and

The distribution of comet paths has suggested that a very large planet could be lurking at 25,000 AU, says WISE project scientist Peter Eisenhardt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

No, it’s not coming to destroy us in 2012. But how cool is that? That there may be a whole large planet lurking out in our solar system that we have never seen. Just like that ginourmous new ring found around Saturn by the Kepler space telescope.

It’s not perfect by any means but we’re already on our way down that slope. I gotta get myself ahold of this Vocaloid software so I can make music with computers singing love songs to one another.

CS: You’ll see something very different by then. Let me explain. One prediction that I have PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, did something very unwise earlier this year. Never mind demanding that everybody start referring to fish as “Sea Kittens” – that’s just an irrelevant publicity stunt. No, they went and offered a million dollars to the first inventor who could demonstrate a vat machine for basically delivering vat grown meat. And I don’t think they realize how close we are to this and which industry will develop this machine first because it just so happens that an awful lot of people in the biotech sector are working very hard to deliver machines that will generate bits of meat to order. Specifically, Long Pork. For the organ transplant business. One of the scenes in the next novel I’m working on set in about 15 years time will involve the ladies of leisure in Morningside a fairly posh part of Edinburgh who lunch together – they dine out on each other. From the point of view of a very, very disturbed police officer who’s trying to figure out what, if anything, to charge them with.

I’m pretty sure most of my readers will know instantly what ‘Long Pork’ is. And he’s right. We are working, feverishly, to vat-grow human body parts – for a noble reason, to be sure, but this technology is going to be easy enough fairly soon. It shouldn’t be hard to grow any muscle, once the basic technology is worked out and the process is robotized/factorized.

I mean, one company can even print blood vessels already. No imagine a steak printer in the kitchen. It is possible, it’s just a question of how badly we want this technology.

And once you have that steak printer – the perfect steak, every time? From an empty fridge to prize-winning Kobe beef at the push of a button?

The logistics and price will undoubtedly keep such technology literally out of your kitchen for a long time, but once the basics for growing organ and muscle tissue are down, skies the limit.

We’re going to need it if we want to colonize space (unless we choose robotization, then we’ll simulate printing beef in our simulated kitchens to comfort ourselves with the memories as we travel – I mean, what else are robots gonna do for MMORPGs in space, fly space ships?), and we want to colonize space. And we need to do that, to survive. One planet is finite, but life need not be.

Sri Hong-

Are you kidding me? It’s free sci-fi (well, a free chapter, you know, first hit’s always free), an internet magic cookie, what more do you need? From P. McAuley at Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds.

Backend stuff: stuffed up the theme, retrieved from backup, and the repaired all the lost work. Mental note to backup every time live site edits are committed. The photography gallery page now looks rather nice. Still working on new, simpler theme, should go better with the gallery.

Assuming the site is working for you. Sporadic tales of “500, server error” messages are beginning to filter in. I can get that myself, but only in IE, only some of the time. The feed should still work okay.

Animated sequel to War of the Worlds done by the Heavy Metal crew.

It’s set after the invasion, with man adapting the martian technology, combining it with steam power, developing airships etc. Looks to be pretty lavish, and as a fan of Heavy Metal I look forward to checkin out what they can do with a decent budget. Lets hope it has some good tunes and not the trash movies like Transformers get stuck with.

So I say hay, he must have a voice on the internet if he’s a ’self-described science junkie’ (and you’ll notice this is filed under technofetiche) so I scroll to the bottom of Wikipedia and find his blog.

And on his blog, first post, is the following gem about a sci fi magazine asking select people to post what they think is the best short stories, and analyses, of then links to read some of the stories being reviewed.

Sometimes, the internet is indistinguishable from magic.

@GD also posted this link on a story of a brand of cigarettes made to be smuggled. All that crap we hear about drugs and smuggling and gangsters and what-not…. for cigarettes. Billion dollar industry. It almost makes me want to go find and buy some, just to participate, just to own such a weird object for a while, before I get someone to smoke them for me.

Watch it. Then prepare to go nuts with the wait, because it’s not coming out for a while.

It lifts itself AND it’s power source already at this stage. Of course, this is being built for the military, so it’ll be able to accomplish much more (and much more sinister) tasks in the future.

It will, however, trickle down. Within the next 10 years or so, we should be able to populate our gardens with robotic sparrows. Task one: eat those fucking wasps. Task two: see task one. Task three: look wicked.

Madeline Ashby is a graduate student living in Toronto and working on a thesis regarding anime, fandom, and cyborg theory. She also writes for Frames Per Second Magazine and WorldChanging Canada. Between Japanese lessons and workshop meetings, she has foolishly embarked on a project called The Von Neumann Wives.

