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This topic was debated in a two-part series over at Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com /explorations/1999/071999plants/index.html

http://www.sciam.com/1998/ 0698issue/0698gershenfeld.html a good scientific america article, basically a quantum particle can exist in more than one state at once (based on its probability of being in a certain state). the state is a way of saying that there are finite energy levels a particle (electron) can have, these can each represent a state. it also talks about action at a distance. all of this is interesting but unfortunately very hard to understand. its based on wacky math and probability functions. the ones and zeros are basically the same thing...a high level and low level of energy. this is just on a smaller level

Einstein devoted the last 30 years of his life to an unsuccessful search for a "unified field theory," which would unite general relativity, his own theory of space-time and gravitation, with Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. (...) At any rate, it seems likely that by 2050 we will understand the reason for the enormous ratio of energy scales encountered in nature.

Einstein devoted the last 30 years of his life to an unsuccessful search for a "unified field theory," which would unite general relativity, his own theory of space-time and gravitation, with Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. (...) At any rate, it seems likely that by 2050 we will understand the reason for the enormous ratio of energy scales encountered in nature.

Einstein devoted the last 30 years of his life to an unsuccessful search for a "unified field theory," which would unite general relativity, his own theory of space-time and gravitation, with Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. (...) At any rate, it seems likely that by 2050 we will understand the reason for the enormous ratio of energy scales encountered in nature.

Directories are nice, but I think IBM's Clever project demonstrates that intelligent searching can actually do quite a whole lot. Read the Scientific American article on the subject for more information.

Of course, there's also Google, which although perhaps not quite as intelligent as Clever, seems to be light-years ahead of everything else I've ever seen.

All of this made a lot of sense even back in 1997, and I think that the issue is even more relevant now. Computer scientists know how to generate the content, and library science is very good at organizing and categorizing information, as well as indexing it for the easiest way to look it up. I read this issue from front to back twice, and it's a permanent part of my library.

It is still an open question what role the junk DNA, technically called introns plays in organism development. Unlike the simple unicelluar critters (prokaryotes) such as bateria, all higher level organisms (eukaryotes) have these long non-coding sequences which have been retained across evolutionary generations despite the extra energy/space required. The whole area is akin to the physists search for all the various subatomic particles after the cracking of the atom. We can see the bits and pieces, we can assemble the various sequences, but there's no unifying standard model of how or why. With Nobel prizes and new killer apps in the air, it is not surprising that universities and institutes are throwing money into the research.

The 19th centure might have been the dominance of physics and engineering but there's a lot of speculation and anticipation (especially by the empty hands of the biologists and zoologists) that the next century will be their turn at the gravy train :-). Fun times ahead.

LL

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

This special issue of the magazine is devoted to the topic of "What Science Will Know in 2050," and includes viewpoints from many prominent names in biology, cosmology, mathematics and physics.

Sir John Maddox opens the section with his article entitled "The Unexpected Science of the Future" in which he posits that "the questions we do not yet have the wit to ask will be a growing preoccupation of science in the next 50 years." For support, he analyzes several 50-year periods in the past. In each analysis he contends that science, at the beginning of the period was unable to predict the upcoming advances.

For example, who in 1950 could have imagined the e-commerce explosion of the late 1990's? Even as late as 1980, the upcoming prominence of the personal computer was widely doubted. Or who could have reasonably imagined that we would clone a sheep? DNA had not yet been discovered!

And, if this were not enough evidence, consider that the rate of technical innovation and discovery is accelerating!

In the next 50 years, could we see the dawn of artificial intelligence? Will that intelligence petition for civil rights? Will it be vastly more intelligent than us? If so, will it share its discoveries with humanity? What new directions might they take us?

Will we unify physics? What will the completion of the human genome project yield? Will we drastically alter our climate? Will we discover life outside Earth?

