Bacteria used to protect against earthquakes

When earthquakes happen sandy soil can turn into a liquid-like state that can be disastrous to buildings built over it. Suddenly the stable ground that you built your house on, is not so stable. This is especially a concern in coastal cities.
Now scientists think they can turn that sandy soil into rock, just by injecting a type of bacteria into the soil under your home. The bacteria actually causes calcium to collect around the individual sand grains. Cementing them together to form a type of sandstone. The bacteria type is a natural, rather than engineered type, and is non-toxic. It simply has never been used in this way before.
Turning sandy soil into rock is not a new idea. There are chemicals that can be injected into soil to turn it into rock. the problem with the chemicals is that they are toxic, and will poison the ground they are injected into. So they really aren't an option for your home.
The scientists say that it hasn't been tested yet outside of the lab. So there may be unforeseen problems with this method.
Check out the full article here.

Chinese pigeon cyborgs

A group of Chinese scientists is reporting that they have found a way to control pigeons in flight. they accomplished this by implanting electrodes into the pigeons brain. By sending signals to those electrodes, they can remote control the pigeons while they are flying. The scientists say they have no idea what this technology might be used for, and can't think of any practical reasons for doing this. Basically, in true geek fashion, it sounds like they did it just to see if they could.
You can read about it here and here

Jesus' Tomb

There is a big story floating around the Internet right now about Jesus' tomb. Director James Cameron has just finished a documentary in which he claims to have found Jesus' tomb and his immediate family. Furthermore, he claims that Jesus is still in the tomb along with his alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, and son Judah.
What proof does he have? Basically none.
He claims that the names on the coffins are too significant to be coincidence. The names inscribed are Jesua and Mariameme. He claims that Mariameme means Mary Magdalene and Jesua means Jesus. He further mentions DNA evidence as proving this conclusively. But if you read his own press site and all the news stories, it becomes clear that the only thing his DNA tests proved was that Jesua was related to people buried in the tomb. Which is not the same thing as proving that he was the Jesus in the Bible.
According to the chief archaeologist who excavated the site, Amos Kloner, the names listed were common at that time. Furthermore, while the name Jesua is a known alternate name for Jesus, the name Mariameme is not considered an alternate for Mary. So basically, this is nothing but a sensationalist stunt to get publicity for his film. No one who sees the evidence is going to be swayed in either direction by it.
You can read the BBC story here.
The official Discovery Channel Documentary page here.

Speaking english is bad for your heart?

Someone sent me the following in an email. I thought it was pretty funny, so I posted it here.

HERE'S THE FINAL WORD ON NUTRITION AND HEALTH. IT'S A RELIEF TO KNOW THE
TRUTH AFTER ALL THOSE CONFLICTING MEDICAL STUDIES!!!

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the
British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the
British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than
the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart
attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION: EAT AND DRINK WHAT YOU LIKE. SPEAKING ENGLISH IS APPARENTLY
WHAT KILLS YOU!!!

The graphic above comes from the American Heart Association website. Follow the link for their recommendations on heart disease prevention.

Robert Hanssen FBI spy

I went and saw Breach last night. It was actually a pretty good movie. Breach is based on the true story of Robert Hanssen. Hanssen is an FBI agent that started spying for the Russians in 1985. He was caught in 2001 and is currently serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. His story is actually pretty interesting, and the movie was pretty good.
Check out his story on Wikipedia, and check out a CNN news release about it.

Giant Sinkhole opens in Guatemala

A giant sinkhole opened up in a poor neighborhood in Guatemala city. The sinkhole is over 300 feet deep. Several houses and a truck were sucked into the hole when it opened. The bodies of two of people have already been found and a third person is still missing. I don't think I have ever seen a sinkhole this big. Check out the links below for more info.
BBC coverage of giant sinkhole
Associated press writer Juan Llorca

Mars rovers get an update

The mars rovers just recently got an update to their software that should allow them to keep from getting confused by large rocks that are in the way. Since the lag time between earth and mars is about 20 minutes, the rovers often have to act in a semi-independent fashion. The scientists will tell the rover to go towards a certain location, but if the rover has any issues in following that command, it will have to deal with them itself. Previously, if the rover found a large object in it's path, it could get confused and require input from NASA before it could get around it. This was due to the limited planning abilities when it was choosing a route. Now it can plan and map out a path up to 50 meters ahead.

