Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
One of the first things GoddessJ complained about, when she got her new iPad for Christmas, was that the autocomplete kept adding a ‘y’ to the end of her name. I call her ****y, and her family; no one else is allowed to, and she doesn’t refer to herself that way either. I had to …
Interesting work, with even more interesting potential uses. Though as the comments point out, it’s probably not enough to stop cavities (or “caries,” in dental terms) in the long run. From comment #17, another interesting tidbit: there’s a sweetener called “Xylitol” that not only doesn’t add to tooth decay, it actually kills off the cavity-forming …
Technology marches on — and leaves laggards behind. One of my three remaining external monitors only has a VGA port; two others that I only got rid of earlier this year1 predated any kind of digital connector. Fortunately there are adapters. 🙂 1 I got rid of them only under protest. They were old desk-hogging …
Continue reading ‘“Leading PC manufacturers dropping VGA support by 2015”’ »
Here’s my Christmas present to my readers: there’s an phenomena which has not yet been fully explained, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that apparently produces a gravity field directly from electricity. The effect was discovered early in the twentieth century, but abandoned due to technical limitations and all but forgotten, which is why I’d never heard …
While I was living in Maryland, maybe sixteen years ago, we had a couple really nasty ice storms one year. As in, a long overnight session of freezing rain that coated anything it landed on with a two-inch layer of ice, followed by several inches of snow, the another half-inch ice crust on top. I …
The mystery of what happened to the famous and charismatic 1930s pilot Amelia Earhart has intrigued people for more than seventy years. It has been the subject of urban legends, and even worked into fiction — I found eight references to fictional works that mentioned her, four of which included her as a main character, …
Continue reading ‘“Finger may point to solution in Amelia Earhart disappearance riddle”’ »
This sounds like wonderful news at first, but when you think about it a little more, it seems like a disaster waiting to happen — one that only a few SF novelists have even attempted to write about. And of those few, the only one that I’ve read (which, unfortunately, I do not recall the …
Continue reading ‘“Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice – now for humans”’ »
Food for thought, especially for certain of my readers who have a little one on the way: “The triclosan findings in the younger age groups may support the ‘hygiene hypothesis,’ which maintains living in very clean and hygienic environments may impact our exposure to micro-organisms that are beneficial for development of the immune system,” said …
Continue reading ‘“Study suggests that being too clean can make people sick”’ »
I always wondered at the assertion that Earth’s oceans had to be from comets and asteroids, because I couldn’t see how there could be a heavy enough bombardment of them to make that much of a difference. (Even if the Earth is just a slightly damp ball of rock. 🙂 ) Apparently I’m not the …
First, read this, and maybe watch the video there. Then read the following passage from the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, published eighteen years ago (1992) and one of my favorite near-future SF novels. One of the main characters is a teenage girl who goes by the handle “YT” and couriers messages by skateboard …
Continue reading ‘“Stylish cyclist collar hides airbag inside”’ »