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We have the technology.

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A native of Suzhou, China, who enjoys rock climbing and ballroom dancing, Xu earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, and arrived at MIT in September of that year. Since coming to MIT, Xu has studied queuing networks that include stochastic, or random, dynamics with his advisor, John Tsitsiklis, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

In work beginning with his master’s thesis, Xu has shown that having even a little flexibility in resources drastically improves wait times. For example, Xu says, “In call centers, you just need to train your staff so that each person speaks a few languages or knows a few disciplines. If they are mixed and matched in a smart way, then together they are very powerful.”

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Up to 90% of the energy used in crop cultivation is wasted on dealing with the damage caused by the cultivation equipment itself.

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Last month, the United Kingdom announced that it was investing $90 million in what was being billed as the most groundbreaking aeronautical development since the jet engine. The public investment would be used along with private funds to build a prototype of a SABRE engine, a propulsion system that would make the world’s first true “space plane” possible.

The Most Expensive Kitchen Appliances

KeyMe

Unerdware

Smartphone-Connected Laser Distance Meter

The Withings Pulse

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Vanderbilt University professors have developed a steerable robotic needle that can perform surgery on parts of the human brain that were previously considered too dangerous for physical intervention. Specifically aimed at relieving the effects of cranial blood clots, which have a 40 percent lethality rate, the new technology moves us forward from the present drug-based treatments. The only issue with it, perhaps, is that the process looks and sounds more like a disconcerting sci-fi scenario than a real-world medical breakthrough.

I feel so much better now….

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Not much good comes from taking expired medicine, but it’s not always obvious when the drugs in your cabinet are too far gone to safely ingest. To remedy the situation, Kanupriya Goel and Gautam Goel devised concept packaging that’s basically impossible to misinterpret. It’s called Self Expiring for exactly the reason you’d suspect: the packaging gradually “expires” over time, ultimately displaying a “not fit for consumption” message when there’s no going back and it’s time to trash your meds.

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 The researchers focused their efforts on Schlage Lock Comp.’s flagship secure-key solution, dubbed Primus.  Primus keys carry glaring “do not duplicate” message, which references Schlage’s patent on its two-tracked toothed key design, U.S. Patent No. 5,808,858.  The patent was filed in 1997 and granted in 1998.  The keys are typically used by law enforcement, mental health institutions, and military detention centers; they are even personally recommended by famous lockpick expert Marc Weber Tobias who wrote the much-referenced 1970 textbook on security Locks, Safes, and Security.

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Individual pieces of graphene have some pretty amazing properties, but finding a way to produce bulk materials that make good use of those properties has been rather challenging. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make graphene-based electrodes in bulk through a process so simple that it can be adapted to the manufacturing techniques that we currently use to make paper. And the resulting capacitors, at least in these test cases, had storage capacities that approached those of lead-acid batteries.

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 Joshua Jacobs of Drexel University in Philadelphia and a team of scientists including, Michael J. Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Itzhak Fried at UCLA and Tel-Aviv University, reported in Nature Neuroscience on Sunday that signals from electrodes implanted in human patients with severe epilepsy proved the presence of grid cells that function in the same way as those in other mammals.

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Not unlike the fictional scientists of “Jurassic Park,” Mr. Galese scours the patent office’s archives for the “design DNA” of antique inventions, then reinterprets them as design files for today’s 3-D printers. He has posted more than a dozen of these forgotten inventions on his blog as well as the 3-D printing design library, Thingiverse, for anyone to make today.

“If you look at the figures in older patents, the 19th century patents are really beautiful. They’re really works of art,” said Mr. Galese who finds these early engravings much more beguiling than modern software schematics he has worked with as a patent lawyer.

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Boffins at Maastricht University, Netherlands have managed to grow synthetic beef from the stem cells of a slaughtered cow. But how does it taste?

The world will find out next Monday, when the first hamburger made from the man-made meat is cooked and served at an unnamed “exclusive west London venue,” as reported by The Independent on Sunday.

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In the future, however, you might be able to develop a training plan that has nothing to do with external edicts, generalized principles, or even trial and error. Instead, you’d train according to your own genetic athletic profile — an array of genes that determine what kind of exercise, done for how long and how often, your body will best respond to.

That’s only one of the tantalizing suggestions that David Epstein, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, offers up in his new book The Sports Gene (Penguin). In a wide-ranging exploration of the links between genetics and athleticism — many of which are still being unraveled by scientists around the world — Epstein offers a fascinating look at how genetic research is already transforming sports science. Along the way, he digs into controversial questions about gender and race, examines the latest in genetic testing that purports to spot athletic traits, and unravels how some of the world’s best athletes — from Usain Bolt to Michael Jordan — attained the pinnacle of sporting success.