You can read about the problem and the update here.

Metalic sculptures

I ran across this interesting site that sells Metal art sculptures. I'm really not sure how to describe them. Look at the picture I posted and you will see what I mean. The cool thing about these art pieces is that they are all designed using a computer and complex math. Pretty cool stuff. Check out his site for a lot more pieces. Also, the art is all for sale at pretty reasonable prices. If my house had been decorated in a different style, I would probably get a few of these for display. Sadly, most of these pieces won't go with the decor in my house.

Interesting metallic sculptures.

ITunes discovers Pianists fraud

Check out this article. It looks like a concert pianist passed off recordings from other pianists as her own recordings and no one found out for years. Itunes does a bunch of calculations on CDs when it plays them to try to find a match in its database. It does that so that it can display track information, artist info and graphics to you while it plays the CD. Itunes identified the CDs from this atrist as being recorded by other Pianists. Which made a music magazine editor suspicious. He went and had them checked out. It turns out that all of her CDs are other peoples CDs.

Check the article out here

As more and more media becomes digital, this kind of thing is probably going to get more common. Just a few months ago, there were some articles about using Google's book search to find plagiarism in older well established books. So if you copied someone else's work and think you got away with it because you did it years ago and no one found out, you might be getting a wake up call. I wonder if there is any kind of statute of limitations on things like violating copyright? Probably not.

Data stored in DNA of living organisms

Found this article about an experiment that some scientists did with data storage. Basically they stored data in the DNA of a particular form of bacteria and then read that data back out.
That isn't really anything new. People have written data into DNA and read it back out before. There was even a prototype computer a few years back that used DNA.
What's new about this experiment is that they stored the data in a living bacteria culture. Then they caused the bacteria to grow for 100 generations. Taking the youngest generation, they then extracted the data out of the DNA of that generation. So the data they introduced into the DNA of the original bacteria was inherited by its descendants and was able to be read back after 100 generations. That is a pretty significant accomplishment that could lead to living growing computers and storage systems.

You can check out the original article here.

The fake drug that is too Real

An Australian artist, Justine Cooper, created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder. Both the disease and the drug are made up.
The marketing campaign included billboards, a website, and a booth set up in an art gallery in New York. The website and the booth are obviously parody, but they are done so well that many people have decided that the disease and the drug are real. So many people that pharmacies and doctors have been inundated with calls asking for the drug.
If you go to the website for Havidol you can read all about the symptoms that the drug is supposed to treat. It seems that the drug will fix every possible problem you might have. From physical strength, to popularity.
The claims are so outlandish and fantastic, that people should at least be skeptical. It's kind of sad that so many people actually believe that the drug is real after going to the website.
You can read the news story here and go to the main site here

Tesla madness

I don't think I would want to have this guy for a neighbor. A lot of the experiments on his site seem a little dangerous. While he clearly has a rather unhealthy obsession with electricity, all of his experiments are very cool. The picture above is real, and I really recommend going to his site and checking out the other pics and experiments he has on there. Besides the pictures of his experiments, he also has detailed instructions and directions on how he did each of his experiments.
Check it out here

In car phonographic record players

You find the strangest things on the net. I was browsing Digg the other day and found a link to this article. It seems that back in the 50s, Chrysler sold cars with a built in record player. Can you imagine the poor quality of the sound? Who thought this would be a good idea? The records would skip on every little bump in the road, and there were issues with records warping from the heat of being stored in the car. They only sold it for one year. So I guess most people saw how stupid this idea was.
You can check out Chrysler's official page on this here

Can there ever be too much bandwidth

Ed Felten at Freedom To Tinker, a blog I read pretty regularly, wrote an interesting piece about the use of bandwidth. He questions whether or not we will ever reach a point where we have literally more bandwidth than we could possibly use.

