Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Books on May 7th, 2004
Who was Isaac Newton? In his own age, Newton was a god of reason who created a perfect and perfectly rational universe. To a later and more romantic age, he became a monster, a bizarre unsociable creature who stripped the world of its rich mystery. More recently he has been outed as a closeted mystic [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 6th, 2004
Years after most of the universe’s mass went missing, it seems we still can’t figure out where it went. Scientists have put a WIMP detector in a Minnesota mine hoping to find the elusive quarry, but to no avail. See the BBC News story here: BBC NEWS | Dark matter detector limbers up.
A WIMP is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 5th, 2004
This just in from the Science Fiction Technology Naming department… scientists at MIT are building a pollution mitigation device for diesel engines called a (wait for it) plasmatron fuel reformer. It works like this: some of the diesel fuel passes through the reformer, which forms a hydrogen rich gas, which is then combined with the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 2nd, 2004
The Economist has a good article on biotech this week. The moral of the story is that there’s a lot more to biotech than the pharmaceuticals business. Industrial solvents, food products, textiles, energy production, even the feedstocks to the plastics industry can be produced from living organisms that have been appropriately wired. Early indications are [...]