HER STORY:

The Motes let Xian go, and she tucked herself, twitching and sweating, into a loose ball until the crane plucked her like fruit from her sector of the performance space. The Motes really had a lot to say, this session, and her body had contorted in ways it hadn’t since her People’s Colonial Circus days: her toes near her eyes, her spine a half-circle. A nurse pulled Xian’s collar down and slapped on a pain patch. Xian’s body, so light in this space, took on a false heaviness as the drug worked at softening the impact of what the Motes’ molecular machines had done to it. Someone gave her a drink – potassium and sodium chloride and all the chemicals the Motes liked to mimic when their machines broadcast signals through a Dancer’s nervous system, bypassing the brain’s own signals. She needed to replenish. She needed to sleep. She needed to place her bets.

THE REST

more good stuff here

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

“Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.”

Even his non-fiction prose ends up sounding Dickian. I really need to read more of his corpus.

Looks like it has a infrared webcam for a face. I dunno what percentage of the snake was printed, but at this juncture it appears to be only the structural parts, no motors or electronics.

Some day, though…

And anyone who’s read “The Diamond Age” (N. Stephenson’s last good novel), the, uh, whatever they were called, the matter compilers, those were basically 3d printers. I liked how he described them as great thwacking monsters – I guess in the 80s, rotary mechanical vacuum pumps were about all that was available – the newer pumps just hum (diaphragm) or whir (turbomolecular pump) or make no noise because they’re oil diffusion, cryogenic or getter-ion pumps. And to do nano-scale engineer, those thwacking mech pumps do NOT provide enough vacuum – a turbomolecular or oil diffusion pump would be needed at the very least (to attain ‘high’ vacuum, ~2×10^-6 torr) or possibly the cryo or getter ion pump (to attain ultra-high vacuum, ~10^-11 torr), otherwise the gas molecules bouncing around in there (in low vacuum, or 10^-2 torr) will destroy or otherwise fuck with the nano-self-assembly process.

And I know, because I’ve had to study this shit – and I’ve coated things with nano-crystalline gold to make it conductive, and that requires high-vac systems filled with 10Kvolt ionized argon plasma that knocks single gold ions (a single, unattached charged atom is an ion) off of the target (i dunno why the target is where things come from and not where they go, it’s just the nomenclature) and shoots them in straight lines on to a sample, to make it conductive for the SEM analysis process.

The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.

A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). An object 12.9 billion light-years away is seen as it existed 12.9 billion years ago, and the light is just now arriving.

Thanks for the link, @zoecello. Pretty awesome article, too bad their distance math is wrong. The object was 12.9 billion light years away from us 12.9 billion years ago. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating (according to the latest calculations of observed phenomena). A common mistake is for people to make the assumption that because the universe is 13.7 billion years old, it must also be 13.7 billion light years across. WRONG. The universe is about 78 billion light years from tip to tail. So this object is now probably 30 to 40 billion light years away from us now. They are correct in that we’re seeing the object as it existed 12.9 billion years ago. A better explanation would read: “The object is seen as and where it was 12.9 billion years ago, but due to the expansion of the universe the object has moved, and of course undergone 12.9 billion years of evolution, and would now be located closer to 40 billion light years from us. 40 billion years from now, we’ll know what it looks like today.”

Unfortunately, we have no way of actually know how far away it is or if it even exists today. We’re not even completely sure that the galaxy even extends as far as we’ve calculated – you’ve played those video games where you go off one side of the screen and appear on the other, such as Joust – if our galaxy was just big enough, but had edges that looped back in on itself, we’d see the same patch of space, but as it existed back farther in time, then when it looped again we’d see it again, but even further back in time, looking much different than the first time. You’d have a hard time discerning a universe that played by those rules from the universe we observe today. Especially if that universe was spherically warped through the geometry of a higher dimension, so everything appears euclidean because we can only detect in the three dimensions, but in reality would be like the unending surface of a ball.

Would we recognize the solar system if we saw it 100,000 years ago? 1,000,000? 100,000,000? 1,000,000,000? Compared to the calculated size of the observable universe and the current life-span, it wouldn’t need to be a very big ball-surface universe to be completely unrecognizable if we looked back at ourselves. And really, we can barely see other galaxies, barely see nearby solar systems. And you couldn’t look for repeating patterns because of the time factor.

