Archive for March, 2008

Pee Used To Create Self-Healing Substance

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

I can’t say it any better than the BBC:

The as-yet-unnamed material - a form of artificial rubber - is made from vegetable oil and a component of urine.

The substance, described in the journal Nature, produces surfaces when cut that retain a strong chemical attraction to each other.

Pieces of the material join together again as if never parted without the need for glue or a special treatment.

Hm… self-repairing spacesuits and spacecraft linings, anyone?

The Ever-More-Ubiquitous Webcam

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

In the David Brin SF novel Kiln People, the main character (a detective) follows someone’s movements at one point by tracking them via the public and private webcams that cover nearly every square inch of the city. When the book was first released in 2002, the reader could have been forgiven for thinking that was a little far-fetched, but a couple recent stories suggest that reality is getting closer to that all the time.

Bugzilla!

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

This morning I realized that my to-do list for Project X was getting out of hand. I’ve used various bug-tracking systems before, and I thought one of those would be ideal for this (both now and in the future), so I decided it was time to set up a local copy of Bugzilla.
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