I believe that we might be able to reasonably predict discovery 10-15 years out, with rapidly decreasing success beyond that.

dp

• Simple useful things: my girlfriend got me twenty pairs of identical black socks one year. No more sock sorting; They all matched!
• A cheap sturdy pocketknife. Gift from my mom one year. I use it everyday.
• A 15x handlens.
• Those $10 boxes of cheap sockets. Several of them, for each vehicle, in the workshop, the office, some to give to others...
• A large fresnel lens. One big enough to melt rocks. From Halted Electronics
• Subscription to Scientific American
• Fruit flies. Lots of fruit flies. Get them from: Ed's Fly Meat.
• Carnivorous Plants from California Carnivores (See previous gift.)

Actually, there is evidence to support that this has happened in our Solar System, just not to the extreme that has been seen in these other systems. The current theory, with some minor supporting evidence is that Saturn, Uranus, Neptune moved outward fairly significantly, while Jupiter moved inward, but to a lesser extent due to its large mass. Pluto was carried out and made more eccentric by Neptune, along with some Kuiper Belt objects. So, far concentrations of Kuiper Belt objects have been found at resonances of 3:2 and 2:1 to Neptune. Which implies they were swept to these periods as Neptune migrated outward. See Scientific American, Sept 99 for a decent description of the process. Dastardly

Has anyone tried emacspeak? I've read a bit about it and it seems pretty cool (esp. since it was developed by a blind Unix programmer).

Here's a scientific american story which I felt was neat. And a linux HOWTO. And a DDJ article on the design

I always felt this was a very underrated tool.

w/m

The hydrocarbon mass of methane hydrates is greater than that of all the Earth's oil, coal and gas deposits combined. See one of the latest issues of Scientific American SciAm.

Well this inspired me to do a websearch. http://www.aip.org/enews/ physnews/1995/split/pnu244-3.htm http://www.sciam.com/ askexpert/geology/geology9/geology9.html The second references the first.

Google uses a new type of algorithm to rank the relevancy of pages based on how many other pages link to it. It's not just the fact that it runs under Linux - it's the result of a some pretty sophisticated new ideas on how to best search the web.

Check this out for more information in what is going on with search engines.

As mentioned in the previous Slashdot discussion, the March 1999 "Scientific American" mentioned this, and a letter to the editor reply mentioned that reactions with higher energy happen in Earth's own atmosphere. After many millions of years of such activity, we haven't been destroyed yet. We can also see that it hasn't happened to eight other planets, moons, and the Sun.

A similar idea made by Xerox has been published in Scientific American in 1998.

Xerox did an actual implementation of a black and white paper thin display. The technologie use tiny plastic balls that are activated by electric current. The nice thing about this is that when the power goes off, the display stay in the state is was; it does not fade-out.

They claim they can achieve a 220 dot per inch resolution with a size of up to one foot square.

Take a look at this technology here.

Actually, this should let us build amazingly complex parts. The key is in producing the proper framework for the organ to grow upon.

There is a somewhat informative article in Scientific American that discusses the current state of tissue engineeing.

Sure, growing a complete human heart might be 15-20 years in the future, but all of the basics are there now. Recently on the evening news there was a story about trying to grow a human heart, and they showed the framework that all of the blood vessels were growing upon. Sure enough, every tiny little nerve, artery, and vein was in this insanely complex framework. Of course, that only grows one part of the heart, the trick is to grow all parts of the heart.

There has already been at least one human patient who had a thumb grown for him, after losing his in an accident.

Of course, it might make more sense in the future to just grow headless/limbless clones of ourselves to harvest the organs from...

It only took hundreds of millions of years to get from vertebrates to mammals, millions to get from mammals to hominids, hundreds of thousands to get from hominids to humans, tens of thousands to go from hunter-gatherer humans to agricultural ones, hundreds to go from agricultural humans to industrial ones, decades to go from industrial to electronic, and a matter of only years to go from electronic to digital computer networks. In fact change has been so rapid that while you and I, gentle reader, are cyberwhatering our brains out on /., there are still hunter-gatherers hunting and gathering in the Amazon.