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From Cochise to Kang, a towering talent.

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Those guys you see pumping iron? MUTANTS!

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Two basic chemical reactions are responsible for beer being “beer-colored” rather than clear like water. One reaction couples amino acids to sugars; the other spurs sugars to decompose. In addition to adding color to beer, the products of these reactions also add significant flavor to the resultant brew.

A century ago in October, the Maillard reaction made its debut in the scientific literature thanks to the work of French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard. And the Maillard reaction is one of the most important reactions to understand how an amber beer looks different from a stout, which in turn looks different from a wit beer or pale ale.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The pioneering scientist who created Dolly the sheep has outlined how cells plucked from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses might one day help resurrect the ancient beasts.

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And if it gives you super powers as a side effect, well, who’s going to complain?

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About seven in 10 Americans track some health indicator, like their weight, diet or symptom from their homes (even if they take a low-tech, paper and pen approach). But now hospitals are adopting more high-tech ways to help doctors follow along remotely.

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I guess unions and individual freedom just don’t mix. Whoda thunkit.

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Slow news day.

An update on the Soylent stuff.

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Needed: An app to measure how fast most of them get sold on the street.

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I guess Disney was right.

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In “Chocolate habits of Nobel prizewinners”, published in Thursday’s edition of Nature, Beatrice Golomb of the University of California, San Diego, notes that of the 23 Nobel laureates she surveyed, 43 per cent revealed that they ate chocolate more than twice a week, significantly more than the 25 per cent reported by a control group of 237 subjects matched by age, education, and sex.

Well. There it is.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher whose polemic writings still resonate today, was among the first few people in the world to use a typewriter. Or, as it was called at the time, a writing ball. Crafted by Danish inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen, the writing ball had a number of advantages over competing designs: it was quieter in operation, simpler in construction, cheaper, and more portable. In retrospect, you can also add that it had the iconic appearance of a product of the mechanical age.

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In early 2006, miners drilling a new natural gas well in the Indonesian district of Porong struck a problem. Not far from their workings and not long after they did some drilling, hot mud started bubbling to the surface.

Lots of hot mud.

So much mud that at least 30,000 people were displaced and 10,000 buildings destroyed.

Levees built in 2008 have contained the mud, but the stuff is still bubbling up and causing problems, not the least of which are subsidence caused by its weight.

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The remains of the deceased, 12-foot-long pinniped – which may have weighed as much as two tons when alive – were discovered in a coffin interred in a St Pancras graveyard during excavations for a new railway terminal. This was actually some time ago, but today we learn that investigating archaeologists, having finally given up on unravelling the mystery intercontinental dead-walrus-by-gaslight affair, have placed the animal’s remains on display in a Hackney museum.

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Much the best thing I’ve heard about Google in years. (The Guardian is, of course, a long-time Voice of the Crust, so they have to denounce any deviations from the Party Line.)

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Foodies! They’re everywhere….

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No, it’s not Obama throwing his supporters under the bus.

 “Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”

“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

Care for a sinkhole?

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No, it’s not Michelle Obama.

If This Then That

FOAAS

HireMyFriend

Kite Patch

Nifti

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The first design, modeled after a paper plane, is created from a cellulose sheet that has electronic circuits ink-jet printed directly onto its body.  Once the circuits have been laid on the plane’s frame, the craft is exposed to a UV curing process, turning the planes body into a flexible circuit board.  These circuits are then connected to the planes “avionics system”, two elevons attached to the rear of the craft, which give the UAV the ability to steer itself to its destination.

I find this vaguely disturbing.

The second design from Dr. Pounds’ lab is named the Samara.  It’s an odd looking UAV designed to mimic a maple seed. The Samara is built from a rigid circuit board with sensors housed on a tiny round PCB at its leading end.

The proposed use for the Samara is to drop a huge number of them from a larger vehicle to survey a vast swath of land. Because of its unique design the Samara would fall gently to the ground, rotating like a helicopter’s blades, collecting valuable environmental information on its way back to Earth.

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Be the first on your block….

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The team calls it the iKnife (intelligent knife), and by analyzing vapors created during electrosurgical dissection in real time, it takes only seconds to distinguish healthy flesh from affected tissue.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a difference.

Scientific American looks at the conventional wisdom.

Considering that our cells depend on sugar for energy, it makes sense that we evolved an innate love for sweetness. How much sugar we consume, however—as well as how it enters the body and where we get it from in the first place—has changed dramatically over time. Before agriculture, our ancestors presumably did not have much control over the sugars in their diet, which must have come from whatever plants and animals were available in a given place and season. Around 6,000 BC, people in New Guinea began to grow sugarcane, chewing and sucking on the stalks to drink the sweet juice within. Sugarcane cultivation spread to India, where by 500 BC people had learned to turn bowls of the tropical grass’s juice into crude crystals. From there sugar traveled with migrants and monks to China, Persia, northern Africa and eventually to Europe in the 11th century.

