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Dennis Robertson, M.D., Mayo Clinic ophthalmologist, conducted investigations with a green laser pointer directed to the retina of a patient’s eye; the eye was scheduled for removal because of a malignancy. The green laser damaged the pigment layer of the retina ...

This was a "street legal" 5mw laser pointer. A misplaced 50mw beam will cause damage to your eyes, probably in the form of microspots, because laser light is will focused by your eye's lens. Unfortunately the brain will fill in microspots in the retina until there are too many, or you get too old, then you have vision problems.

The moral: Beware friggin sharks carrying friggin lasers.

It's a safe assumption.

Actually, it's probably a safe assumption that this is just a way to extract $1.3 billion of funding out of the EU in order to pay for a bunch of supercomputers and interdisciplinary research. It's apparently part of something called FuturICT, a submission to the EU's Flagships initiative, which is to say that it is meant to be ambitious - here a codeword for 'infinitely improbable'. FET Flagships are long term initiatives on a budget of around 100 M€ Euros per year.

You can get a copy of the proposal from here. It's a bunch of hand-wavy maybes. Most of the proposal is taken up with the interesting observation that knowing stuff about stuff is a prerequisite to revolutionising education, understanding and fixing the world economy, identifying financial crises before they happen, identifying innovations before they catch on, solving transport problems, creating a whole new scientific paradigm ('science 2.0'), fixing energy consumption and making us all safer. However, they have letters of support from George Soros and various other luminaries, so presumably the EU will assume (or already assumed) that they know what they are talking about.

I sincerely hope you're right, but more likely cognitive dissonance will take over and people will be more likely to believe what they see even if they know it likely to be false.

Don't worry, I'll be as optimistic as you like on a Friday afternoon. The second morning back after a three day weekend still tracks closer to Monday before caffeine for me.

Ironing: http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/process_engineering/report-29650.html

Folding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo

A quick googling indicates that 38% of papers published in Nature contain at least one statistical error. A student that earns a 62% in a subject is said to not understand that subject.

Come to think of it, whatever happened to that Europa lander they were planning which was supposed to bore through the ice?

As soon as you do this you risk contaminating what is underneath so you have to do this incredibly carefully. Last I heard it was on hold until they had figured out how to do it such a way that they did not introduce any contaminants in the process. They are looking to use a lake under the south pole for practice:

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-02b.html
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/earth_sciences/report-11000.html

So yes, don't keep the kids sterilized. But don't immerse them in crap either. That's just stupid.

Actually, there was a report a few years ago showing children raised on farms were less prone to allergies than those raised in fertilizer-less environs.

Bring on the crap.

I seem to recall reading an article many years ago about a trial in the UK in which this same technique was working quite well on humans. Of course I can't seem to track down the article now, and the closest thing I did find was this article from five years ago about a business providing this service. Unfortunately, it only muddies the waters further by including the line "To date, no companies or research groups in the world have been able to demonstrate the formation of a living, natural tooth." Does anyone else remember the trial I mentioned or am I just imagining things again?

Look up the work done in Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center, Houston. There is a design for buggy/rover that crawls over lunar regolith and builds a mat of solar cells on the surface. ( Google on Ignatiev, Freundlich, Lunar .. )
Decoded version.
Also dig around on ISRUInfo.com, especially in their conference proceedings sections. There are lots and lots of ideas for designing the hardware to be applicable in small scale missions.

The interesting part about that article is that people are adjusting their plans based on the traffic forecasts which makes the forecasts less accurate.

One idea [...] might actually be to provide less complete traffic information to encourage drivers to adopt more varied strategies for evading congestion..."

is way better.

"The development provides instantaneous results, gives no false positives, can be used remotely and is portable --"...

Marshall McLuhan, of course...Quite a while ago. There is a more complete article here: http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/lif e_sciences/report-38309.html From Robert Logan's "The Extended Mind Model of the Origin of Language and Culture" "The evolution of notated language has lessons that can help us understand the origin and emergence of speech. In a study of notated language (McLuhan and Logan 1977; Logan 1986) the effects of the phonetic alphabet and literacy on the development of deductive logic, abstract science, codified law, and monotheism were revealed. We showed that these five developments, which emerged between the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers and the Aegean Sea between 2000 and 500 BC, formed an autocatalytic set of ideas that supported each other's development. The alphabet not only served as a convenient way to notate speech it also taught the lessons of analysis (breaking up words into their basic phonemes), coding (writing), decoding (reading) and classification (alphebetization). From this work emerged the notion that language is both a medium of communication and an informatic tool since the structure of a language influences the way in which people organize information and develop ideas. This work led to the hypothesis that speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet represented six independent languages each with its own unique semantics and syntax (Logan 1995; 2000a). It was shown that these six forms of language formed an evolutionary chain of languages with each new language emerging from the previous forms of language as a bifurcation to a new level of order à la Prigogine in response to an information overload that the previous set of languages could not handle." So now we are finally linking the structural (genetic) changes that must accompany the intellectual changes. Why is everyone so scared of this? Because behaviour might (gasp) be largely genetically encoded?

Actually, it's a 66/67 minute delay. The distance from Saturn to Earth is 746 million miles

Looking at the flame here (thanks google, for finally giving me a picture that wasn't the hindenburg or the sun!)

I'd be hard pressed to call that visible in a brightly lit room if you weren't looking for it.

Thanks to all those who provided updates since I posted this, when the news broke. I thought I'd add a few more: The news from Hubblesite, The Discovery Channel, Yahoo News, and from Innovations Report

Hmm... I wonder what a few hundred of these UV UV LEDs could do. Maybe if Cisco would start using these on their gear, I could probably have a year round tan!

Ummmm. There is a pretty serious problem with heat dissapation and CARBON nanotubes Like this report shows

Isnt this going to cause a pretty serious problem in integrating nanotube technology into electronics ?

You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.

The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.