Interesting News

Underwater breating without air tanks

Tuesday 6/7/2005 12:52:20 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Wow.  I love swimming, scuba, snorkeling; this would just totally change the face of the sport.  Perhaps more interestingly, with great care, new techniques for decompression could be implemented so that divers can stay deep for hours on end.  With gradual, staged resurfacing, meticulously calculated, all of the excess nitrogen could be depleted from the blood safely.

I'm imagining weekend underwater vacations.  Lengthy explorations of South America's cenotes, and the blue holes.  Caving and wreck diving would offer entirely new experiences. 

On top of that, we get an entirely new form of cardio exercise.  Even for people who just don't swim well can start doing their aerobics classes at the bottom of the swimming pool. 

For me, karate sparring at 40 feet under... aaaah that would be just a whole new experience.

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Sedna - The 10th Planet of Sol

Monday 3/15/2004 4:28:32 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts.

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100-metre nanotube thread pulled from furnace

Friday 3/12/2004 3:00:47 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

A thread of carbon nanotubes more than 100 metres long has been pulled from a fiery furnace. The previous record holder was a mere 30 centimetres long.

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Nutrient during pregnancy 'super-charges' brain

Friday 3/12/2004 2:59:00 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Taking a nutrient called choline during pregnancy could "super-charge" children's brains for life, suggests a study in rats.

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The Opte Project

Friday 11/28/2003 7:22:56 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

"This project was created to make a visual representation of a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and esthetics/art. This project is free and represents a lot of donated time, please enjoy."

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Blood could generate body repair kit

Friday 11/28/2003 7:17:13 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

A small company in London, UK, claims to have developed a technique that overturns scientific dogma and could revolutionise medicine. It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's.

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Aerospike

Tuesday 9/23/2003 12:54:06 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

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Interesting Space News

Tuesday 9/23/2003 12:46:52 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Lots of interesting space news lately...

Listen to a Black Hole, courtesy of NASA

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Smart software makes sense of rough sketches

Thursday 9/11/2003 8:27:11 AM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs.

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Adaptive Camouflage

Monday 8/18/2003 11:18:29 AM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Next-gen optical camouflage is busting out of defense labs and into the street. This is technology you have to see to believe.

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Living in An Ekpyrotic Universe

Monday 6/30/2003 5:33:30 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Is the big bang theory wrong?  Probably.  At least, it's significantly incomplete.

Even if our favorite 4 dimensions did explode from a point, there's a lot more to the story than "everything came from nothing."  Recent theories have taken a different tact, and start by exploring the other side... where was everything before that?

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Mimicry makes computers the user's friend

Wednesday 5/28/2003 6:26:46 PM (CST) - Michael Wells   

Computers that mimic their users' voices are rated as more co-operative, friendly and sympathetic, researchers find

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