Eyeborg

BBC  has a piece on Rob Spence, a Canadian documentary maker (and blogger) who lost his eye, and replaced it with a small camera.

He has a 12 min documentary about his new "eye" and other "cyborgs" (folks with prosthetic body parts).  Wonder if he would get thrown in jail if he got pulled over in Boston? 

National Ignition Facility to go online

The Guardian notes that the very coolly named "National Ignition Facility" will be bringing online their Laser fusion power test facility.

The $3.5bn National Ignition Facility (NIF) sits in a 10-storey building covering three football fields and will harness the power of lasers to turn tiny pellets of hydrogen into thermonuclear energy. If the machine works as planned, it will become the first to generate more energy than it consumes, a feat that could pave the way for commercial laser fusion power stations and an end to the world's energy security problems.

 NIF's explanation on how it works is very interesting.


....  Now how could I rig a way to mount this on a sharks head....

Electric Tron Motorcycle

A custom motorcycle company in Florida called Parker Brothers Choppers made a very cool electric TRON Light Cycle.  (see in Slashdot and gizmag)

Hire the Hackers!

A Threat Post posting by, Paul Roberts notes that in a TED Talk,
Misha Glenny makes the argument that most hackers are brilliant folks with a high chance of Aspergers, that were just easily misguided.  He says that rather then putting them in prison, we should hire them and leverage their talents. 

Time Lapse Video From ISS

Fraser Cain at Universe Today on Sep 18 posts a short note about

Science educator James Drake built this amazing timelapse video from the perspective of the International Space Station as it flew over North and South America.

Night scene with the lights below, and the lightening storms are very cool.

Space Junk

While a Sep2 slashdot article "report warns of space junk reaching a tipping point" points out that there is too much (16k cataloged objects) orbiting the planet. Mike Orcutt has a piece titled "Space over Time" in Technology Review (Sep/Oct 2011) showing how much each country has put up there (by year, and purpose - military/commercial/etc.)

Smart Grid might make you late

The Federal Government has mandated (years and years ago) that all US electrical power run on average (over 24hours) at 60Hz.  This has been useful for clocks to keep time. This seems to be a bit (by multiple factors) of a cost challenge when building out smarter, and more robust power systems through out the country. 

So the thought is to test the effects of phasing out the strict 60Hz rule which The North American Electric Reliability Corp, who manages the countries electrical power systems, will be doing. 

Results to your oven clock (per year):

• East Coast: +20 min/year
• West Coast: +8 min/year
• Texas: +2 min/year
• Quebec: 0 min/year

(also see AP article on this topic.)

Human IQ

Christopher Eppig, a grad student in New Mexico posts on Sep6 2011 in SciAm "Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places".  His research finds:

"[...] we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch."

The gist of this is because of lack of fuel for the developing brain:

"One study found that newborn humans spend close to 90 percent of their calories on building and running their brains. (Even as adults, our brains consume as much as a quarter of our energy.) If, during childhood, when the brain is being built, some unexpected energy cost comes along, the brain will suffer."