Eldritch Crank's List: technology

After years of failed attempts, researchers have successfully generated stem cells from adults. The process could provide a new way for scientists to generate healthy replacements for diseased or damaged cells in patients

Now there is hope in the form of new genome-engineering tools, particularly one called CRISPR.

The finger’s cells, bone, soft tissue, even nail grew into the mold. “It’s very interesting to see a patient heal. That’s my passion, wound healing. It is fascinating to have the new results,” said Dr. Rodriguez

Ralf Cramer, board member at Continental, the German parts supplier, explains: “Autonomous driving will come about from a base of advanced driving assistance systems. Technically, we can do it already today [in testing and development] but if we put all this technology into a production car, the vehicle would be too expensive.”

Some of these systems are already finding their way into non-premium vehicles. The new Ford Focus can parallel park itself without the driver touching the wheel and the Ford S-Max Concept, to be shown in Frankfurt, includes perpendicular parking capability and automatic braking if a collision with a pedestrian is imminent.

Fingerprinting may prove a more robust tracking technology than cookies because the user’s identify endures even if they erase their cookies. Making changes to your software and settings only makes you more identifiable, not less. An EFF study several years ago found that it is easy to track when someone changes their profiles by adding software updates, for example. You can see what details your computer is transmitting right now by visiting this site.

Japanese scientists have produced 26 generations of clones from a single mouse, the lead researcher said Friday, possibly paving the way for the mass replication of valuable livestock.

The team have so far produced 598 mice that are genetic copies of one original creature in an experiment that has so far been going for seven years, said Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology.

I got to ride along on a loop around several DC blocks with two Google engineers in the front seats. Google's "self-driving cars" must always have someone seated at the controls, whether in Nevada -- which recently licensed Google's cars -- or anywhere else.

The drive was thrilling and fascinating because, come on, the car drives itself. In traffic! Disappointing because it's clearly not going to be ready for public use for years and years.

For now, at least, the car only drives routes it's been trained to drive. My ride in Washington DC was along a route that Google engineers had driven with the car earlier. Google refused to allow the car to be driven anywhere beyond this well-studied environment, at least not with the media tagging along.

Earlier this spring, Google said it had "safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving."

Monday marked a new milestone for the project, when Nevada issued a special license after demonstrations on state freeways, state highways, in Carson City neighborhoods and on Las Vegas' landmark Las Vegas Strip, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles said in a news release.

The prospect of being able to create our own meat could herald a food revolution. Humanity’s meat consumption is projected to double in the next 40 years, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Given that 70 per cent of agricultural land is already used for meat production, this could precipitate a food crisis of unimaginable proportions.

Google's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now logged more than 190,000 miles (about 300,000 kilometers), driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads with only occasional human intervention. The project is still far from becoming commercially viable, but Google has set up a demonstration system on its campus, using driverless golf carts, which points to how the technology could change transportation even in the near future.

Rumors have circulated for months that Amazon is developing a tablet, and recently one reporter confirmed its existence and wrote of his hands-on experience working with a preproduction test unit.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering "cultured" meat.

It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way ... on the hoof.

The fruits of the AI revolution are now all around us. Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence.

For Johansen as for all of the pirate kings, it was always about writing good code, and what good code does is give power to the people who use it. That's the real reason the pirate apocalypse never happened. The pirates never wanted music and movies and all the rest of it to be free — at least, not in the financial sense. They wanted it to be free as in freedom.

"It sounds too good to be true: a non-toxic spray invisible to the human eye that protects almost any surface against dirt and bacteria, whether it is hospital equipment and medical bandages or ancient stone monuments and expensive fabrics.

But true it is."

Robotic Nation essays

"Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products."

"In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. "