…

Because fructose metabolism seems to kick off a chain reaction of potentially harmful chemical changes inside the body, Lustig, Taubes and others have singled out fructose as the rotten apple of the sugar family. When they talk about sugar as a toxin, they mean fructose specifically. In the last few years, however, prominent biochemists and nutrition experts have challenged the idea that fructose is a threat to our health and have argued that replacing fructose with glucose or other sugars would solve nothing. First, as fructose expert John White points out, fructose consumption has been declining for more than a decade, but rates of obesity continued to rise during the same period. Of course, coinciding trends alone do not definitively demonstrate anything. A more compelling criticism is that concern about fructose is based primarily on studies in which rodents and people consumed huge amounts of the molecule—up to 300 grams of fructose each day, which is nearly equivalent to the total sugar in eight cans of Coke—or a diet in which the vast majority of sugars were pure fructose. The reality is that most people consume far less fructose than used in such studies and rarely eat fructose without glucose.

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Well, that’s a relief.

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Many of the Royal Warrant holders date back centuries and have fascinating stories to tell about their progress from the past to the present – and even the future.

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“Cancer cells grow and divide much more rapidly than normal cells, meaning they have a much higher demand for and are often starved of, nutrients and oxygen,” said Chris Proud, Professor of Cellular Regulation in Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton in U.K..

“We have discovered that a cellular component, eEF2K, plays a critical role in allowing cancer cells to survive nutrient starvation, whilst normal, healthy cells do not usually require eEF2K in order to survive.

“Therefore, by blocking the function of eEF2K, we should be able to kill cancer cells, without harming normal, healthy cells in the process,” Mr. Proud said.

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Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 76 miles (123km) long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s two longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through two fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4 billion, nearly three times as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.

Well, Big Dig cost what it did because of corruption and incompetence on the part of successive Taxachussetts Democratic administrations, and however bad Chinese authoritarianism might be, they still have a ways to catch up to the Democrats.

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For too long, basic biology research has been constrained to academics at universities and professionals at commercial labs. That needs to change, according to Joseph Jackson, co-founder of the Bio, Tech and Beyond community lab, in order to expand the industry. His biotech hacker space opens today in Carlsbad, Calif., just north of San Diego.

Bio, Tech and Beyond intends to “bootstrap” the traditional research model and provide a space for professionals and advanced amateurs to conduct independent research. For a fee that ranges up to $600 a month, they can access equipment and other resources that would usually be inaccessible to an individual. They will also offer classes that range in skill level from student to professional.

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Basically, with the introduction of small steel wool fibers, Self Healing Asphalt is capable of repairing micro-cracks and significantly extending the service life of roadways by self-healing through induction heating. Similarly, Schlangen is leading the research on Self Healing Concrete, where by infusing concrete with a harmless limestone-producing bacteria that feeds off of calcium lactate – a component of milk – the material has the potential to self-heal micro-cracks in the presence of rainwater.

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Coal slurry pipelines, which carry ground-up coal mixed with water, have been the focus of considerable attention since the mid-1970s because advocates claim they can carry coal more cheaply than railroads.

However, these pipelines require relatively clean water since saline water would mix with the coal powder and cause corrosion and problems when the coal is burned. This is a major problem in the semi-arid West where the pipelines would begin. Here water allocation is handled by complex legal agreements, and proposals to divert large amounts of fresh water over state lines is highly controversial.

This is where Aquatrain would be different. By bagging 3 to 4 tons of coal in thin plastic bags 15 feet long by 30 inches in diameter, W. R. Grace believes it should be possible to pump these coal-filled capsules through a 36-inch pipeline using saline water. Not only would this reduce the cost, but such a pipeline would be likely to pay for its water. That makes such a project far more politically palatable here.

I have my doubts.

”Once you get over laughing at the idea of shipping coal in giant Baggies, the concept has a lot going for it,” says Ira E. McKeever Jr., president of W. R. Grace & Co’s Western Mining Operations, which came up with the novel concept only nine months ago.

Well, I haven’t gotten over laughing at the idea yet, so I’ll let you know.

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Envir-nazis cry ‘NO! THAT’S NOT WHAT GAIA WANTS!’

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 Built in the early 15th century to treat plague victims, the hospital was demolished in 1854 to make space for the existing square that stands above its buried walls. A church bearing the same name was found next to the site in June 2009 during construction of a light rail station. That project was halted for 10 months as archaeologists studied and preserved the ruins.

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Gee, the U.S. has dozens of them — we call them ‘submarines’ and ‘aircraft carriers’.