Blackmoor Vituperative

Scientists have created a tiny cable — much thinner than a human hair — through which they can transmit visible light, potentially paving the way for improvements in solar energy, computing and medicine.

The achievement, described in research published on Monday in the journal Applied Physics Letters, involves a re-imagining of the coaxial cable — that commonplace conduit of cable television, telephone and Internet service — on a minuscule scale.

(from eWeek, Tiny New Cable May Spur Big Technological Advances)

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city…

(from the October 2001 issue of Scientific American, Drowning New Orleans)

Here’s a neat video of water in microgravity:

I have long been of the opinion that religion — more specifically, Protestant Christianity as it is practiced in the USA, the religion with which I am the most familiar — is fundamentally anti-life and anti-human. In other words, evil.

It’s just an opinion. Many reasonably-intelligent, well-intentioned people disagree with me, and I do not think less of them for it. However…

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV — and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer — goes poof. Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they’ve probably never heard of.

(from The Nation, Virginity or Death!)

Internet News has an interesting article about funding robotics in the war years.

Physicists have built the world’s thinnest gold necklaces, at just one atom wide. […]

Paul Snijders and Sven Rogge from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology, in Delft, Holland, and Hanno Weitering from the University of Tennessee build the single-atom wires by evaporating a puff of gold atoms onto a silicon substrate which has first been cleared of impurities by baking it at 1200 degrees Kelvin. The crystalline surface was cut to form staircase corrugations. Left to themselves, the atoms then self-assemble into wires (aligned along the corrugations) of up to 150 atoms each (see figure at Physics News Graphics).

(from the American Institute Of Physics, Atom Wires)

Here’s a galaxy that bears a strong resemblance to the evil spectre Timmy, from Mystery Science Theater 300 episode 416, Fire Maidens From Outer Space.

The “fertile constellation of Orion” better stay away from those “hot, young stars”… (buckawow-chicka-wowow).

The Burmese python is challenging the native alligator for the top of the Everglades’ food chain. In a particularly freaky skirmish of this war, two of these apex predators killed each other in a fight to the death just a few days ago.

I updated the site statistics. More hackers whose IPs have been logged and blocked, and more weird search terms which led people here. It seems that the Fantanas are more popular than Windows. Who’d have guessed?

Mmmmm… laboratory meat:

Laboratories using new tissue engineering technology might be able to produce meat that is healthier for consumers and cut down on pollution produced by factory farming, researchers said. While NASA engineers have grown fish tissue in lab dishes, no one has seriously proposed a way to grow meat on commercial levels.

But a new study conducted by University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny and his colleagues describe two possible ways to do it.

Writing in the journal Tissue Engineering, Matheny said scientists could grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry or fish in large flat sheets on thin membranes. These sheets of cells would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked to increase thickness and resemble meat.

Using another method, scientists could grow muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The resulting tissue could be used to make processed meat such as chicken nuggets or hamburgers.

…

The demand for meat is increasing worldwide, Matheny said. “China’s meat demand is doubling every ten years,” he said. “Poultry consumption in India has doubled in the last five years.”

(from News.com.au, New hamburgers ‘grown in laboratory’

It appears that the elusive dream of legal cannibalism is almost within reach! I can almost taste it….