliva sampling kits to about 5,500 incoming freshmen and transfer students this week and the bill cannot come up for a vote before August 2.
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July 9, 2010
Stanford Ushers In The Age Of Bookless Libraries:
The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. In the past five years, most engineering periodicals have moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better. Students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.
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July 8, 2010
If Cars Could Fly:
Is it a plane? Is it a car? No, it’s a super flying car-plane! If you’ve ever had the burden of trying to decide between driving or flying to work, soon you’ll be able to do both.
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June 30, 2010
Taking Tomatoes Back To Their Tasty Roots:
After tomatoes have been engineered to be high yield and consequently less tasty, scientists in Florida now want to restore the supermarket tomato to something that tastes more like a tomato than a piece of cardboard. The researchers say it will take a combination of psychology and genetics to accomplish their goal.
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May 28, 2010
Science for the Masses:
The US National Science Foundation’s insistence that every research project addresses ‘broader impacts’ leaves many researchers baffled. CSPO affiliate Barry Bozeman suggests NSF create specific research programmes with strong broader-impact goals around areas in which the effects are important and obvious, such as climate change.
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May 26, 2010
Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell:
A team of scientists has created what they say is the first synthetic cell. Although the achievement may pave the way to better ways to make biofuels and vaccine, for some it raises troubling moral questions.
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May 21, 2010
Electronic Fireflies to Light Up Your Backyard:
Fireflies in a jar are a wonderful childhood memory for many of us. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the things that Tom Padula missed when he moved from the Midwest to Silicon Valley nearly two decades ago. So in the spirit of Silicon Valley, Padula decided to create electronic fireflies: lightweight, inexpensive, solar-powered bugs.
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May 20, 2010
The Cyborg Insects Are Coming! Why it's futile to resist new military technology:
CSPO affiliate Brad Allenby notes that American military technology is getting very frisky. And most of these
technologies will eventually make their way back to civil society with impacts that will probably be more complex and more difficult than anyone can predict. While it's tempting to call a stop to deployment, the US will develop
these strange and alarming new technologies, but not, perhaps, for the reasons that many suspect.
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Arizona State Settles DNA Case With Indian Tribe:
Researchers and institutions that receive federal funds are required to receive “informed consent” from subjects, ensuring that they understand the risks and benefits before they participate. But such protections were designed primarily for research that carried physical risks, like experimental drug trials or surgery. When it comes to mining DNA, the rules — and the risks — are murkier.
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April 21, 2010
Cheating hurts China's science ambitions:
Ghostwriting, plagiarizing and faking results is so rampant in Chinese academia that some experts worry it could hinder China's efforts to become a leader in science.
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April 11, 2010
Marines Tap Social Sciences In Afghan War Effort:
Is the military's use of social science research somehow less ethical than its use of natural science research? U.S. forces in Afghanistan are using a controversial tool in their efforts to hold the ground recently captured from the Taliban. It is the work of civilian anthropologists and other social science researchers, who advise military commanders on how to win the hearts and minds of local people.
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GM introduces 2-wheel, 2-seat car of future:
It's not quite as foldable as the space vehicle that cartoon figure George Jetson pops into his briefcase as he bops into the office. But the EN-V concept car, GM's "automobile solution" for the future, just might fit into an apartment foyer.
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March 25, 2010
Colleges, Professors Discourage Women from Pursuing STEM Careers:
Significant numbers of women and minorities who made it into science careers were discouraged along the way. What's more, the bulk of those who said they've experienced discouragement most often cited their educational institutions as the offenders.
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March 23, 2010
A variable velocity rifle that puts the 'less' in 'less-lethal':
New from the designers of the “Tickle Me Elmo” doll: a variable velocity less-lethal rifle. The Lund Variable Velocity Weapons System is a gas combustion rifle that chambers both lethal and less-lethal rounds, automatically
adjusting the muzzle velocity downward if a target is too close so as not to accidentally turn a “less-lethal” situation into a highly undesirable one.
