Is there such a thing as a native European, or are we all aliens here?

Consider this: now that winter’s approaching, how many of you fancy sleeping outside? How about sleeping outside naked?

The simple fact is, the human animal is not suited to surviving a Northern European winter. Without technologies such as hunting, fire and agriculture, our ancestors would have died out centuries ago.

Continue reading “You Are An Alien”

As well as making for a great headline, this story also happens to be true. According to the BBC News website, scientists have been using satellite photos to locate penguins in the Antarctic – but as the penguins themselves are too small to spot, the boffins have been locating them using the brown stains produced by the birds’ accumulated guano.

Full story here: Link to BBC Science & Environment News.

My mind was stretched this morning by the following passage from an article in h+ magazine:

“They were trying to establish exactly how organic photosynthesis approaches 95% efficiency, whereas the most sophisticated human solar cells operate at only half that. What they discovered is nothing short of remarkable. Using femtosecond lasers to follow the movement of light energy through a photosynthetic bacterial cell, Engel et al. observed the energy traveling along every possible direction at the same time. Instead of following a single trajectory like the electrons on a silicon chip, the energy in photosynthesis explores all of its options and collapses the quantum process only after the fact, retroactively “deciding” upon the most efficient pathway”

From Slashdot: a group of car enthusiasts find a stolen car, then use Facebook and Google Maps to locate the driver.

Full story: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/12/1712258&from=rss

This is simultaneously cool and creepy: http://cubo.cc/

As reported by Futurismic and New Scientist, researchers from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed artificial intelligence software that appears to possess a rudimentary “theory of mind” comparable to that held by a four or five year old child.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has released the first HDTV images of the surface of the Moon, taken by its KAGUYA probe from an altitude of 100 kilometres.

In this speech transcript, Charles Stross turns his attention to the way technology’s going to affect our lives over the next twenty years.

According to the BBC, UK engineers are saying that tiny “smart” devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could soon be used to explore other planets.