"Our material is powerful enough to be able to be used in a car battery."

_45623791_virus-battery2

NASA-Cisco climate project to flash 'Planetary Skin'

"NASA and Cisco Systems Inc. are developing "Planetary Skin" -- a marriage of satellites, land sensors and the Internet -- to capture, analyze and interpret global environmental data. Under terms of an agreement announced during a Capitol Hill climate summit today, NASA and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) will develop the online collaborative platform to process data from satellite, airborne and sea- and land-based sensors around the globe."

Though I really, really would like it to be true, I am doubtful that science alone will save us from ourselves. However, I have to say that this is pretty cool. I wonder what side benefits there will be from Green tech research.   The Space program gave us all kinds of nifty things we otherwise may not have had (crazy cool new building materials, new plastics, astronaut ice cream).  What will this bring?

The NYT article is linked from the quote above, but apparently they have their own website as well at http://www.planetaryskin.org/.

A growing mass of support for Science Debate 2008 makes me very glad.  I think that the more more accurate scientific information that is disseminated into the public sphere, the better.

ScienceDebate2008

"Science and engineering have driven half the nation’s growth in GDP over the last half-century, and lie at the center of many of the major policy and economic challenges the next president will face. We feel that a presidential debate on science would be helpful to America’s national political dialogue."

This is ...awe inspiring.

"nonorganic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA. The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter. It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation."

This is dust, spontaneously transforming into "life".  Well, technically life,  as we have defined life so far. As they say in the article, we may need a better definition.

I don't know which direction scientists will run with this information, but it sets my imagination going.  Though we will never know for sure, it makes sense to me that process of reproduction and death that is evolution occurred out of natural processes that seem supernatural to us only because they are too complex to wrap our minds around.  Once evolution got going, the process was self-sustaining, and life just kept getting more and more complex. 

Maybe life's mystery doesn't come from a "super"natural source, but simply from it's vast and deep complexity.

For some reason, I think that is even more amazing.

Once again, I saw this first here.

ITS ROCK-HARD surface can take a full- on assault from a baseball bat, yet remains flexible enough to allow you to kick, leap and roll with perfect ease. Crafted from cutting-edge science, its unique molecular structure means that while providing armoured protection against crude concrete and even barbed wire, it remains light enough to allow you to run at high speed.

HardTextile

More here.

I found this on Warren Ellis's blog

This post is inspired by listening to the Wed, June 6th episode of Fresh Air.

What amazes me about all of the various military intelligence PR disasters that have happened in the last few years, is not the ethical problems, but that we already knew that these methods don't work.

As a research psychologist in training, it makes total sense to me to review all of the previous work done on a subject before acting.  In the rest of the world, things don't work that way.

The Intelligence Science Board just came out with a report that basically says that "harsh" interrogation techniques yield bad intelligence, compared with more sophisticated methods.

Notice they didn't say "these brand new methods we just discovered".  The fact that torture and torture-like methods of interrogation don't work well is old news.  What is news is that this time the government has actually asked scientists what they thought and might even listen to the answers.

This advice should surprise no one, least of all the CIA.  The most effective interrogator during World War 2 was Hanns Scharff, who famously didn't even raise his voice.  He was brought in for all of the most important prisoners, and the military integrated his methods into their schools.

Has anyone read this book?  It looks like it is a history of CIA interrogation from a psychological research point of view.

What makes this rankle even more is that most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the most well known setting for over-the-top interrogation, are mostly either civilians of very-low-threat prisoners.  They are not the worst of the worst like we were told (and I think the government thought) they would be.  For an excellent review of Abu Ghraib, listen to this 2006 Peabody Award winning radio program.

Again we see that even though the situation is shocking, it shouldn't be a surprise.

This also speaks to something I have long worried about.  Scientists do a pretty good job of finding things out, but a lousy job of getting what they find out there.