November 2011
1 post
Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t...
(Feature from GOOD Magazine, Issue 025/WINTER 2011 The Next Big Thing)
David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice....
September 2011
3 posts
The Sweet Science of Sugar
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.10)
Oh, sugar, we know how toxic you are, but you give us so much joy. The pleasure is simply a matter of sucrose hitting your tongue, right? Nope. A series of discoveries by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center has shown that many of the taste receptors on your tongue are also present in your guts. You continue to taste sugar as it works its way...
New Takes on Slow-Cooking Tech
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.09)
There isn’t much you can do with a slow cooker that you can’t accomplish with a Dutch oven on a stove top. You still have to brown your meats and sauté your onions ahead of time. You still have to chop, dredge, and deglaze. But there is one important thing a slow cooker will let you do: walk away.
However, there’s more than just...
Your Gait Can Predict Your Longevity
(From Oprah Magazine, September 2011)
Forget the “life line” on your palm and complicated medical algorithms. It turns out that forecasting how long you’ll live might be as simple as timing how fast you walk. University of Pittsburgh researchers recently crunched data from nearly 35,000 subjects 65 years or older and discovered that each increase in gait speed of 0.1...
August 2011
1 post
BioTech@Home
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.09)
A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility. To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a...
July 2011
2 posts
Friendship Has Its Limits (Social Media Isn't...
Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it—cursor hovering over the Share button—you likely considered how your friends were going to react.
“People are going to Like this,” you thought. “Maybe I’ll even get a few comments.”
Now, how many times have you run...
Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So...
Separating Twins
The Experiment: Split up twins after birth—and then control every aspect of their environments.
The premise: In the quest to tease out the interplay of nature and nurture, researchers have one obvious resource: identical twins, two people whose genes are nearly 100 percent the same. But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies...
June 2011
1 post
Yuck! That's Delicious!
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.06)
Just because a menu item sounds a little odd doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious. Ask chef Chris Cosentino, co-owner of San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant. He’s famous for serving up every part of an animal—even the bits that might make you say ick. “It’s about not being afraid of your food,” Cosentino says. With his favorite dish, Chris’ Last Supper, he...
May 2011
1 post
Light Up Your Wardrobe
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.04)
Thanks to the open source Arduino microprocessor, hobbyists don’t need to mess with soldering irons or circuit boards to computerize their gadgets—to hack their alarm clocks, say, or put their thermostats online. But few have pushed the Arduino as far as Marc DeVidts, who used one to orchestrate a particularly dramatic wardrobe change. For last fall’s...
March 2011
2 posts
Burning Question: Why Are ATM Cards Still So...
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.03)
It’s a local news chestnut: Crooks are stealing debit card PINs from ATMs and gas pumps! Your card could be next! But in these days of complex fraud-alert algorithms, RFID scanners, and embedded chips, shouldn’t we be hearing this story less often? Why aren’t ATM-debit cards more secure?
Well, they are secure. Just not in the US. When our current...
Underground Caverns Keep Things Cold, Safe… and...
(Photo Essay, Wired Magazine, Issue 19.02)
When WikiLeaks wants to safeguard its trove of diplomatic cables or Kraft needs to keep tons of cheese cold, they head beneath the surface.
Continue Reading…
January 2011
1 post
Arctic by Air
(From Long Shot Magazine, Issue One, 2010)
People have been attempting to cross the arctic north in hot air balloons for more then 100 years. The key word here is “attempt.” Ill-fated expeditions over the polar ice cap reach back as far as in 1897, when famed Swedish balloonist S.A. Andrée and his team ran out of hydrogen after only two days of flying. Forced to land the balloon,...
December 2010
0 posts
Science For All
(From Wired Magazine, Issue 18.12)
The institutions that foot the bill for scientific research tend to be best at writing big checks for big projects. Now a bunch of nonprofits are trying to fund the little guys, asking for small donations to small projects. A focus on transparency—researchers must update donors with progress reports—could help get the public invested in science with their...
Great News for Your Body: The Top 10 Health Tips...
(From O: The Oprah Magazine, December 2010)
Every so often, medical researchers hit upon a scientific truth that makes us smile. Here, our 10 favorite studies from 2010.
Good Luck Charms Actually Work
Lucky pennies, four-leaf clovers, horseshoes—it turns out believing in them isn’t totally kooky. In a study at Germany’s University of Cologne, researchers asked superstitious...
July 2010
2 posts
Nature's Prophet: Scientist runs the numbers to...
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 18.07)
There are lots of scientists trying to determine the fate of plant and animal species in the context of global warming. Few command as much processing power as Healy Hamilton, director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She got her start number-crunching nature with her PhD thesis, a DNA...
What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate...
(From Wired.com, February 26, 2010)
SAN DIEGO — One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time?
Here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where...
May 2010
6 posts
Essay: Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 18.06)
On the final day of last winter’s meeting of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel convened to discuss the growing problem of climate change denial. It went poorly. Rather than brainstorming methods for changing public perception, the speakers wasted three hours trying to find someone to blame. Was it an anti-global-warming...
Backstory: Making the Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up...
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 18.06)
Pop-up books have always been the exhibitionists of the literary world—all those creases and protrusions. In Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Emma Sanders applies the in-your-face form to science: the Large Hadron Collider. It took CERN 12 years to build the subatomic smasher, and it took Sanders two years to re-create the folded-paper mini-me. She enlisted...
Weird Science to the Rescue
(From TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 25, 2010)
Climate change is no longer an impending catastrophe to be averted, but an existing condition to be managed. That was the sentiment among scientists at this year’s annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego. Just as the world at large seems to be coming to terms with the reality of a warming planet, so too,...
On the Minds of Scientists
(From TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 25, 2010)
At the year’s biggest conference of scientists, the talk turned to space etiquette, video game science, and the tricky question of who owns your DNA.
Continue Reading…
On Twitter, Filmmaker Kevin Smith Is a Superstar
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 18.03)
At first glance, things seem to be going rather badly for Kevin Smith. The actor, screenwriter, and director scored a critical success with Clerks during the indie film boom of the 1990s, but he’s never been able to repeat the feat. Several efforts to reinvent himself — like the romantic comedy Jersey Girl and the bromantic comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno —...
Amber Ale: Brewing Beer From 45-Million-Year-Old...
(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 17.08)
An aroma like bread dough permeates Raul Cano’s lab. He has just removed the cover from a petri dish, and the odor wafts up from several gooey yellow clumps of microorganisms that have been feeding and reproducing in a dark cabinet for the past few days. Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo,...