Love for Life

Boilin' Ed - Increase in Knowledge/New Technologies
Increase in Knowledge/New Technologies

Increase in Knowledge/New Technologies

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China's 'Big Brother surveillance' to dwarf UK

China has launched an ambitious "Big Brother" surveillance programme using everything from closed circuit television systems that can recognise faces to identity card computer chips to monitor its population. A high-tech security company has been awarded a contract for the first phase of a scheme to encode computer chips for the residence permits all Chinese citizens must carry, starting in the southern city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. The government will use the chips to control the whereabouts of its hundreds of millions of migrant workers. But they will also store data on the number of their children under the one-child policy, education records and ultimately medical and credit histories. The company is already setting up television systems throughout the city armed with "intelligent surveillance" software that can recognise faces. Police hope eventually to combine the two systems to provide complete surveillance.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/16/wchina11...

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Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life." "It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways - in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict." That first cell of synthetic life - made from the basic chemicals in DNA - may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it. "Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role." And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070820/ap_on_sc/artificial_life_2;_ylt=Atk8...

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Scientists hail 'frozen smoke' as material that will change world

A miracle material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars. Aerogel, one of the world's lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C. Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars. t is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: "It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery." Aerogel is nicknamed "frozen smoke" and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide. The result is a substance that is capable of insulating against extreme temperatures and of absorbing pollutants such as crude oil. It was invented by an American chemist for a bet in 1931, but early versions were so brittle and costly that it was largely consigned to laboratories. It was not until a decade ago that Nasa started taking an interest in the substance and putting it to a more practical use. In 1999 the space agency fitted its Stardust space probe with a mitt packed full of aerogel to catch the dust from a comet's tail. It returned with a rich collection of samples last year. In 2002 Aspen Aerogel, a company created by Nasa, produced a stronger and more flexible version of the gel. It is now being used to develop an insulated lining in space suits for the first manned mission to Mars, scheduled for 2018. Mark Krajewski, a senior scientist at the company, believes that an 18mm layer of aerogel will be sufficient to protect astronauts from temperatures as low as -130C. "It is the greatest insulator we've ever seen," he said. Aerogel is also being tested for future bombproof housing and armour for military vehicles. In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2284349.ece

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'We have broken speed of light'

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart. Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences. For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws. Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispe...

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Robot Wars -a Reality?

Increasingly, the military wants to hand over the responsibility of killing to conscienceless machines. Some say it's a great way to protect our troops and others are calling it a cold-hearted cop-out. In either case, the US military hopes to dehumanize military operations as quickly as possible. The US National Research Council advises "aggressively exploiting the considerable war fighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles". They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground. The US military already has unmanned aerial vehicles armed with hellfire missiles. "At present they require a human to give, by remote, permission to fire," says Owen Holland, professor of computer science at the University of Essex, "but it will not be long before they can take the human out of the loop." South Korea and Israel are deploying armed robot border guards and China, Singapore and the UK are also increasingly using military robots. But so far the biggest player is the US, which is putting $230bn into a future combat systems project, an ambitious plan to develop unmanned vehicles that can strike from the air, water and land. Congress has already set a goal of having one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015. Fully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/robot-wars-a-re.html#more

Link to website: http://www.atgpress.com/boilined/boil019.htm