There's a Scientific American commentary from about two years back on this subject that you might want to read.

I like the idea of an balistic missle defense system. However I don't think the technology exists (yet) to make one effective.

Detonating a warhead in front of the main warhead force would either destroy or at least blind every satelite in the area. Encasing the warheards in liquid nitrogen colling them to evade IR detection. Hell even inflating a metalic balloon would cause radar wave to be deflected. (Remember, Echo (The first communication satelite) launched by the US back in the '50s was simply a balloon.)

If you were content with a bio-chem attack, you could overwhelm the defensive screen with lots of little mini-warheads and use those to distribute Anthrax, or Beubonic Plauge, or whatever.

If you made the warheads manuverable you could get them to evade incomming anti-missles.

Until these shortfalls can be overcome (and I'm sure they will be) we shouldn't give ourselves a feeling of false security. Afterall, MAD has worked so far. (I kind of wonder about how effective it will be in the future. Afterall death isn't a deterant for a suicide bomber (but that's tact-nukes which this doesn't defend against.)or a country's leadership with a suicide bomber mentality.)

(FYI: The US has signed a treaty stating that it would not develop a missle defense program back in '70s.)

References: "Why National Missile Defense Won't Work" Scientific American August, 1999

http://www.sciam.com/

Unfortunately, you can't read current articles on-line. Subscribe! It's a great mag.

One of the interesting bits in the article was that the Russian Vostok [2] outpost in Antartica is right on top of an under-the-ice lake, al-la Europa. They are going to field-test the Europa explorer equipment on it -- satellites and robots. Two robots are proposed; a "cryobot: and "hydrobot". The cryobot would look at the ice and melt a hole down into the water. The hydrobot would look at the water.

There's also an article at Nasa about life on Europa.

The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.

The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.

The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.

The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.

Liquid deposits beneath the surface of Europa have been posited for a considerable number of years. Easily since I was in middle school. The Christian Science Monitor is not exactly breaking scientific ground here.

Here is a link to a 1996 conference on this subject.

A similar story is running in Scientific American. You can see the table of contents for this month's issue here.

Points to Remember:
*it may not be water. Long-chain hydrocarbons have also been proposed. It could be from mineral oils to salt water, really.
*the only "new news" here is the theory proposed by these guys from the U. of Arizona that the cracks are consistent with tidal patterns. This is cool, but it is only confirming evidence for what people believed in the first place.
*Europa has strong volcanic activity, similar to its lava-covered sibling Io. This is due to Jupiter's insane gravitational pull. But Europa is colder than Io, because it's further out and has no atmosphere, so it has an icy crust. The idea is that (if it really is H20 ice) the volcanic activity has melted some of the ice. But, again, lots of stuff besides water freezes. All we know is that spectrogr aphically there is some kind of salt there.

I hope it does prove to be water, but let's not get carried away just yet.


-konstant

I remember reading somewhere that there are plans to send a probe of some sort out to Europa and pierce the icy crust to see if there be any beasties beneath.

Good hunting to 'em.

c'mon people! think!! I think everyone is missing a few large points here (and interestingly enough, I think it's a fair indication first of all that creation is true - which if it is, leads one towards the existence of God, which leads one to the presence of the human soul, which leads one to consider the condition of the human soul before God (but that's a different discussion)...[no, I'm not RC])

This guy has done something new and impressive, yes - BUT he hasn't really "created" anything...

"A BLUEPRINT for the creation of life is about to be unveiled by scientists."

Creation of life? Chalk up another one to the media for over-hyping something, or else to this guy for blowing his breakthrough a little out of proportion. Look at what he's really managed to do: He's supposedly "worked out the process to 'create' a synthetic bacterium". THAT'S IT! (the word create is used a little out of context)

Has he come up with a new DNA base pair? Has he built a lifeform without the use of DNA strands? Has he created some new type of lifeform that man has never seen before? Nope - all he's managed to do is figure out how the DNA of a bacterium is put together, and then managed to make a man-made COPY!

