Category: Sci/Tech

While the debate over stripping Pluto of its planet status continues, the discovery of two new moons orbiting the whatever-we’re-calling-it-now was recently announced. The moons, which are incredibly faint, even by Plutonian standards, were discovered using the Hubble Telescope.

Street Tech has joined the Stanford Folding@Home project. This is a distributed computing project (a la Seti@Home) where your unused computer processing cycles are put to work helping to simulate protein folding.

As proteins are assembled (or “folded”), misfolding can lead to all sorts of diseases. By running computer models which simulate gazillions of folds, researchers can study, and hopefully come to a better understanding of, how proteins fold (and misfold). This could lead to prevention and treatment of fold-related diseases (such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow ALS, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s).

So, to help out in the effort, we’ve created Team StreetTech. To join, all you have to do is download one of the Folding@Home programs (for Mac, Win, Linux) and enter the Team StreetTech number in the set-up (Team #47060). You can run F@H as a screensaver (Mac) or as a stand-alone client or text console.

C’mon, Street Techies: Show your TechTeam spirit and do something useful with all those wasted CPU cycles you spent so much money on.

[This picture shows the first Team StreetTech folding sim. Here I’m helping out on protein number p1155_L939_K12. Is it just me, or does that sickly greenish molecule look like trouble?]

There may be a silver lining to the current indignity of having to refinance your house every time you want to fill up your batmobile with dinosaur squeezins — according to a piece on Wired News, echoed on Treehugger, the solar cell market has (not surprisingly) gotten a boost as oil prices soar. A number of lead solar chip and panel companies have seen their stocks rise over the past year, from a couple of bucks a share to just under ten. Prices seem be slaved to those of oil, so when oil falls, so goes the solar cos. Still, hope springs eternal that this tech will finally get more attention, as oil and nat gas dependency bankrupts greater numbers of us little people.

It’s criminal to me that it’s the freakin’ 21st century and photovoltaic R&D and manufacturing is still so far from being “fast, cheap and out of control.” When I moved to DC in the ’80s, I had a scientist friend who’d come up with what looked like a very novel, maybe even doable way of more cheaply and easily manufacturing PV wafers. He couldn’t get R&D interest to save his soul. Okay, so maybe that was partially due to his eccentric mad-scientist persona, his disagreeable body odor, and the fact that he wanted to use chemicals that, if mishandled, could render entire neighborhoods uninhabitable, but still… Screw RFID tags, I want clothes, buildings, cars, and housepets that drink sunlight and fart direct current.

Wasn’t Dean Kamen and the Segway supposed to change the world and the future of transportation? Oh well, maybe this wacky inventor, sans the monster Segway hype, will shake things up a bit instead. He’s built a hydrogen generating module that bolts onto any existing truck or automobile, increasing its gasoline fuel efficiency, allegedly reducing fuel consumption by as much as 40% and almost all internal combustion pollutants. May sound too good to be true, but according to the article, the company that did independent testing of the H2N-Gen Module was so impressed, they’ve decided to buy into the venture.

Interesting piece in Business 2.0 about clues that point to the possibility of Google positioning itself to provide its own national broadband network, free and ad-supported. Interesting dot connecting.

After seeing the train wreck (or more accurately, robot wreck) that was the first DARPA Grand Challenge, with out-of-control robot rovers ditching themselves in the desert, is the idea of a similarly-styled flying car challenge a good one? NASA thinks so. According to a piece on Luxist, the space agency has announced a Personal Air Vehicle Challenge. While the grand prize for the DARPA Challenge is now set at US$2 million, NASA’s only ponying up 250 Gs. Maybe that’s ’cause they’ll need the rest of the cash for hardened bunker construction. “INCOMING!”

With some 1 billion people on the planet without access to safe drinking water (NOT a typo), the invention of a device called the LifeStraw could have a profound impact on world health. The LifeStraw is a plastic tube with no moving parts. The user simply drinks from any water source and filters in the tube actively filter out and kill bacteria such as typhoid, cholera, e. coli, salmonella and other common killers. The straws will cost around US$2 and can process 700 liters (around one year’s worth) of drinking water.

The latest issue of Tissue Engineering magazine has a paper in it on viable ways of growing edible meat in the lab. The researchers say that being able to grow cultured meat could have a profound impact on the environment, animal welfare, and even human health (the meat’s composition could be tweaked to provide better nutrition). The trick is making it palatable and overcoming the likely ick factor.

Here’s the PR.

[Note: In case you missed it, “wendy meat” refers to the vat-grown human meat featured in Rudy Rucker’s Wares series of novels.

It turns out that iTunes 4.9 supports vidcasting (or “videoblogging,” if you prefer), video items embedded into weblog entries. Lifehacker explains how to do it:

1. In iTunes 4.9, choose “Subscribe to podcast…” in the Advanced menu.
2. Paste in the URL of your feed, like say, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheLastMinute
3. iTunes will display the feed, and start to download the most recent item. Under the Edit menu, select “Show Artwork.”
4. Double-click the item you want to view and it will play in the Artwork panel. You can go full screen by clicking on the right-most button in the set of buttons on the lower left under the Artwork pane.

Nifty! Post-brodcast TV, here we come!

Pocket protectors are all aflutter over an anonymous piece, posted on AnandTech, by a game developer who’s worked with both the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 CPUs and says they’ve been way outstripped by their hype. He offers up the dirty details on the strengths and weaknesses of both chips.

The article, which went up this morning, was quickly pulled from the site. It’s been cached on Slashdot here. Not for those with weakened technical aptitude.

[Via Engadget]