Science/Technology blog

Welcome to the 25th weekly Carnival of Space — the best space-related blog carnival that you’ll find within a parsec of home! I’ve gathered up a bountiful crop of blogging goodness for you, so let’s get right down to business.

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (a.k.a. SETI)

If these gizmos were pointed at Washington, D.C., it’d be a long, grueling search…

Starting right at home (but looking outward) the interwebs are all atwitter with discussions of the new Allen Telescope Array. Named after Microsoft co-founder (and major project funding source) Paul Allen, the ATA has been a bit of a soap opera to date. It’s planning was announced, then construction was delayed, funding was on, then off… Well, as of the 11th of October, this beastie is officially a going deal.

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You know you hate me?

When the voice with India-accent started to ask my social security number and my password, that’s when I hung up. Don’t the customer service reps in India know that’s a no-no. And then I thought, that was a damn good way to make me hang up and call back and be someone’s else problem. Is that what was going on?

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Snipped from the News.Wired.com.

Anyone here think the sheer act of lobbying should be illegal … anyone? Well, I sure as hell do! Why? Because it biases all our political processes. Gee, who would have thought? Money bias anything? No way … Okay, enough of that. Why am I bringing this up? Because people want to be paid, and the FCC is no different. On Wired.com, they have an article pertaining to the FCC giving lobbyists the heads up on regulation changes and such before the public gets to hear about them.

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Or rather, Wild Birds who Tried to Go Wild but Were Instead Captured for the Pet Industry.

Brock, a Yellow Naped Amazon Parrot
recused by the USDAWould you like a baby kinkajou? How about a little cougar cub or maybe a herd of giraffe? All is possible with the help of the internet and the booming illegal wildlife trade. A multi-billion dollar industry, the illegal wildlife trade is comparable in scale to the trade of illegal drugs or arms. From people needing to feed their families and finding no financial alternatives, to people who simply must have an exotic pet, this industry is alive and well. For example, there are about 5000 tigers in the wild and up to 10,000 PET tigers in the United States!

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Snipped from Wired.com.

Do you remember all the commotion earlier this year about Congress giving the White House the go on wiretapping America, ILLEGALLY? Well, Congress (Democratic of course, spineless weasels!) not only extended it back in August by granting the NSA “emergency” temporary power, but they are now introducing the RESTORE Act (the Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007). ” [RESTORE Act] allows the nation’s spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.” says Wired.com.

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Posted in Health, Bio at 4:00 pm by David Bradley — 4 Comments

For years, the notion that bacteria could cause ulcers was brushed aside, until the work of Robin Warren, who “rediscovered” the gut microbe Helicobacter pylori, was finally accepted. More recently, periodontal disease, a bacterial infection of the gums, has been implicated in heart disease, it’s the toxins released by the bacteria that are to blame. And in a recent discussion with one leading researcher about the genetics of obesity, he told me that he considered it more likely that a bacterial infection was more likely to be to blame for some cases of obesity than genetics and conversely there may be bacteria that make some people thin.

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Posted in Geek at 4:00 pm by David Bradley

Fancy a new vase or some unbreakable crockery for that camping trip, but haven’t got time to go shopping? What about a replacement for the broken spoke on your spectacles or an individually designed heads for your golf clubs? Or, how about a scale model of that new sports car your kids designed or a mini objet d’art created from photos of a Henry Moore sculpture? The possibilities for 3D printing are limited only by your imagination and what someone could come up with in a 3D drawing package or with CAD software.

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by David Bradley

Some of us are old enough to recall a time when forward-thinking TV shows like the BBC’s classic Tomorrow’s World promised us the “paperless” office. This was during a period of massive technological development when mainframe computers were coming to the fore and the very first personal computer was being hinted at. It seems that the paperless office never happened. By the time I’d left University and started work in a publishers there was more paper than ever, almost every document was either faxed, duplicated or printed out using the new-fangled laserjet printers that nudged out the dot-matrix machines just as I arrived…

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Snipped from EditorAndPublisher.com.

What is really going on in Iraq? We may never know. Why? Because the mainstream media is a puppet of the conglomerate corporate world in which they paint reality as they want it to be painted, not as it is. If anyone ever thought that war was not a profitable enterprise for big business, then you better think again. War is good for business. And, those that profit, even indirectly, will do anything to keep it going. Sound unreal? No, it isn’t. There is one man who is tired of all the whitewash and who sought out the truth by digging for it on the internet. What he found was made into a docu-drama about what is really gong on in Iraq.

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by David Bradley

Grid computing, in which clusters of computers or vast distributed networks, often connected through links far faster than conventional internet pipes are now allowing scientists, engineers, clinicians, designers, and others to access distributed databases, powerful computing resources and instrumentation and so creating opportunities for faster, better or different approaches to research.

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