Evilsoft.org

Biotech

1. Live cells jetted with electric fields
2. Scientists invent super-smooth, super-small pipes that could ferry medicine into the body
3. Caffeine Free: Blue Light Makes People Alert at Night
4. Mine Buster Targets Breast Cancer
5. New device fights tooth decay with electricity
6. Study Strengthens Link between Virus and Weight Gain

Culture

1. Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
2. Radiation exposure drug availability blocked by feds
3. Sexual Chemistry Only Lasts Two Years
4. Let There Be Wi-Fi
5. AT&T Sued Over NSA Eavesdropping
6. NASCAR in the Clouds
7. Telegram Passes Into History
8. President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage!

Environment

1. How to Beat the High Cost of Gasoline. Forever!
2. Switch Grass: Alternative Energy Source?
3. Global Warming Risks Severe
4. Stark warning over climate change

Mathematics

1. Benford’s Law

Physics

1. Relativity, FTL and causality
2. Matter bound by light
3. South Pole Neutrino Detector Could Yield Evidences of String Theory

Space

1. Space Enthusiast Resources
2. The Mysterious Smell of Moondust
3. Sliding Into ‘Home Plate’, Onward To Victoria Crater
4. New `planet` bigger than Pluto
5. Augmented reality telescope brings universe closer

Tech

1. Inventor develops artificial gills
2. Lofting Balloons for Cell Service
3. These Houses Can Take a Lickin’
4. Honda Accord ADAS auto-pilot system takes the reins
5. Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors

Biotech

1. X-Prize for DNA Decoding Aims to Fuel Innovation
2. Science Creates a Living Bandage for Broken Hearts
3. Scientists Find Unusual Lung-cancer Tumor-suppressor Gene

Culture

1. Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks
2. The New Boom
3. Science `not for normal people`

Environment

1. Growing crops to cope with climate change

Military

1. The first gun-toting robotic combat soldiers set to be deployed

Physics

1. Sonofusion Experiment Produces Results Without External Neutron Source
2. Gravity theory dispenses with dark matter
3. China to build world’s first artificial Sun

Space

1. 7 myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster
2. Smallest Earth-like planet found
3. Shuttle a deathtrap, says astronaut
4. Spacecraft, heal thyself
5. Buzz Aldrin’s Roadmap To Mars

Tech

1. Heavyweight transparency – Light Transmitting Concrete
2. The Gypsy MIDI controller turns the human body into a musical instrument
3. Transparent OLED On the Way
4. Nanotubes show their strength in numbers
5. Retro-fit heads-up display system for motorcycle and bicycle helmets
6. Fast track to a fine vintage

On evil… have 18 minutes and an mp3 player ? If so you are going to love it.

Biotech

1. nano-size battery to be implanted in eye to power artificial retina
2. Doctors claim suspended animation success
3. Measuring wrinkles, sun damage with software

Culture

1. Crisis in Science Prompts Sharing of Data

Environment

1. Doomsday seed bank to be built
2. Wound Up Over Windmills
3. California home to 27 new species

Military

1. Police, Army Robots to Debut in 10 Years

Physics

1. Scientists make first step towards ‘holy grail’ of crystallography
2. Is dark energy changing?

Space

1. Space propulsion breakthrough new spacecraft ion engine tested
2. First Galileo signals received
3. Mini-galaxies may reveal dark matter stream
4. Pluto probe launches from Florida
5. Nemesis, the Sun’s Binary Star Companion?
6. Elated Scientists Say Space-Dust Mission Exceeded Expectations
7. Space Junk Cleanup Needed, NASA Experts Warn

Tech

1. New Uses For LCD Technology
2. Tokyo to get world’s first maglev elevator
3. Flash memory to rival hard drives
4. Measure of Metal Supply Finds Future Shortage

Biotech

1. Caloric restriction appears to prevent primary aging in the heart
2. Taiwan Breeds Transgenic, Fluorescent Green Pigs

Culture

1. Are We Descended from Cannibals?
2. The fully-automated convenience store
3. Charles Arthur: Spam has passed its peak

Entertainment

1. New Music Player to Spread Files Wirelessly
2. N.Y. governor wants drivers to fill up with ethanol or biodiesel
3. DropShots service to help families stay connected and share life experiences

Environment

1. Citroen to reveal diesel hybrid C4
2. Honda FCX fuel cell vehicle production announced

Military

1. Improved Armored Vests Reflect Changing Enemy Tactics
2. New Radar Scope offers X-ray vision

Physics

1. Desktop fusion is back on the table

Space

1. Astronomers find magnetic Slinky in constellation of Orion
2. More to the North Star Than Meets the Eye
3. Dying Star Reveals More Evidence for New Kind of Black Hole
4. US Draw Up Rules for Space Tourism
5. Milky Way’s Warp Explained
6. Companion Dwarf Galaxy Discovered

Tech

1. Sony Reader targets book lovers
2. Spin Doctors Create Quantum Chip
3. The Optimus Organic LED keyboard

Sony is demoing what looks to be a fantastic device in the form of their new e-book reader that uses e-ink electronic paper to give it a printed feel instead of a display feel. Of course, the device itself while being way cool will inevitably be gimped by sony to only support the sony proprietary lifestyle, and most all us geeks refuse to buy anything from a company that so clearly feels it’s customers are criminals who’s computers need a good deep rooting. Still, this development will be followed by others, and perhaps we’ll see something in the next year or two by a company that will let it’s users put their own documents on it. This would be a fantastic development, as it will almost certainly lead to a paperback sized wikipedia.

