The World Is What It Is Today Because of These Six Innovations

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FROM SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE WEBSITE DATED: SEPTEMBER 14 2014 BY  Megan Gambino

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The prolific author traces the unpredictable course of human invention, showing how one great idea inadvertently leads to a multitude of others. Murano glassmaker Angelo Barovier’s creation of clear glass in the beginning of the 14th century, for instance, led to the invention of spectacles, the microscope and the telescope, even the fiber-optic cables of the Internet.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph to send audio letters, and Alexander Graham Bell intended for people to use the telephone to listen to live orchestra music. What does this say about innovation and unintended consequences?

It says that part of the process of innovation comes from the consumer side of the equation. You can invent the telephone and put it out in the world and say, “This would be fantastic for you playing cello on one end and someone else listening to you playing cello on the other end,” but it gets out into the world and people start using it. They say, “That would be a terrible way of using the telephone. But it is really great for calling my grandmother.” That is always the case with technology when it gets unleashed into the world. People end up pushing it in directions that the inventors never dreamed of.

You refer to the “adjacent possible.” What is this?

It is a term originally coined by Stuart Kauffman, a brilliant complexity theorist. Basically, when someone comes up with a new idea, technology or platform of some kind, it makes a whole other set of –

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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/world-what-it-today-because-these-six-innovations-180952871/#wI8qJJO8bhCvRc6L.99
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Does the human eye prove that God exists?

 

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FROM THE TELEGRAPH, UK DATED: SEPTEMBER 24 2014 BY CHRIS BELL

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When the body of Dr Yoshiki Sasai, an eminent Japanese biologist, was discovered in August this year, his death was widely mourned across the world of science. Not just for the abrupt end to his glittering career – one which had seen him win several awards, including the 2010 Osaka Science Prize, and become the laureate of the 2012 Inoue Prize for Science. Nor because of the tragic manner of his death: the 52-year-old was found hanged in his own laboratory – an apparent suicide, some say, after a scandal over a research paper he’d co-authored in January.

Instead, the scientific world lamented what, perhaps, Dr Sasai was about to achieve. As one of the directors at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, he was one of the world’s leading experts in stem cell technology. His team had pioneered incredible new techniques for creating organ-like structures – making giant strides towards a future where replacements for our failing human organs could be grown in a Petri dish.

And most tragically, the months before his death had heralded Sasai’s biggest achievement. His team had already grown partial pituitary glands and even bits of the brain, but now he’d coaxed embryonic stem cells –Read more

Injected polio vaccine in addition to oral drops improves immunity, says study

(Photo courtesy UNICEF) /Picture from downtoearth.org.in

 

Text and picture from: downtoearth.org.in By Kundan Pandey

Citing new evidence, scientists claim that giving inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) to individuals who have already been administered oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) may improve their immunity to the poliovirus.

A research paper published in the journal, Science, on Friday claims that its finding can help to resolve the controversy over vaccine choice.

Researchers conducted a large, community-based, randomised clinical trial on nearly 1,000 infants and children in Uttar Pradesh. All subjects were given one vaccine or the other. After four weeks, all subjects, regardless of the initial dose type, got a dose of OPV.

IPV reduced viral shedding

In children who were given IPV, viral shedding was reduced, meaning that these children were much less infectious to others—a key in halting the spread of the virus.

They also found that a single dose of IPV, which is administered by injection, induced intestinal mucosal immunity more effectively in children than an additional OPV dose.

Lead author of the research and WHO’s director for polio operations and – Read more

The windowless plane prepares for take-off

windowless plane /From Telegraph, UK

Text and picture from: Telegraph, UK, dated: August 13 2014 By John O’ Ceallaigh

One of the pleasures of flying may be admiring the world below, but that experience could be significantly altered in future if plans for the development of a windowless jet come to fruition,

French design agency Technicon Design has released renderings showing its proposed Ixion Windowless Jet, a private jet that is completely devoid of windows in its fuselage. In their place, screens would line the interior of the cabin, displaying footage of the panoramas outside. Should the aircraft be flying through a tedious setting, passengers could request that the scenes on –Read more

Urban growth: bio-bricks offer a whiff of the future

The bio-bricks used in Hy-Fi can be grown in five days (Image: Kris Graves) /Picture from New Scientist

From: New Scientist Dated: July 25 2014 By  Brendan Byrne, New York City

A sweeping tower made from over 10,000 bio-waste bricks bound with fungal fibre has been growing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Looking like something between a three-headed grain silo, Zhang Huan’s Three Legged Buddha and a Berlin flak tower, Hy-Fi is the winner of this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP), and its organic aesthetic clashes hard with the museum’s red-brick frontage and the green-glass Citicorp building behind.

