January 09, 2003

I'm back, with some really cool news from February's issue of Popular Mechanics. This issue had some info in progresses in Science, and had some REALLY cool stuff. Probably the most significant advance was made in the field of teleportation. Yeah, you read that right. Ping Koy Lam at the Australian National University successfully teleported a beam of light. The details are very vague, and it does not say anything about the teleportation distance or the time taken to teleport (instant, speed of light, etc.). The next step - teleport a single atom. Another interesting advance in science was made in gravity alteration. This experiment is still under trial, but in April, NASA will conduct tests to try and find a link between gravitation and electromagnitism, based on the theory proposed by Ning Li. The design consists of a superconducting disc, but the details are again vague. Although its not really new news, an artificial retina constructed from a grid of thousands of microscopic electrodes has been developed. This grid is placed over the original (defective) retina and provides sight even for the blind. Quoting Kurt Wessendorf, a Sandia researcher, "Images will come in a little slowly, and appear yellow, but the aim is to bring a blind person to the point where he or she can read, move around objects in the house, and do basic household chores." Cool stuff. Another notable advance was made in creating dinosaurs. Yes, it sounds like a Jurassic Park, and it has the possibility to lead to one. Scientists have found a method of artificially "filling in" the gaps of dinosaur DNA to create full strands identical to real dinosaurs. This raises the question - if this method succeeds, will they make a Jurassic Park? I think it'd be worth it ;) Other quick notes include a Vaccine for Cancer, which is still under testing and has successfully fought tumors in test animals. It works by reactivating TAP emitters inside cancer cells, which give the signal for the immune system to do its job. TAP emitters have been found to be disabled in the most deadly types of cancer. Lastly, "experts" now believe that the chance of another planet very similar to Earth is very great, with the estimate of 2 billion other planets having a similar temperature. Now we just need to use the teleporters to get there. That's all for now. I was blown away by all of this - can't imagine why. Hope you found it as interesting as I did. thus ranteth Gheed at 8:06 PM | Permalink |