Post(s) tagged with "science"
Canada’s ‘war on science’
Inside Story Americas, aljazeera.comEnvironmental groups say recent measures show that Harper’s government is stepping up its attack on climate scientists.
Canadian campaigners are calling it a “war on science” – a slow and systematic unravelling of environmental and…
This is definitely not the last of these kinds of battles when economic development by extraction fossil fuel conflicts with environmental or climate concerns.
Craig Venter Imagines a World with Printable Life Forms
Craig Venter imagines a future where you can download software, print a vaccine, inject it, and presto! Contagion averted.
“It’s a 3-D printer for DNA, a 3-D printer for life,” Venter said here today at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York City.
The geneticist and his team of scientists are already testing out a version of his digital biological converter, or “teleporter.”
Full Story: Wired
Joi Ito’s Near-Perfect Explanation of the Next 100 Years
“One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.”
Full Story: Technology Review
We can see the trends already and it is really an important shift that will have profound implications - the problem is that it is probably deeper transformation than any traditional scientific paradigm shift and might therefore take much longer than humanity can wait.
Academic publishers have become the enemies of science | Dr Mike Taylor | Science | guardian.co.uk)
This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.
With the new database-based science, there is often no moment when the complex becomes simple enough for us to understand it. The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges.
The driving force of Big Data is transforming the concept of knowledge in way that will have deep and profound consequences for science. But most likely not for how we run our daily lives…
World’s Smallest Steam Engine Is Size of Fog Droplet
Engineers have made a tiny engine a few micrometers wide, or roughly the size of a water droplet found in fog.
The device is both confined and powered by a “trap” of laser light, and it sputters a bit. The fact that it works at all, however, may push the boundary of what’s possible in engineering microscopic machines.
“The machine is so small that its motion is hindered by microscopic processes which are of no consequence in the macroworld,” said physicist Clemens Bechinger of the University of Stuttgart in a press release. A study about the microscopic Stirling engine was published Dec. 11 in Nature Physics.
» via Wired
While passive data gathering can be useful, measurement is far more valuable when coupled with conscious, active experimentation and sharing of insights. Likewise, the value of undertaking the experiments themselves is proportionately greater if the organization can capitalize on those experiments in more locations and at greater scale. In combination, these practices constitute a new kind of “R&D” that draws on the strengths of digitization to speed innovation.
Available massive amounts of data paired with cheap processing power will boost the experimentation and learning dramatically, as the microscope did. But having witnessed the great organizational inertia when it came to rely on the results from e g Finite Element analysis instead of extremely expensive physical testing - and in my experience it was full scale car crash tests - I am hesitant to think that this will have impact on how traditional organizations do things. I can rather see that universities, entrepreneurs and skilled amateurs will provide the lion part of the growth in this area. The innovation story will then mainly be written by small research groups or curious individuals who have an idea that they will try out in an experiment with a huge body of real data. And some of them will definitely strike gold…
The Future of Science 2021: A Multiverse of Exploration - Boing Boing
Another beautiful future map from Institute For The Future…
Monkey brains grow bigger with every cagemate they acquire, according to a new study showing that certain parts of the brain associated with processing social information expand in response to more complex social information.
“Interestingly, there are a couple of studies in humans by different research groups that show some correlation between brain size and the size of the social network, and we found some similarities in our studies,” study researcher Jerome Sallet, of Oxford University in the U.K., told LiveScience.
“[Our study] reinforces the idea that the human social network was built on something that was already there in the rhesus macaques.”
» via Live Science
A startup called Liquid Robotics has a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that rove the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors.
via 2020:
Ah… Now the surface of the seas are also about to be invaded by swarms of sensor-equipped data gathering robots.
Source: nighthacks.com
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P A Martin Börjesson
To be able to see the future emerge we have to throw a wide net to catch the weak signals. In this tumble I collect things I find valuable for my work as scenario planner, strategist and futurist - for more info about me go to www.futuramb.se.
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