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March 22, 2010
'Repo Men:' Metaphor For Health Care Overhaul?:
Is the new movie Repo Men, in which the title characters repossess artificial organs when the recipients fall behind in payments,a commentary on two prominent policy issues: health care overhaul and the regulation of the financial industry?
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March 19, 2010
Researchers Create Small Scale Invisibility Cloak:
Move over Harry Potter - Researchers have successfully rendered a minute bump on a gold surface invisible, using special masking technology that could someday bring true invisibility cloaks from the realms of science fiction and fantasy into reality.
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March 19, 2010
GM makes your entire windshield a head-up display:
General Motors has been fiddling around with head-up displays for 22 years now, and there was a time when you could get Buicks with speedometers that projected your speed right there on the windshield. Cool, if limited in its usefulness. But the General is back at it with a system it says will make driving safer and easier.
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March 17, 2010
Obama Policy Shelves Most Bush-Era Stem Cell Lines:
A bitter irony has befallen researchers who use federal money to study stem cells from human embryos. Some
of the old, dependable stem cells that were OK to study with federal funds under the Bush administration are off-limits so far under a new policy set up by President Obama.
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Electric Motorcycle Racing Becomes a 'Race-to-Own' Co-Op:
The man who jump-started electric motorcycle racing believes a new form of motor sport requires a new form of governance, so he’s created a cooperative where teams racing in the TTXGP help make the rules, settle the disputes and share in the profits.
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March 12, 2010
Exploring the implications of nanotechnology:
When Arizona State University researchers talk about the nanorevolution, they mean more than something limited to the technological realm. The manufacture, manipulation and use of materials at the nanoscale – at atomic or molecular levels – have implications far beyond science and engineering labs. CSPO Affiliate Jonathan Posner is working with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society to explore the potential ramifications of nanotechnology’s emergence.
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March 3, 2010
Internet, TV main news sources for Americans:
The Internet is now the third most-popular resource for Americans' daily news, behind local and national television news, and about a third of cell phone owners are using their devices to catch up on the latest information, according to a new study.
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March 1, 2010
White House, NIST launch online forum about smart grid:OSTP and NIST launched on Tuesday (2/23/10) an online
forum to collect feedback from the public, as part of the Obama
administration's open government initiative, on deploying a consumer interface
for the smart power grid.Read More
Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based Drinkers:
The secret to a great cocktail has something to do with the ice, the liquor, the glass — and the bartender. But what if the bartender is a cold, soulless machine? At a bar in San Francisco, a group of artists, engineers and tinkerers sought the answer with their creations: robots designed specifically to pour out a nice drink.
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February 20, 2010
Cell Phone Data: Can You Track Me Now?:
A new study used cell phone billing data to show that people's travel patterns are extremely predictable. The study shows the emerging power of using cell phone data for social science research.
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Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind:Many
revisions have been proposed for psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders –
the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
due in 2013 – the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the
line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence
and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be
treated.It also will have implications for
pharmaceutical marketing, research and the legal system.Read More
A Day in Crow's Nest:
A day spent with ASU President Michael Crow, including co-teaching Science, Technology and Public Affairs with Dan Sarewitz.
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Bin Laden Rebukes U.S. on Climate Change:
In his latest statement, Osama bin Laden blamed the and developed countries for not halting climate change: “Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality.”
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January 29, 2010
Don't Bogart that Bandwidth:
Mobile Device-Use Constrained By Bandwidth. More people these days are using mobile devices. That means they are
downloading more videos, more software and other big chunks of data that are clogging up the wireless pipes. One thing that may help is tiered data plans. People who use more bandwidth would pay more than someone who just checks emails.
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January 29, 2010
UN climate controversy:London’s The
Sunday Times reports on the new controversy facing the United Nations
climate science panel for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the
number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods and basing
the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine
scientific scrutiny.Read More
