by Jason Patocka March 26, 2010
What do you get when you mix biotechnology with your Inkjet printer?
A lot of awesome that’s what.
H+ Magazine recently featured a great article on bioprinting, but its just one aspect of fabrication that is likely going to be an emerging trend in the early 21st century. Gone are the days where you are stuck printing documents. Now you will have the ability to print 3D objects, and even living tissues if you desire. One day it might just fit on your desktop.
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by Jason Patocka March 23, 2010
Early 21st century convergence in cellular systems biology, bio-materials engineering, and regenerative medicine demonstrate exciting first steps in building functional organs. Ultimately, these advancements would potentially allow disabled people to replace their prosthetic or faulty organs with actual limbs and tissue. Visionary aspirations for this technology foresee an age of full blown bionics, where technology inspired by Neuromancer or Blade Runner becomes part of daily life, and helps cure currently untreatable diseases.
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by Jason Patocka March 12, 2010
by Jason Patocka
Pathways for economic stimulus certainly aren’t in short supply these days. Neither is global demand for insatiable technological wow factor. That is why the field of nanotechnology holds much hype, mystery and promise. This buzz saturated field of research is drawing significant attention among investors, legislators, and even its fair share of mentions in pop culture. Now the field has even matured to the point where US nanotechnology policy is adapting to meet the forces of change.
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by Jason Patocka March 8, 2010
A great deal of our civilization’s happiness depends on a steady stream of electrons. Global demand for these quantum mechanical physics darlings is insatiable, and 20th century electron production and storage methods are getting expensive and dangerously unsustainable.
Fortunately, nanoscientists are working hard to address this persistent need.
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by Jason Patocka March 4, 2010
NASA Finds Moon Ice, Evian Reviews Pricing Forecast
NASA apparently just found radar evidence from an instrument aboard Indian satellite Chandrayaan 1 that suggests 600 million metric tons of ice are chilling at the Moon’s lunar north pole. Before you start getting excited at the concept of pitching some aerogel domes and seeking your fortune mining helium-3, you still might want to consider the fact that it still costs about $10,000 USD per pound to put something into orbit. Nevertheless, this discovery greatly increases the Moon’s real estate value and will likely contribute to the eventual geopolitical headache over lunar property rights.
by Jason Patocka February 17, 2010
Supercomputing is awesome, and super-computed models of complex systems is something we ultratech geeks salivate over. This is especially true when discussing methods to solve the ever so elusive structural mysteries of one the most complicated thing in the cosmos – the human mind.
IBM’s Blue Brain project ambitiously seeks to re-create a model of the human brain, neuron per neuron, synapse per synapse entirely* in silico*. Recently they’ve managed to model a variety of interesting neural networks like cortical columns in mice, and recently published results of simulations that detailed aspects of networked cat neurophysiology. Filmaker Noah Hutton documents this ambitious project in this short film clip from his forthcoming documentary on the project.
Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.
Ambitious as this project is, its not without controversy. IEEE Spectrum ran a piecea couple of months back that puts this research into context. Still, its hard not to basque in the radiance of something as profound as building a virtual neural architecture and its implications for medicine, AI, and the eternally sexy topic of data infrastructure.
by Jason Patocka
One day there will be contact lenses or some kind of cortical implant that will give you a built in data overlay for just about anything. In the meantime, we have to settle for far-less-integrated-yet-nonetheless-badass projects like this Augmented Reality demonstration at Columbia University.
See the video. (more…)
by Jason Patocka February 16, 2010
Battery life is the bane of most people’s existence, including mine. The good news is that there is certainly lots of buzz among materials engineers to develop something with greater capacity and efficiency than the ubiquitous lithium ion battery. Lewei Linat UC Berkeley is taking a different approach to extending battery life by using piezoelectric nanowires to generate electricity. For those of you new to the growing field of piezoelectric engineering, its where scientists and engineers are trying to develop novel materials that harvest kinetic energy. In other words, making a jacket that harvests electricity as a byproduct of your movement.
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by Jason Patocka
*Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory just fired up the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to produce a collisionthat yielded a temperature 250,000 times hotter than the core of the Sun *. When you look at the frontiers of experimental physics these days, its hard not to get excited about our collective future in understanding the cosmos. Powerful, primordial, 13.7 billion year old universe stuff. Video after the jump.
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