Tag: science

Automatic photo captioning

The primary objective of Tripod is to revolutionise access to the enormous body of visual media. Applying an innovative multidisciplinary approach Tripod will utilize largely untapped but vast, accurate and regularly updated sources of semantic information to create groundbreaking intuitive search services, enabling users to effortlessly and accurately gain access to the image they seek from this ever expanding resource.

Based on geo clues, IR and other methods.

Inductive charging

Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.

pretty good layman’s introduction to the recent MIT induction breakthrough

Lion-eating chimps

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.

Their location at the center of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals’ range is deep in impenetrable forest.

Mammoth deextinction

by inserting this modified DNA into an elephant’s egg cell, and implanting it in an elephant’s womb, you could create a modified elephant that’s nearly identical to the original mammoth

The far north could probably handle the mammoth deextinction.

2021-09-29: Colossal

The company, named Colossal, aims to place 1000s of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, 1000s of years after they went extinct. “This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for 8 years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.” Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings. Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping CO2. Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates. Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy, but everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

Politicized Medicine

Bush administration officials tried to suppress important public health reports because of political considerations. The administration would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke. The report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

This is a good example why we need open data, as proposed by the OECD, and tools for citizens to meaningfully analyze the raw data, without interference by political hacks.