Looking for some educational home projects for the kids?

This group specializes in do-it-yourself scientific, industrial, and alternative energy projects.

Dangerous Laboratories

Why not go Nuclear fishing?

Here are some other great home project sites:

Omniscience Futureneering is lots of fun. Want to build your own X-ray system? Here's how!

OtherPower is a group of alternative energy enthusiasts who will show you how to build solar, wind, water and generator power systems. "It's EASY to make your own power source from SCRATCH!"

PowerLab Among lots of great projects, learn how to build a 20 kilojoule RailGun that uses Lorenz forces to fire a non magnetic projectile to hypersonic velocities!

While Mom and Dad are out, why not try generating hot plasmas using the microwave oven?

Androids: Here they come, ready or not!

The field of robotics is a broad one, and great progress has been made in the development of robotic vehicles, aircraft, special purpose robots, space robots and many more types. They make a difference in our lives daily, whether you know it or not. But there is another kind coming that will definitely involve you on a daily basis. Soon.

They are Androids.

ASIMO Android, by Honda

Regardless of their ultimate utility, people are obsessed with robots that mimic the human form, i.e., "anthropomorphic" robots. The allure of creating a machine in our own image seems to be irresistible. Do we want them to take care of us? To be more powerful in many ways?

In the aftermath of World War II, the Japanese major cities had been devastated, the culture was under tremendous stress as the Japanese re-invented themselves, and life was generally really hard. In the 1950's, a comic strip began, staring Tetsuwan Atom, also known as "Astro Boy" or "Atom Boy". Tetsuwan Atom was a robot, built in the image of the deceased son of a scientist. He had many special powers and after a rough childhood he dedicated himself to adventure and battling threats to mankind.

Tetsuwan Atom

The android, Tetsuwan Atom, remains beloved by the Japanese. When I've talked to researchers at several of the top robotics labs in Japan, they frequently cite Tetsuwan Atom as an inspiration for their current work in robotics -- much of which involves anthropomorphic robots.

I'll write more on robots later. Today I stumbled across a web site that illustrates the importance of androids to many people from all walks of life:
Android World. This internationally popular site aggregates information on android projects world wide as well as provides other interesting information on the history of androids.

Dueling Physicists? Truth, Belief and Reality

"I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved. Following Bohr's complementarity I would spot that belief and proof are in some way complementary: if you believe you don't need proof, and (arguably) if you have proof you don't need to believe."

- MARIA SPIROPULU, Physicist, currently at CERN

" To believe without knowing it cannot be proved (yet) is the essence of physics."

- LEON LEDERMAN, Physicist and Nobel Laureate; Director Emeritus, Fermilab

Asteroid Mining - There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!

Eros is a typical stony asteroid. One of thousands easily reached by spacecraft launched from Earth. The NEAR spacecraft rendezvoused with Eros in 1998 and collected exceptional data.

How about this nugget:

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust. A cautious estimated suggests 20,000 million tons of aluminum along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.

What is it worth? The gold alone is worth billions of dollars at today's prices (which would probably crash if you suddenly tried to sell all the gold on Eros at once!). The other metals such as platinum are even more expensive.

The technology to mine asteroids for the most part exists today. What is lacking are the financial resources to carry out such endeavors along with commercial entities willing to tackle the job.

We don't necessarily have to bring the metals back. Why not build factories right there to build products in space? You might work in such a factory someday.

Graphics
Credit: Home Run Pictures

Lunar Communities - Your Retirement Dream Location

Easy mobility in low gravity, golf courses with kilometer long fairways, gorgeous views of the heavens - what more could you ask for in a retirement community? Well, lots actually. One day you will have the option of moving to the Moon.

NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate is working to make it happen with Project Constellation (this is what I am working on right now).

So are various private and public consortia. A good example is the Artemis project. The Artemis project is all about how to establish a permanent, self-supporting lunar community.

Antimatter Space Propulsion

We've grown up in an era where rockets are packed with high explosive chemicals, released in a variety of controlled ways to create thrust. Recently, electric propulsion has also become a tool for interplanetary travel. But what about the future? Where is all the "Star Trek" technology we dreamed of? It should come as no surprise that many groups are already working on how to manipulate the enormous energies available in antimatter/matter reactions. Study up! You may need to install one of these babies in your ship someday.

Antimatter Space Propulsion at Penn State University

What is Bioart?

This one surprised me, even though I should have expected it. Always remember that "The street finds its own use for technology" (William Gibson, Neuromancer
).

From BioTech Hobbyist Magazine

"CAE GRAND JURY

Monday June14 5:30pm

Ick: what is bioart? An overview of the biological projects of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)
and review of the relationship of biological art practices to more traditional scientific and bioethics research. This discussion will focus on the larger value of bio art to the research community and the politics of knowledge that surrounds these practices focusing on the risk posed to the entire research community with the potential indictment tomorrow of Steve Kutze and colleagues."

Blog for comments

Quote for the Day

"Any descriptive proposition," he said, "which remains true longer will out-survive other propositions which do not survive so long. This switch from the survival of the creatures to the survival of ideas which are immanent in the creatures (in their anatomical forms and in their interrelationships) gives a totally new slant to evolutionary ethics and philosophy. Adaptation, purpose, homology, somatic change, and mutation all take on new meaning with this shift in theory."

- Gregory Bateson

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/bateson_gregory.html

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bateson04/bateson04_index.html

Artificial Muscles

"An important possible eventual application of this research is artificial limbs that function like natural arms and legs – including the ability to move and manipulate objects -- both for amputees and robots"
- Dr. Ray H. Baughman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the UTD NanoTech Institute

Artificial Muscles

Synthetic Biology

"Following in the footsteps of Lynn Conway's pioneering work on VLSI that allowed ordinary students to create their own processors, a group of MIT professors have almost completed doing the same thing using DNA, known as synthetic biology. While not all of the components of a basic computer are working yet, there is hope that some day ordinary students may be able to design living computers, producing everything from novel drugs to seeds that sprout into treehouses."
- Slashdot

Lynn Conway
VLSI
Designing DNA
Synthetic Biology

Thought for the day

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn"
- Alvin Toffler

Bottles with zero volume. Frontier of boundry-fre...

Bottles with zero volume. Frontier of boundry-free manifolds.

http://www.kleinbottle.com/


Watch out for the local kid who talks too much about nuclear physics:
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html

Awake for the future

Hi, this is my first post. I started this blog because we are all heading for a future that is mystifying, troubling, exhilarating, ... and even if you close your eyes and pretend otherwise it is still going to happen. And it will be very very different.

You can be awake, or asleep. In this blog I will post the odd bits of information, links to tools, and resources, and my own thoughts. May you find them useful.

Thanks for visiting. I realize as I'm writing this that the blog has not yet been published, so no one is actually viewing it yet, and in fact may never view it. In that case, maybe I'm the one that is asleep. Oh well, too philosophic for early in the morning. Here we go...