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Technology

Seastead, Ahoy!

By Abby Seiff Posted on 2.18.2009 17 Comments

Economy got you down? Not sure if this whole “American capitalism” thing is working out for you? Looking for cheap housing? Well, you can always start from ideological scratch and build a new society on a free floating platform in the high seas.

Science

Threat Watch, LHC?

By Abby Seiff Posted on 2.5.2009 16 Comments

After decades of work, the Large Hadron Collider went live 143 days ago and went down 139 days ago. Its being offline, however, has hardly put an end to speculation over what exactly will happen when the repairs are completed and the switch is flipped on the world's largest particle accelerator. Scientists from the Universities of Bologna and Alabama recently submitted a paper to Cornelll's arXiv.org exploring the possibility that those (harmless) microscopic black holes we'd heard so much about could stick around longer than previously believed. No matter that their conclusion was basically, still: "so what? Ain't gonna do nothin." News outlets,as SciAm notes, jumped over the story and the anti-LHC kook-contingent resurfaced. So here's to you, naysayers and doomsdayers alike. After the jump, a very special episode of "Science of YouTube," wherein the LHC goes online and the Earth is destroyed. Enjoy!

Technology

Ask a Mars Career Counselor

By Abby Seiff Posted on 1.5.2009 2 Comments

You’ve just landed on the Red Planet and are looking for a fresh start. Sure, that job selling respirators at the local space-hardware store sounds cozy, but it’s a dead-end career. Mars will be ripe with opportunity; you just have to figure out how to tap it. So here’s the secret: Go into construction. You’ll learn useful skills and be out on the surface, where the real action is. Explore the landscape on coffee breaks. All you need to do is stumble upon a nice deposit of precious material—like platinum or deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that could fuel fusion reactors—and you’ll have it made.

Science

Finer Wine

By Paul Adams Posted on 1.26.2009 5 Comments

Robot Sommelier

Is your $30,000 bottle of Chateau Petrus Bordeaux truly a rare vintage, or is it just $30 merlot? Counterfeits plague rare-wine auctions, but researchers in Spain have built a handheld "electronic tongue" that detects them instantly. It measures the signature chemicals, acidity and sugar content in a drop of wine (typically one bottle from a case) and runs those against a database of certified vintage wines to catch fakes that might fool human tasters.

Science

What Would You Do With 4 Billion Dollars?

By taylorhengen Posted on 1.23.2009 3 Comments

The Decade of the Mind (DOM) initiative was created in 2007 at George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study by an internationally-respected consortium of scientists. These scientists want to convince the US government to spend 4 billion dollars over a 10 year period with the objective of advancing our understanding of the human brain. Since the original announcement of the initiative, they’ve held two conferences a year to try to further this agenda. This year’s installment took place in early January, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.