Which brings me to another topic. If the universe is expanding, and the universe’s fabric is spacetime, does that mean time is expanding too? Or is it an inverse function, i.e. time is caused by the expansion of the universe? Gravity affects time and is a function of spacetime geometry. Where gravity is less dense, the universe pulls apart faster and thus time appears to run faster? I suppose it’s within the realm of the possible but I haven’t even the foggiest clue as to whom I should ask about this.

By tracing radioactive pollution created by the nuclear tests of the 1950s, researchers have settled the question of whether the human heart creates new cells during a person’s lifespan. “The dogma has always been that cell division in the heart pretty much stops after birth…. In medical school, we teach that you’ll die with the heart cells you’re born with” [Science News], comments cardiovascular expert Charles Murry. However, a new study has overturned this dogma, and found that the heart does regenerate, albeit slowly.

Well, okay, you have to live to about 100 or more to completely replace all the cells in your heart, as it regenerates pretty slowly:

In the study, which will be published tomorrow in Science, researchers took heart cell samples from cadavers and preserved hearts. Using multiple samples, the researchers estimated that a 20-year-old person renews about one percent of heart muscle cells in a year. By age 75, the rate of cell turnover slows to about 0.4 percent a year

However, being as I was born in the latter half of the 14 billionth year or so of this universe’s evolution, I don’t see 100 as any sort of realistic age to be aiming for. 200 would be the very minimum to aim for, and hope that by then they can step you on your way to immortalize your consciousness until at least this universe ends.

They play Popcorn by Gershon Kingsley and the Dr. Who Theme by Ron Grainer (Orchestrated by Delia Derbyshire, who did drum n’ bass back in the 60s and 70s), both very appropriate early experimental instrumental electronic music selections.

Then there’s this 40 second gem that’s visually appropriate, even if it is full orchestral music.

At first I was like “Yeah yeah, Imperial March” and then I was like “WAIT a fucking second, that’s the Imperial March… PLAYED BY LIGHTNING!!!@133`123$#$%%!!!”

If you played through one of these as a rave, they’d never allow you to leave the stage. Seriously, who could follow up a performance like this that wouldn’t disappoint e-tards?

More appropriate music.

And thanks to the internet, we discover that these guys just have the BIGGEST coils they tour with. But they’re not the only ones.

That’s right, Bach via Tesla. I have a feeling if they played these at a Baroque-era church the entire town would show up and fall on their faces worshipping God’s mighty display (though we know it to be science); if they could pull themselves away long enough other towns might hear and eventually you’d have a whole religion based around this. Assuming they didn’t think it devil’s work and immediately burn you, that is. I leave you with something the girl will appreciate:

and that’s less than a minute of the middle of this scary, yet awesome TED talk by Juan Enriquez (thanks rachet, your links waste a lot of my time)

They put resveratrol into beer! a scientist said “Wow, there is a god!” when told of the news. This guy is pretty funny, too.

I’d heard about the trachea regrown from stem cells, implanted without drugs. Well, they did the same thing with a rat heart and IT STARTED TO BEAT.

They grew it in a glass jar and it started. to. FUCKING. BEAT.

Now that’s an awesome day in the lab.

I finished reading Accelerando last Friday. The author — Charles Stross — took the concept of the Singularity in directions I didn’t anticipate and fully employedhis background of computer science and system administration. Advanced civilizations running timing attacks against the space-time continuum out beyond the Bootes void? Sign me up. That’s the kind of thing I want to read about.

via rachetcat on catagraph.us – Playing with Gears 

I finished Accelerando two nights ago. That shit was crAZY. I liked the end where children ran around playing real life like a video game, since their physical bodies were just an expression of ego at that point.

Strangely enough, the Bootes void came up on the History channel in the background an hour or so ago (before it bored my girl to tears and she changed the channel).

Stories like this make me wonder if we’re seeing advanced civilizations who have conquered their star to a point where it lookslike a neutron star but is actually a superdense dyson sphere, invisible in visible but kicking out high intensity data streams – maybe it’s hitting our atmosphere because something like a star wisp in headed our way….

The only thing I can know for certain is that the truth will probably end up more strange and wonderful than mere fiction could ever imagine.

Maybe those neutron stars that are “feeding” off their binary sisters (srry no link handy) aren’t really neutron stars either… maybe a civilization just needs the matter to increase their computational density…. the magnetic waves from these magnetars (described above) could be from the shifting of nanotech processes on an unimaginable scale, like waves shift through our brains to make them work… what would that look like in a Matroishka brain the scale and density of a neutron star?

If you’re thoroughly confused at this point, the Accelerando novel, free at the link above, will clarify things in a decidedly fun, science-backed sci-fi way – I was up until 2 am every night until I finished it, and while I usually am a night owl this kept me from noticing the time at all.