Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Science & Technology
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The Royal Society of NZ is holding an essay competition for high school students to write about genetics and ethics. See RSNZ: genETHICS. The Genethics Essay competition is a unique and innovative competition that provides secondary school students with an opportunity to discuss ethical issues associated with human genetics research. The competition is open to…
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From Rudi Volti’s book on technological society that I was skimming through today, Distrust flourishes when people have no ability to participate in decisions that shape their lives, and the inability to affect the course of technological change can produce a mixture of naïve hope and paranoid reaction. A realistic sense of control, including a…
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Article on the Nature website about replacement bladder sacs grown externally from patients’ tissue and then reimplanted. See news @ nature.com – Scientists grow bladder replacement in lab – Trial points way to engineered organs using patients’ own cells.
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Wired carried this story about a collaborative environment for programming that is modeled on old-fashioned text adventure games – see Wired News: Coding Tool Is a Text Adventure. If you want to relive those days of text adventures try Lobotomo Software’s port of Adventure to Mac OS X. Infocom have their Zork games available for…
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Betterhumans.com posting Nanotech restores sight to blind hamsters points to articles that describe the use of nanotechnology to help regenenrate severed optic nerves in hamsters.
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Article in the (UK) Independent’s legal section on the status of frozen embryos from IVF in Britain. See Independent Online Edition > Legal : Fertility: The frozen ones by Cole Moreton. It’s mainly concerned with the stories of people involved, but also has some basic technical information.
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A couple of links. The first to a robot that is controlled by the behaviour of a slime mould that has been integrated with control circuitry, and the second link a robot (EcoBot II) that is powered by a Microbial Fuel Cell that produces energy from dead flies and rotten fruit. See New Scientist Breaking…
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The latest Australian Sky and Telescope magazine (Jan/Feb 2006) comes with a DVD on the cover with a 2 hour long documentary produced by ESA on the history, work and future of the Hubble space telescope. I started to watch it and the kids drifted in and stayed to watch it too. A mixture of…
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These look interesting. Glasses that contain controllable pixels that can compensate for aberations in the eye giving enhanced vision. See Wired News: Super Vision Sans Bionics.
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Just skimming through these while list current applications of virtual reality in practice. These look amazing though I’m not sure I’d volunteer to test “Spider-World” (which means of course I’m a good candidate for it.) Hoffman, Hunter G. “Virtual-Reality Therapy.” Scientific American 291, no. 2 (2004): 58-65. [HTML version]North, Max M., Sarah M. North, and…