Oh sure, in the future he might be able to modify the DNA slightly, and perhaps make a bacteria that always moves to the left, or some such thing - but he's still working with an organism that is easily recognized as a bacterium.

This is analogous to impregnating a woman's ovum by going to a sperm bank. Have they managed to create a new human without a man? no - all they've managed to do is remove sex from the issue.

Suppose they "clone" a human ovum and sperm, and then put the two together, and come up with a viable embryo - even then, they haven't managed to create anything, 'cause all they'll have done is made a copy of something that already exists!

Impressive, perhaps, but definitely a world apart from actual creation......the main problem with this whole thing is that they've used the word "create[creation]" in a very poor context, and it's lead everyone to understand the wrong thing....interesting how many people believe that belief in God is anti-intelligence, anti-scientific, anti-progress....goes to show how little they actually know about what the world has labeled "religion" - interesting how big of a fit people throw when the articles call all "hackers" bad people, complaining about being stereotyped, but then turn around and say that all those who believe in God are idiots, or lamebrains or some such - people like Bishop John Jukes don't help much, true, but since when is he representative of even .001% of the population that believes in God?

"The realization I had was that each of our cells can do that better than the best supercomputers can," -Venter [hrm, evolution did this? I think not] (http://www.sciam.com/1998/0898 issue/0898profile.html - this is a better article on this guy and his work)


Nato.
-it's a nickname, not a statement of support for the organization - get over it.

Hypersearching The Web is that SA article. Google is different as it primarily tries to find authorities based on links, while the Clever method in the article is more like finding authorities within communities. The Clever algorithm looks at text around a link to estimate importance and relevance of a link.

This was touched on by this Scientific American article a few months back. It covers another project looking for useful ways to index the Web. They came up with a similar hub/cluster topology based on authorities, which are sites that a lot of other sites link to, and hubs, which have large collections of links to authorities. Unfortunately, the cool illustration that was in the print version didn't make it online. (You can pretty much skip the first two sections of the article unless you want to read the authors' grossly incorrect definition of spamming; it doesn't get interesting until the "Searching With Hyperlinks" subhed.)

Here is an article about the ship that went down--I think this is the incident you're referring to. Most amusing.

Currently we imprison a larger percentage of our population that any other country in the world (a little over one percent of our population, if I remember.)

According to this article in Scientific American, the U.S. prison population is 668 per 100,000 (~.7%). Only Russia has more, with 690 per 100,000. Check out the article, worth a read.

And Turkey is supposed to be repressive.

What's wrong with this picture?

I am ashamed at the way my country has dealt with victimless crimes
such as pot smoking. The war on drugs is an embarrassment to us,
the taxpayers, because we keep throwing money at a non-existent "problem",
and it makes the US look like a bunch of fools who can't figure out
the obvious answer.

Home of the free? Only if you're willing to walk in goose-step
with the alphabet soup of federal agencies fighting the war on free thought.

Try this one.

Cheers,
Ben

The largest notch in Gartner's tally, however, is for the time that employees waste "futzing" with their computers rather than working on them. That costs employers another $5,590 per computer each year, the group estimates. Its guess may be low. SBT Accounting Systems in San Rafael, Calif., found in a 6,000-person survey that office workers futz with their machines an average of 5.1 hours--more than half a workday--each week. One fifth of that time was wasted waiting for programs to run or for help to arrive. Double-checking printouts for accuracy and format ran a close second. Lots of time goes into rearranging disk files. And then there are games; Microsoft Windows comes with four preinstalled. All told, SBT estimates, futzing costs American businesses on the order of $100 billion a year in lost productivity.

There's a lot more than fossils to account for. Astronomers can observe objects that are billions of light years away. To believe (like the hard-line Creationists) that the world is new, you have to believe that either (a) God is faking the far-off light to test our faith or that (b) all science is bunk.

