Lego Domination

One day robots will take over the world.
It begins here with Lego:

Non-Materialist Neuroscience

Spotted this on the New Scientist website earlier today. It seems the creationists have now declared war on common sense again with another set on non-sequitur arguments.

At least, as is pointed out in the article, this shouldn't have quite the same polluting impact as Intelligent Design. Especially in schools as neuroscience doesn't tend to be on the curriculum.

Scientists are perfectly willing to modify or even throw-away theories if they can be disproved or are superseded. In fact this is the very essence of the scientific method. But please, people, be rigorous in your proof and don't just try and squeeze the facts into your dogma-shaped hole.

World’s Largest Tidal Turbine Successfully Installed

Via Digg.

The world’s largest tidal turbine, weighing 1000 tonnes, has been installed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. The tidal turbine is rated at 1.2 megawatts, which is enough to power a thousand local homes. It was built by Marine Current Turbines, and it will be the first commercial tidal turbine to produce energy.

Looks like a fantastic idea to me.
Famously both the Thames a Severn are significantly tidal, so if this is truly successful it would be well-worth exploiting there too.
As it's on a post it could also be an answer to the environmentalists concerns about traditional tidal barrages - that they block the flow of mud and silt and so destroy wetland habitats.

read more digg story

It's NOT a Theory

This kind of thing leaves me exasperated.

Intelligent Design is not a theory - it just isn't. Accepted scientific theories are developed from empirical evidence and subjected to rigorous peer review. Darwin's theory has been subjected to that and come out the other side stronger. It's not fixed dogma, and I fully expect the theory to change (as it has in the past) as more and more empirical evidence comes to light.

Intelligent design is, to the best of my knowledge, based on a hunch by some that "something as complex as life cannot arise spontaneously". That's not based empirically, but on human intuition.

I don't have a problem with creationism or intelligent design being exhibited in schools as part of cultural studies, say. However, including it in the science curriculum lends it a credence which it does not deserve under the established scientific method.

Elsewhere on the Electric InterWeb

Busy busy - my new job (same company different role) is eating much of my blogging time at the moment. I'm hoping it will stabilise soon.
In the meantime I've had a little time to look at where else "Nimbos" is used. Apart from being, as far as I can tell, a Spanish word for cloud, I am also a smart-home company.
Well fancy that.

The same radio - just ALL of it

More boggling stuff from the world of science and technology - this time courtesy of Wired.

The idea is that a great deal of our communications tech are basically doing similar jobs - they just dip into a different part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The only difference between a TV set and your mobile phone is the way signals in that spectrum are decoded and used.

So the clever thought is - why not make a universal receiver!

After all the predictions in the past that tech would get smaller and smaller we reach a new phase: the new "smaller" is actually integration.

Of course the ultimately integrated machine is the computer - a machine which does everything from being a simple calculator to communications device to robot engineer (OK the last one's probably not a use you've put your PC to). So once you have a universal receiver plugged into this integrated device, the essential differences between your TV, mobile or GPS become no more than a matter of software. You plug this widget into your PC and do everything from wirelessly pick up your emails, work out where you are, watch TV and record something off Radio4 - all at the same time. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I want one - today!

Chocolate Power

I love this kind of science - it's exactly the kind of thing science should be working towards, as well as all the blue-sky stuff. In short (from New Scientist):

Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of
Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria
chocolate-factory waste. "We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one end,
could we get electricity out at the other?" she says.

Electrical power from waste is exactly the kind of thing we need to start turning around the reliance on fossil fuels and our oil economy.

There is something I do always find slightly disturbing about these schemes - the sudden commodification of waste materials. Of course "one man's waste is another man's fuel" has always been the case, but one side effect of our capitalist-bent system is that as soon as a waste material becomes useful, someone's eyes light-up with pound signs and decide it should now be sold.

The article goes on to say that the chocolate waste was earmarked for landfill before this use was discovered, so if it does eventually make it to an proper industrial-scale operation I sincerely hope that it's donated rather than sold. In fact, it might even serve Cadbury to offset their own energy use by using their own waste to produce some of their leccy needs.

This has been seen before though. As one example - coal fired power stations tend to be quite dirty things, and one of the by-products going up their chimneys is Sulphur Dioxide. That's nasty stuff which contributes to acid rain so, many governments brought in legislation to help clean that up. One of the ways (apart from stopping coal-use) is to fit scrubbers to the flues. In these scrubbers, wet limestone reacts with the SO2 removing it from the gases which eventually blow away but changing the limestone, gradually, to gypsum.

Are you keeping up?

Gypsum, which is also a by-product of other industrial processes is often dumped. However it's also useful as a main constituent of plaster and plasterboard used in the building industry. The building industry decided that they should be paid for removing what was deemed waste by the power companies but they in turn decided they should charge the building industry for supplying, not waste, but a raw material. Sheesh.

More on Gypsum recycling here.

End of the Bulb

You can tell that new <DOCTOR.WHO> is just days away and my fan-boy gene is turned up to eleven 'cause when I see a story like this:

Researchers working on organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) have made a critical jump that could finally call lights out time for the humble bulb.
Since OLEDs are transparent when switched off, the prospect is of whole surfaces like walls, windows, or even curtains flooding rooms with brilliant white light.

I think "roundels, anyone"*

*(this will only make sense to the likewise afflicted)

Space Golf

We're in the Space-Year 2006 now. I've just about come to terms with the fact that the hover-cars we were told we'd be zipping around in haven't come yet but this really isn't what I was expecting from the space race (from New Scientist):

Russia plans to hit a golf ball into Earth orbit from the International Space Station. If NASA approves the plan, the ball would set records for the longest drive ever made

I know it's a sponsorship thing but considering the cost and environmental impact of space launches it does seem like a colossal waste of time, effort and resource.

Golf is evil anyway so I certainly don't want to see it in space. They'll be playing on the moon next!

String Technology

This is the maddest thing I've seen in a long line of mad things coming courtesy of the science community recently. I sometimes think certain "blue sky" research should actually be called "box of frogs" research for its madness. I'm suitably impressed:

A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.
LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile (1.6 km) into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests, it announced on Monday.

The full article is available from New Scientist here.

In this case they've gone beyond the "blue sky" and into proper physical tests. For some reason it's giving me visions of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

I remember going through some of the technicalities when doing the particular spacey modules of my degree. It goes to prove that the simplest ideas really are the best as it's certainly a sound idea. Assuming you have cable strong enough and long enough to reach into geostationary orbit, there's no reason at all (to the best of my knowledge) that such a thing wouldn't work. LiftPort certainly seem to beleive it would.

The main restriction is the weight of cable as it gets longer and longer. It also has to be flexible enough to withstand wind and weather. Of course whatever is at the space-end of the ribbon would have to be able to slide up and down to some extent to compensate for fluctuations, apogee and perigee too, I'd guess. Once you're through the vast expense of getting the thing into place, though, you then have a relatively cheap, easy and lasting way of bumping things into space.

Rockets are so very 20th Century anyway.