Now stop for a second and think about that. I recognize that there are accuracy issues with wikipedia, but as a source to get the general concept of people places and things, wikipedia is pretty impressive. In 2 years, we could all be carrying around electronic paperbacks that contain a veritable library of alexandria with snippets to volumes about everything we see around us. This goes a great distance towards making stupid mode (read: being offline) a hell of a lot less….well…stupid.

Beyond reference works, I forsee that a large number of people could find decent use in a device like this to get their news sucked down to it via RSS so that when we sit on the light rail, or eat our wheaties we can have a newspaper that doesn’t leave us with a 400 pound pile of trash yearly.

All in all, this device looks very cool, now hopefully someone other then sony can bring one to market that doesn’t inherently distrust you.

Bruce Sterling had a chat with some folks over at the Well.com discussing the state of the world in 2006. It is a great chat from one of the best writers of our time. I highly recommend taking the time to read it, its funny and you will probably find many new factoids (a definite plus for all you useless trivia junkies). My favorite quotation of the whole chat is about the Chinese and their really strange future demographics: “I’m not sure that I buy the mass-migration theory, but there’s never been a society anywhere, ever, with that kind of age and sex-ratio structure. China forty years from now looks like a lumberjack camp for geezers. I wish ’em luck with that.”

Well, we have started up again in the new year after our end of the year break with a slightly late Cool Tech Friday (Saturday?). Hope you enjoy this year’s CTF.

Biotech

1. Human Stem Cell Process Found
2. South Korea panel to issue final word on stem cell fraud

Culture

1. Edge.org’s 2006 uestion: What is your dangerous idea?
2. Einstein Has Left the Building
3. The Patent Epidemic
4. Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders
5. Did Early Humans First Arise in Asia, Not Africa?
6. Ready access to info means smarts or stress?

Entertainment

1. Philips Continues Game Moves With Entertaible

Environment

1. GM crops created superweed, say scientists
2. Mount St. Helens\’ Lava Baffles Scientists
3. Milestones and Trends in Renewable Energy — 2005 and 2006

Physics

1. Experimental Hyperspace Drive
2. Oregon researchers make big advance on road to superlens
3. 13 things that do not make sense

Space

1. Pluto colder than expected
2. Skepticism greets claim of possible alien microbes
3. 365 Nights of Skywatching
4. CEV revolution mounted
5. Nasa team sees explosion on Moon
6. Strange new object found at edge of Solar System
7. Virgin Spaceport to Be Built in N.M.

Tech

1. Sea Solar Power Inc. to Tap Deep Sea Temperature Gradient
2. cantonrep.com
3. One digicam, two lenses: Kodak announces the EasyShare V570
4. First jet powered Birdman flight
5. Stretchable silicon could be next wave in electronics
6. Stretchable silicon
7. ESA accelerates towards a new space thruster
8. Nanotech coating to cure fogging permanently

It seems that these days everyone has been talking about Wikipedia. How cool it is, its growing pains, or people getting caught trying to change history, but very few people seem to have noticed the quiet but epic growth of it’s younger sibling, WikiBooks.

Since it’s start in July 2003, the WikiBooks project has quietly amassed hundreds of books of varying quality from near empty outlines to reasonably good beginnings to books that (in their finished chapters) are better then some of the ones I remember from my college days. Unsurprisingly, the books are more complete and comprehensive if you are looking to learn certain programming languages or how to win a 1st person shooter. Still, this project absolutely reeks of potential.

By looking at the list of texts, clearly most of the wikibooks on the site today are in their infancy, but the framework is there, and it’s growing only slightly slower then wikipedia did when it was roughly the same size*. Expect big things from this project over the second half of the decade.

* about january 2003: Wikibooks stats, Wikipeda Stats

What a nice little article… over on the IBM developer works website Andrew Glover nicely compares and contrasts common Java idioms with their Ruby counterparts. For all those people out there who find the Ruby magic a bit daunting and who look at Rails and freak out when stuff seems to happen behind a curtain take a look at this article. I think it is a really nice comparison between the two languages that is a good super-light-weight introduction to Ruby for experienced Java developers. Also look at the bottom of the article for lots of other goodies introducing Ruby further.