And yet I recently saw a poll that showed around 40% of people (I'm sorry, American people) believe that God created the world as it is a few thousand years ago. Just ten percent take a secular evolutionist perspective: life took care of itself. The rest believe in divinely guided evolution, which I think is Catholic Church doctrine.

Marginally relavant but interesting is this chart from a recent Scientific American on church attendance. America is topped only by Poland and Ireland.

AC: Most deaths are caused by sky-diving accidents.

PB: No, most deaths are caused by heart failure.

AC: Um, and just what do you think it is that sky-diving accidents do?

Let me repeat: most cancer isn't caused by viruses (although some is). The top two causes are smoking and diet, although people will claim that just about anything is a cause, including stress, premarital sex, and snakes.

In the current issue of Scientific American (August 1999), the Oxygen Project is explored. It reveals an approach in making a chip, along with other programming and devices, more efficient and faster by using logic gates and compiling the wires automatcally on the processor. Basically customizing the wiring for each application.

The chip is called Raw. It is covered in the 4th part of the article, Raw Computation.

'til dawn...

a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin, the natural pesticide incorporated in many genetically engineered crops

In total, the 11 Bt and other bioengineered corn products on the market occupy 39 percent of total U.S. acreage.

With these disputes raging, industry's diehard opposition to identifying bioengineered foods may be weakening.

So up to 39% of US corn has pesticides incorportated into it via genetic engineering, and the industry refuses to let us know if we are eating that corn.

And don't get me started on selling seeds that produce plants which cannot reproduce.

Does this remind you of the Cyberdyne Systems chip from Terminator 2 or what?

http://www.sciam.com/1999/ 0899issue/0899agarwalbox1.html

;)

This is way OT, but James Burke already writes a Connections column for Scientific American. Back issues and even the current issue are on the Web.

Check this article in Scientific American. Great overview.

here's van Eck's
original paper from Computers & Security, 1985 Vol. 4.

You will find a lot more information under "Tempest radiation" from the TEMPEST standards for EMF emmission reductions.

I found an article from the December 98 Scientific American which mentions a Microsoft connection. It was featured on Slashdot but only has one remaining comment attached to it (bit rot or conspiracy?)

Finally there is The Complete, Unofficial TEMPEST Information Page


--

here's van Eck's
original paper from Computers & Security, 1985 Vol. 4.

You will find a lot more information under "Tempest radiation" named for the TEMPEST standards for EMF emmission reductions.

I found an article from the December 98 Scientific American which mentions a Microsoft connection. It was featured on Slashdot but only has one remaining comment attached to it (bit rot or conspiracy?)

Finally there is The Complete, Unofficial TEMPEST Information Page which has all you (can|should|need to) know.


--

We made a manned moon landing in 1969, 30 years ago. It's a really big rock. There's nothing there. If there was, we'd still be going there.

What's on the moon? Just for starters:

• A wonderful platform for astronomical observations unocculded by an atmosphere (or by a significant one, at least).
• Geological information about the formation of the Earth and solar system.
• Raw materials for large-scale space construction that don't have to be lifted from Earth's gravity well.
• Helium-3, which in addition to use in fusion is being used for facinating medical imaging work.

Conventional Fusion
FAQ

by Robert F. Heeter of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Scientific American "Ask the Experts"
Q&A

The FAQ is rather long, but the Q&A summarises various viewpoints of fusion scientists and is worth reading.

Scientific American: In Focus:The Magnetic Attraction: May 1999

Check it out!

No one really thinks function codes are a good measure of software. There was a decent article
in scientific american about using function points to measure code

I read in Scientific American a while ago about a Z-pinch - a device that uses laser/electron/whatever beams to implode a pellet of fuel. Here's the URL -- sorry to the webmaster of SciAmer
http://www.sciam.com/1998/0898is sue/0898yonas.html

rescdsk

Well, here's a Scientific American article on some of Microsoft's plans that you guys probobly either forgot about or never heard of.