Bloggasm

Because the very concept of a perpetual motion machine violates laws of thermodynamics coupled with the fact that so many scientists have issued patents for it, the US Patent Office now refuses to even take patents for them.

A new company called Steorn not only has become one of the many claiming to invent a PMM, they issued a challenge in the pages of the Economist for any scientists to prove them wrong:

Dublin-based technology risk management company, Steorn, has challenged the scientific community to prove it wrong. In an advertisement found in the most recent issue of The Economist it has challenged scientists and engineers to test the firm’s free-energy technology and publish the findings. The challenge appears real, but is the technology?

Steorn states that from all the scientists who accept their challenge, twelve will be invited to take part in a rigorous testing exercise to prove (or disprove) that Steorn’s technology creates free-energy (also known as over-unity). The results will be published worldwide.

Since the company isn’t allowed to patent the device, they’ve patented the individual steps leading up to it, thereby sidestepping the ban against PPMs.

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A boy from Uganda named Peter Byakatonda suffered from a condition that causes severe pressure to his brain. In a series of surgeries, his cone-shaped skull was taken apart and put back together:

“Rebuilding his skull into a more natural shape with restorable plates was like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” Dr. Raul Barcelo, a member of the five-man team craniofacial plastic surgeons who conducted the procedures on Byakatonda, told ABC television Channel Eight News in Dallas, United States of America recently.

The pressure on his brain is already gone; his body functions that we feared had been lost forever have miraculously returned, and for the first time in his life, he can close his eyelids while his eyesight is gradually coming back,” Barcelo said.

The decisive operations on Byakatonda were headed by Dr. Kenneth Salyer, an international craniofacial plastic surgeon at the Dallas-based Medical City Children’s hospital in Texas.

The boy will have to go into more surgery when he’s 18-years-old in order to balance his face and eyes. The condition he suffered from was called Crouzon’s Syndrome. Apparently, the problem is typically fixed early in childhood, but this particular boy had to go through these tortures:

“Because of my strange appearance and abnormal shape of my head and eyes, I was constantly beaten, insulted and called a monster or a devil. I used to feel very bad but I had nothing to do.”

When I went to Kiteredde Primary school in P.1, master Byekwaso sent me away after I had spent only three days in class. He claimed that whenever I tried to read or write, my tears dampened and stained papers.

“I was also never allowed to sit with my fellow classmates because teachers said my facial appearance frightened the children away from school.”

Jesus, somebody needs to write a book or make a movie about this kid’s life.

Extra bonus quote from the article:

“Cows became my good friends because they never abused and did not care how I looked. They provided me company when my peers rejected me,” Byakatonda said

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A new scientific study shows that there’s a part of our brain that we specifically use whenever we gamble, and that some people are more susceptible to gambling addiction because of this:

A unique information processing structure in human brain is responsible for decisions linked with risk and reward in gambling, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.

These findings, based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of people’s brains, distinguish the gambling function of the brain structures from their functions in learning, motivation, and assessment of the salience of a stimulus, according to a research group at the California Institute of Technology.

The experimental method in their study may help understand and perhaps treat gambling addiction, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia, the researchers say in the Aug. 3 issue of the journal Neuron.

They tested this by having the test subjects gamble while the scientists studied their brain with an MRI. What interested them most was whenever a new card was flipped over, because the brain would then begin to weigh the risk, and this was when they’d see the most activity.

One of the coolest things about the book Fast Food Nation is its outline of taste science. There are scientists out there whose only job is to harness taste at the molecular level and then comb out all the impurities that hinder that taste. It’s a fascinating field of study, one open to much debate because of its subjectivity, and now Nestle Research Center is jumping on the bandwagon:

Nestlé Research Center, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, are pushing back the boundaries of scientific knowledge for the food industry by using molecular physics to explore the properties of carbohydrates in food.

And expanding understanding could lead to food formulation with improved flavour impact and nutritional value, suggest the researchers…

…Dr. Ubbink explained that the food industry is being challenged with increasing demands on flavour impact, nutritional value, food stability, consumer acceptance and so on, and in order to optimise our food systems and processing routes new rational ways need to be found.

The science in this particular case focuses on how specific kinds of sugar can crystallize. They can actually control carbohydrates and reduce the fatty acids without sacrificing the taste.

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Well, he was if you count for inflation:

About 1,400 letters written by Albert Einstein to his wives and children have been made public, suggesting the genius was often more interested in women than his relativity theory.

It turns out that he spoke openly with both his wife and his step-daughter about his many affairs. And he was a much better father than his original biographers gave him credit for.

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Many tech geeks would like to pride themselves on being liberal environmentalists, but with a recent Energy Saving Trust’s report, studies show that the use of consumer electronics will actually double within the next couple of years. With this new surge of electronics, a surge in energy will be soon to follow. So the popularity of gadgets might contribute to global warming:

Fear of the catastrophic consequences of global warming is finally prompting Britons to start changing their lifestyles, a survey said on Monday.

It is not before time, said the Energy Saving Trust’s report “The Rise of the Machines” which predicts that energy used by consumer electronics will double in the next four years.

What people really want to know is the environmental properties of the array of gadgets they are buying so they can make the most appropriate decisions, said the EST, an independent, non-profit organisation.

So if tech geeks are going to continue to be environmentally aware, they should start putting pressure on the tech companies to create more energy-efficient gadgets.

For instance, in the linked article:

The report said large plasma television screens consumed up to four times as much power as normal cathode ray tubes.

Hopefully, gadget blogs will start paying attention to this issue and will highlight energy-efficiency when talking about specific gadgets.

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As Clive Thompson reports, a group of nations is creating a concrete shelter where they’ll store millions upon millions of seeds. The reason? So if there’s some kind of world-ending nuclear holocaust, then we can go to this shelter to replenish the Earth’s biodiversity:

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the looming fences, motion detectors and steel airlock doors are not disincentive enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar bears roaming outside should help.

The more than 100 nations that have collectively endorsed the vault’s construction say it will be the most secure facility of its kind in the world. Given the stakes, they agree, nothing less would do.

Its precious contents? Seeds — millions and millions of them — from virtually every variety of food on the planet.

It would be really interesting if people did this with other things. For instance, a vault full of history books and copies of newspapers. Or the DNA of every kind of animal, so that one day we can clone them all again if they die in a disaster. They can even name it something clever, like “Noah’s vault.”

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