This is appropriate. As the brainchild of environmentally conscious architectsThe Living, Hy-Fi is no corporate monolith or repurposed temple of high culture. Principal architect David Benjamin calls it a “prototype for the architecture of the future“. Grown from local agricultural waste with almost no carbon emissions, Hy-Fi is designed to be composted, save for a few beams made of reclaimed wood and steel. (A side exhibit shows the distinct stages of the bricks’ decomposition.) Hy-Fi isn’t meant to blend with its human surroundings, so much as with the urban ecosystem.

Hy-Fi, like all YAP final products, provides aesthetically charged shade forPS1’s Warm Up summer concert series, and its persistent, not entirely unpleasant fungal stench will no doubt mix well with the fragrance released by –Read more

No Batteries Here: New Implants Can Charge Through Your Body’s Own Tissue

From: Smithsonian magazine Dated: May 30 2014 By Corrinne Iozzio

A device being tested by Stanford University researchers is the latest in an area of medical development known as “electroceuticals.”

The team’s charging system is a riff on the technology used to power electric toothbrushes, smartphones and other small devices. In those setups, electricity passes through a coil in a power source, creating an electromagnetic field. A corresponding coil in the device itself collects energy from that field, which induces a current that can power the device or charge a battery. This type of wave, known as “near-field,” however, can’t travel very far or pass through tissue.

While there is room for a pacemaker with a battery pack near the heart, other parts of the body provide less area to work with. In the brain, for instance, there isn’t room for an implant to sit right at a treatment site. Instead, doctors would need to place it where there’s a relatively open area, such as the back of the neck, and use wires to reach the target site.

“We’re by no means the first people to do wireless powering for medical implants,” explains John Ho, a graduate student who co-authored the study. “[Implants are] used for things like cochlear implants, but the [power source] itself has to be fairly large and the implant has to be very shallow. They can’t reach the important places in the body, like the heart or the brain.” –Read more

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Associated Press Will Use Robots To Write Articles

From: Popular Science, for detailed attribution visit @Graffiti

The venerated AP now plans to generate and sell thousands of automated business articles a year. The robot-written stories will bring up the AP’s story count in this area by an order of magnitude, Poynter reports.

Over the past few years, several news organizations have used robot writers for some of their stories. Forbes uses algorithms from the startup Narrative Science to find and write short stories about companies whose stocks are doing well. The Los Angeles Times uses bots, developed by one of its own journalists, to publish immediate reports –Read more

Measles vaccine wipes out US woman’s cancer

Virotherapy with injections of a genetically-engineered virus has healed a woman’s blood cancer. File photo.

Picture and story from: The Hindu, for detailed attribution visit @Graffiti

The woman was part of a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic demonstrating that cancer cells can be killed with injections of a genetically-engineered virus through a process known as virotherapy.

Two patients in the study received a single intravenous dose of an engineered measles virus (MV-NIS) that is selectively toxic to myeloma plasma cells.

Stacy Erholtz, 49, from Minnesota, was one of the two patients in the study who received the dose last year, and after ten years with multiple myeloma has been clear of the disease for over six months.

“It was the easiest treatment by far with very few side effects. I hope it’s the future of treating cancer infusion,” Erholtz was quoted as saying by KARE-11.

Multiple myeloma is a cancer of plasma cells in the bone marrow, which also causes skeletal or soft tissue tumours.

This cancer usually responds to immune system stimulating drugs, but eventually overcomes them and is rarely cured. Read more

How Carl Sagan Described Death To His Young Daughter

portrait of Carl Sagan, taken by PBS

From: Popular Science (for detailed attribution see @Graffiti)

When your dad is Carl Sagan, your first lessons on death aren’t sugar-coated. But they are nevertheless sweet and compassionate. That’s how Sasha Sagan, Carl’s daughter, describes them in a recent essay in New York magazine. Throughout his career, Carl worked as a science popularizer and as a professor of astronomy and critical thinking. He stayed true to his understanding of the world even in tough times—like when his little girl asked him if he would ever get to see his dead parents again:-Read more

Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

Corn-flake capitalism has come to Sweden.

Now the Swedish city of Gothenburg is considering a similar experiment. The governing coalition has proposed a year-long trial that would divide some municipal workers into a test and control group at the same pay rate, with the test group working six-hour days and the control group working the traditional eight. (It’s unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme.)-Read more