The Personal Fabrication Age
Tuesday, June 14th, 2005/. Cory R writes “Neil Gershenfeld is an MIT professor and the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms where he teaches a course called “How to Make (almost) Anything.” In his book FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, Gershenfeld describes the current state of personal fabrication tools and the surprising impact that these tools have when made available to everybody from MIT students to villagers in India in the form of Fab Labs. Lots of fabrication techniques and some technologies are discussed including those that are still only in development today. The pace of development seems to be accelerating and as the capabilities of the tools advance, Gershenfeld predicts one day he will be able to drop the word “almost” from the title of his course.” Read on for the rest of Cory R’s review.
Open source Digital Bacteria
Monday, June 6th, 2005/. FiReaNGeL writes “Scientists have constructed a software capable of simulating organisms at the molecular, single-cell and population levels. The program, called AgentCell, will soon be available, open sourced under a BSD license. “With AgentCell we can simulate the behavior of entire populations of cells as they sense their environment, respond to stimuli and move in a three-dimensional world”. The researchers have designed their digital bacterial system in modules, so that additional components may be added later - “The hope is that people will modify the code or add some new capabilities”. AgentCell has possible applications in cancer research, drug development and combating bioterrorism. Lots of movies and pictures are available, along with a detailed press release describing the program.”
You might want to check out my own project “Droids API“, which was actually called Bacteria API in the beginning, but I changed it to Droids to sound less like a vira 
Water to provide unlimited energy?
Sunday, May 29th, 2005Dan writes “Wired has a great article about a guy who thinks we can provide unlimited energy, accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning, all by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean.”
A Question of Scale
Monday, May 16th, 2005I found a great gallery of images showing stuff at all scales, from “Quarks to Quasars”.
Excerpt from 1021: Given an estimated age for our solar system of 4.5 thousand million years, the Sun has made about 15 to 18 orbits around the galactic core.
Bruce Bryson writes: “This is a visual journey consisting of 42 images — 42 powers of ten. At one end of the journey is the immensity of the known universe, 13.7 billion years old with a radius of at least 12 billion light years (and probably much larger). At the other end of the journey is a depiction of the three quarks within a proton.”
