] "Elite members of the cast of Star Wars prove that they
] are all natural-born homey g's. "

werd

AtomFilms - Star Wars Gangsta Rap

"The maker of an implantable human ID chip has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 people who register to get embedded with the microchip. "

An orwellian nightmare that fits in the palm of your hand. No, I mean *IN* the palm of your hand.

Wired News: Implantable Chip, On Sale Now

What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense; confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear.

Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments

"A transparent token the size of a postage stamp and costing just a penny to make can be used to generate an immensely powerful cryptographic key."

Marie asked for my comments on this.

The fact that the token cannot be copied doesn't mean the ones and zeros read from it cannot be copied, so this actually doesn't make a very good "cryptographic key." All you need to open cryptography is the ones and zeros. Not a card. Furthermore, the articles talk about reading the key from multiple angles, but cryptographic systems only have one password, so this is a capability mismatch again.

In an environment like an ATM machine where you are fairly certain that you are actually reading from a physical card this might be a more secure (albeit expensive) replacement for a magnetic strip. It may also find its way into door locks. However, you won't find such a reader in your computer nor for scanning credit cards, as in such environments there is no way to be sure that the "key" is actually coming from such a card and not from something else.

So in sum, the technology is interesting, but its not all that useful.

My comments on the optical keys

"Making music out of computer code is helping programmers to catch the bugs that can cause software to go awry."

I am surprised that the results were significant. Very strange... On some levels it makes sense, but it seems so impractical. I'd love to give it a try. I wish they chose a more practical language then pascal.

Making Music from Code

"Researchers have shown that a new combination of techniques for manipulating light can increase the amount of data squeezed through the fibre optic cables laid in cities by more than 100 times "

This article sucks but the tech is great. At the bottom you'll see that they are doing polarisation division multiplexing. Every advance in fiber optics technology means more trouble for the telecom industry.

New Scientist: New fiber optic transmission method

God kills a domo-kun

Everytime you send that fucking picture...

"A prehistoric protein has been recreated in the test tube"

Jurassic park, anyone?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Dino protein made in test tube

This is kind of fun. You can do a hell of a lot with multi-media in an educational setting. I found multi-media animations of filter functions in DSP class to be incredibly insightful. Calculus is really a poor way of explaining things that are really very intuitive if you can see them in action. There is a lot of distance we can get out of something that seems so simple.

Dissect a Frog!

"Ordinary alfalfa plants are being used as miniature gold factories that one day could provide the nanotechnology industry with a continuous harvest of gold nanoparticles. "

This is rad!

Scientists use alfalfa plants to harvest nanoparticles of gold: 8/02