Archive for the 'Strange Technology News' Category

Scientific Fact in Fairytale Fiction — part 2.

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Most of us are far more familiar with Disney’s The Little Mermaid than we are with the original, altogether sadder version first penned by Hans Christian Andersen.  As it turns out, the wicked witch of the undersea world, Ursula, didn’t really need to rely on a curse in order to steal Ariel’s lovely voice.
Theoretically, it […]

Video: Solar cookers in Darfur

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

The Time.com website has put up a video slideshow report about how Darfur refugees have benefited from solar technology that allows them to cook food using the power of the sun.
The alternative, burning firewood, has proven dangerous in the past, not because of the fire but because going off into the bush to gather firewood […]

Koreans ready for commercial mass-production… of dogs

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

RNL Bio is the Seoul-based company that has fired the opening shot in the race to profit from nutty pet owners.
This week, RNL Bio released five pit bull puppies cloned form the dead dog of an American woman named Bernann McKinney.
The deceased canine who provided the DNA for this historic achievement bore the appropriately dignified […]

World’s first double arm transplant

Friday, August 8th, 2008

This German patient is sure to be clasping double armfuls of happiness to his painkiller-saturated breast right now, after being the first person in history to receive transplants of two complete arms.
A team of 40 medics labored for 15 hours in a hospital near Munich, Germany to give the unidentified patient back the appendages he […]

Super-athlete pills: just in time for the Olympics

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Here’s something all those Beijing-bound Olympic athletes would love to have in their duffel bags: fat-burning, endurance-enhancing pills fresh out of development, presumably not yet tested for in the barrage of drug tests they’re sure to undergo for the next few days.
To save myself from a load of acronyms and scientific gobbledygook, I present this […]

Space pioneers of the non-human kind

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

The Time website just came out with a cool photo essay about animals in space. The photo essay is supposed to commemorate NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, but I’m more interested in the animals themselves.
Are they heroes? Pioneers? Hapless experimental test subjects?
The handful of images including the one above may not suffice to reach a conclusion, but […]

Medical horror show

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

Check out this assortment of ghouls and nasties, all working for the benefit of medicine.
They’re medical training manikins (not mannequins, which you find in shop windows), and they range from creepy to out-and-out slasher film gory, to kinda SF cool (as in the example above).
And while you’re at that site, you can vote for the […]

This vaccine will self-destruct in…

Friday, July 11th, 2008

If you have a thing about hypodermic needles and all that injection stuff, you’re going to love this. Researchers have developed a type of salmonella bacteria that, when dripped into the mouths of rodents, can trigger the mouse’s immune system without causing further harm. Why? Because it basically kills itself shortly upon arrival.
Hopefully the technology […]

Uh, land ahoy, apparently

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

I think the only thing cooler than seeing this 207-foot cruise ship grounded in practically zero water is seeing how freakishly well-balanced it is. How is that thing not tipping over?!
What’s also unclear is just how it ended up beached. Right now it’s still unclear if human error or mechanical malfunction is to blame.

DIY virus for better vaccines

Monday, June 30th, 2008

We’ve known for a while that one way to make the body impervious to certain diseases is to give it a low, safe dose of that disease, so our immune system gets a good idea of how to fight it and build up antibodies to fight it. That’s the basic concept for vaccination in general.
What’s […]