Sigh.
The more widespread this stuff becomes, the more likely we fall further and further behind the rest of the world technologically.
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From the category archives:
Science
First, the news. Apparently researchers have worked up a prototype subdermal display powered by blood. No, I’m serious.
Jim Mielke’s wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.
The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.
On both the top and bottom surfaces of the display is a matching matrix of field-producing pixels. The top surface also enables touch-screen control through the skin. Instead of ink, the display uses tiny microscopic spheres, somewhat similar to tattoo ink. A field-sensitive material in the spheres changes their color from clear to black, aligned with the matrix fields.
Now, the views.
Is nanotechnology morally acceptable? For a significant percentage of Americans, the answer is no, according to a recent survey of Americans’ attitudes about the science of the very small.
In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.
Now, this “tattoo” display device isn’t nanotechnology, but it represents the same thing – technological progress resulting in massive shifts in the relationship between humans and machines. The fear of that comes from religion, unfortunately.
“The United States is a country where religion plays an important role in peoples’ lives. The importance of religion in these different countries that shows up in data set after data set parallels exactly the differences we’re seeing in terms of moral views. European countries have a much more secular perspective.”
The catch for Americans with strong religious convictions, Scheufele believes, is that nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research are lumped together as means to enhance human qualities. In short, researchers are viewed as “playing God” when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine, says Scheufele.
That would explain why a comment at the place I found the link to the “tattoo” display called it “The Mark of The Beast”.
Personally, I want someone to point me to the end of the queue. WANT!
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I’ve been building up a rather long list of interesting science/evolution related pieces, and rather than spam my own blog with a huge list of related posts, I figured it was time for an omnibus! Content in the extended: all aboard!
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No joke – researchers have uncovered a monkey prostitution ring.
According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received. Though primates have been observed trading grooming for food sharing or infant care, this is the first time this kind of exchange has been observed between male and female primates in a sexual context, says lead researcher Michael Gumert of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, demonstrating that the amount of time a male macaque “will invest in [its] partner” depends largely on how many options it has around.
Science is awesome. It’s a brief article, but I recommend clicking over and reading the scientist’s description of “biological market theory”. (Yes, my post title is slightly provocative.)
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This is interesting:
Humans have moved into the evolutionary fast lane and are becoming increasing different, a genetic study suggests.
In the past 5,000 years, genetic change has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period, say scientists in the US.
This is in contrast with the widely-held belief that recent human evolution has halted.
The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Professor Henry Harpending, an author of the study from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US, said: “The dogma has been these [differences] are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influences.
“Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin,” he added. “We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.”
Fascinating.
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This is really a very insightful Venn diagram:
If you aren’t familiar with Venn diagrams, they are typically used in set theory to explain relationships between different sets (groups of things).
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Some created a clever little simulation of how a smashed watch could evolve into complicated clocks without a “designer” – if clocks could breed and mutate the same as living organisms.
It’s actually quite clever, and shows why “transitional organisms” wouldn’t necessarily show up in a fossil record. Hat tip to Pharyngula, who points out that, ironically, biological clocks exist in nature. Evolution is an astonishing thing.
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The brain neurons of liberals and conservatives fire differently when confronted with tough choices, suggesting that some political divides may be hard-wired, according a study released Sunday.
…
Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.
The affinity between political views and “cognitive style” has also been shown to be heritable, handed down from parents to children, said the study, published in the British journal Nature Neuroscience.
Intrigued by these correlations, New York University political scientist David Amodio and colleagues decided to find out if the brains of liberals and conservatives reacted differently to the same stimuli.
A group of 43 right-handed subjects were asked to perform a series of computer tests designed to evaluate their unrehearsed response to cues urging them to break a well-established routine.
“People often drive home from work on the same route, day after day, such that it becomes habitual and doesn’t involve much thinking,” Amodio explained by way of comparison in an e-mail.
“But occasionally there is road work, or perhaps an animal crosses the road, and you need to break out of your habitual response in order to deal with this new information.”
Using electroencephalographs, which measure neuronal impulses, the researchers examined activity in a part of the brain — the anterior cingulate cortex — that is strongly linked with the self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring.
The match-up was unmistakable: respondents who had described themselves as liberals showed “significantly greater conflict-related neural activity” when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine.
Conservatives, however, were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits “despite signals that this … should be changed.”
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Terrific little insight in to how Ben Stein is getting his “science is flawed because it excludes God” movie Expelled made. He (or rather, his producers) are lying to people they interviewed, talking to them about other subjects, and then carefully removing quotes from context to say something completely different.
Why were they so dishonest about it? If Mathis had said outright that he wants to interview an atheist and outspoken critic of Intelligent Design for a film he was making about how ID is unfairly excluded from academe, I would have said, “bring it on!” We would have had a good, pugnacious argument on tape that directly addresses the claims of his movie, and it would have been a better (at least, more honest and more relevant) sequence. He would have also been more likely to get that good ol’ wild-haired, bulgy-eyed furious John Brown of the Godless vision than the usual mild-mannered professor that he did tape. And I probably would have been more aggressive with a plainly stated disagreement between us.
I mean, seriously, not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest.
I don’t mind sharing my views with creationists, and do so all the time. By filming under false pretenses, much like the example of the case of Richard Dawkins’ infamous “pause”, they’ve undercut their own credibility … not that that will matter. I suspect their audience will not question whatever mangling of the video that they carry out, and the subterfuges used to make it will not be brought up.
Read the whole article for a better view of how exactly PZ Myers ended up in the film.
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Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona appeared Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, charging that top Bush administration officials silenced him in his public health reports. According to Carmona, during his four-year term (2002-2006) he was not allowed to speak or issue reports regarding stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental, and global health issues.
Regarding the politicization of his office, Carmona added that some other former Surgeon Generals told him, “We have never seen it as partisan, as malicious, as vindictive, as mean-spirited as it is today, and you clearly have worse than anyone’s had.”
The official response is as follows: “It has always been this administration’s position that public health policy should be rooted in sound science,” said Bill Hall, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
No administration response yet on Dr. Carmona’s additional charge that he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.
Some bloggers have questioned why Carmona stuck it out for four years and pretty much did as he was told. An “oath to the president” perhaps? OK, I confess… I just wanted an excuse to post the Leahy v. Taylor clip one more time:
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American Exceptionalism
by Brian on October 30, 2007 · Comments
American prominence on the world stage has not been due to some issue of “national character”; our people are not inherently different than people anywhere else in the world. But we have, in the past, had better educational resources, and a greater emphasis on science and engineering. But no longer.
While the US is still a world leader in science and technology, the gap is closing, and rapidly. China and India crank out engineers at a rate that dwarfs ours. As we’ve documented here at Plunderbund, belief in scientific theories are alarmingly low here compared to other industrialized nations around the world. Federal research dollars – the stuff that funds core research with little immediate ROI (and thus rarely funded by private industry) are actually shrinking under the Bush Administration. One area where we remain far ahead of the rest of the world – where we spend more than everyone else combined and more than 10 times the next biggest spender – is in “defense”. That’s really the only thing keeping us afloat scientifically (and I should know – it’s how I make my living, and I see where the research dollars come from).
The era of American Exceptionalism is at an end. And it’s because our leaders would rather ban scientific research into stem cells and “teach the controversy” and undercut solid scientific education in our schools, rather than investing in the technology, infrastructure, and core science research necessary to keep us out in front of the rest of the world.
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