If you are into computer tech, you will know that it is largely taken as a given, that no matter how much power and storage we have in our computers, it will never be enough. Every time a point is reached where we have more power in our computers than we need, a new application to consume that power is developed. The same goes for storage space. Just a few years ago, I would have been hard pressed to fill a 20 gig hard drive, but today, I easily max out the 100 gig hard drive in my computer at home. Simply having more space caused me to find more uses for it.
Most of the time, people assume that when it comes to bandwidth, the same rules apply. no matter how much bandwidth there is, people will find a way to consume it. In Felten's post, he asks if this is really the case? He argues that there is a physical sensory limit to how much bandwidth a single person can consume. So in his estimation, we will eventually reach a point where adding more bandwidth to our connections, will not be useful or necessary. To be clear, he says we are no where near that point right now, and won't be for years to come.
I would argue that while he is correct on the physical sensory limit, he is incorrect on the usefulness of increasing our bandwidth beyond that point. In the near future, I see every device in our house being connected to the Internet in some way. Whether it is for remote monitoring, or automatic updating. All of those devices will use bandwidth. On the entertainment or sensory side I see lots of new devices whose goal will be to gather, filter, organize, and update any information you might be interested in automatically. most of that info might be wasted, but gathered anyway on the off chance you might want to look at it in the future. this is already happening with our TVs. DVRs record shows for us that we may never watch, but we want to have just in case. As more of our media and news moves to the Internet, I think that will become more common.

Chernobyl Vacation

Read this blog post by a photographer who is currently touring Eastern Europe. He was able to get a special pass to visit the closed off ruins of Chernobyl. A pretty interesting read about his experience. The photos he took are also pretty creepy. Check it out here.

Gothic Techno lamps

Found this very cool site on another blog I read. Seriously cool looking lamps and art sculptures. I could even see a few of these in my house. Sadly, the entire site is in German(I think) and I can't read any of it. So I have no idea if these are for sale anywhere, or just art in some museum. Either way, they are pretty cool looking. Check it out here

Bear Mints

As many of my friends from college know, gummy bears have a special place in my college history. During the many long hours I spent in the computer lab doing projects, gummy bears were a major form of sustenance. Since we weren't allowed to have any food (including candy) or drink in the labs on campus, the gummy bears were always a sort of open secret. Many people including some of the professors, knew that candy, cookies and even sodas were being consumed in the lab, but as long as you weren't blatant about it they would look the other way. There was an exception made to the no candy rule, for breath mints. So jokingly the gummy bears were renamed "bear mints."
Now, you are probably asking, what prompted this little nostalgic walk down memory lane? Well, I found a rather interesting flickr pool devoted to gummy bears. So check it out. Gummy Bear Pool

Roman legions in China

I read an interesting article about a village in China that is said to be descended from mercenary soldiers settled there by a Chinese emperor. people born in the village show a lot of European characteristics and racial features. Back in 1950s an Oxford professor, Homer Dubs, theorized that they were descended from a Roman legion know to have been captured by the Parthians(an empire located roughly where Iran is now). The Parthians forced the captured legion into mercenary service on their eastern frontier, far away from the western Roman frontier.
That was the last confirmed whereabouts of the legion. 17 years after the battle with the Parthians, history records the capture of a mercenary company by the Chinese that fought in a "fish scale formation." Dubs theorized that this "fish scale formation" referred to the tortoise formation of interlocking and overlapping shields that Roman legions commonly used. This mercenary company was settled in the Liqian. Now for the first time, scientists are doing DNA testing to try to find the origin of the inhabitants of the village.

dna-tests-for-chinas-legionary-lore
Widipedia link to story

Well, the Superbowl is over. The Colts won and Bears fans are sad. I know, I had a bunch of them in my house last night. But for me, the fun of the Superbowl is the commercials. This year there weren't that many good ones, but a few gems stood out. Check out this spot for blockbuster.



To see a list of some of the best spots, follow the link to Gizmodo and their list of favorite commercials.

Bionic limbs

Read an article about a woman who lost her arm in Iraq. Doctors have created a mechanical arm that is wired into her own nerve endings. So she can control and move the arm using her brain just like you and I would. Pretty cool. Follow the link for more info. Bionic Arm