All posts by Tom James

Blog

Nuclear in China

chinese_workerContracts have been signed for the building of the first batch of Sanmen AP1000 nuclear reactors in China:

An engineering contract was signed last week towards building the Sanmen AP1000s. Real construction work should begin within one month on the nuclear power reactors.

…

The result will be the first Westinghouse-designed AP1000 pressurized water reactors in the world, ahead of the others at Haiyang in Shandong province and more expected in the UK and the USA.

The Chinese government is also helpfully developing pebble bed nuclear reactors as well.

[via Next Big Future][image from Saad.Akhtar on flickr]

Blog

Brain control with light: neuroengineering at MIT

Just a nod to a must-read article at Wired on the new1 technology of neuroengineering:

Boyden directs MIT’s Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, part of the MIT Media Lab. He explains the mission of neuroengineering this way: “If we take seriously the idea that our minds are implemented in the circuits of our brains, then it becomes a top priority to understand how to engineer brains for the better.”

Here, neuroscience is not merely studied, it is applied. Which is why we’re off again, to see the molecular engineer’s microscope, the viral growing area, and the machine where they cut micron-thin slices of mouse brains in order to evaluate what changes they’ve made using the rest of the equipment.

This video illustrates one of the most potentially disruptive technologies ever:

1:Although the article points out that, depending on how far you expand the definition, human beings have been “neuroengineering” for all history.

Blog

Why we blog

geeseResearchers at the University of Missouri have discovered that writing about emotional trauma increases your sense of well being:

Researchers asked 49 college students to take two minutes on two consecutive days and write about something they found to be emotionally important. The student saw immediate rise in mood and performed better on standardized measures of physiological well-being.

One of the key points of the study was that the length of time spent writing required to achieve beneficial effects was lower than previously thought.

As with keeping a diary, getting your thoughts down in text can be an aid to happiness as well as helping with your writing ability.

[via Jon Taplin][image from zenera on flickr]

Blog

What English words are dying out?

3 Comments

lettersLinguists at the University of Reading have developed a computer model of the development of the English language:

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

This reminds me of another exploration of the future of language.

[at BBC News][image from AYUMi ~ PHOTOGRAPHY]

Blog

Lovelock: give up on trying to save the planet

6 Comments

lifeboatJames “Gaia Theory” Lovelock suggests that there may be as few as one billion human beings left in 100 years time:

Lovelock’s point seemed to be that we should give up on trying to save the planet and the entirety of the human species by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and focus instead on equipping “lifeboat nations” with the necessary infrastructure (schools, roads, houses) to support swarms of climate refugees.

The UK and Canada are lifeboat nations, in case you’re wondering. Probably Siberia too. Basically, anywhere that will be relatively cool and have water in a world that is on average 5°C warmer than it was 100 years ago.

Which sounds interesting and… controversial. The suggestion that places like the UK and Canada should massively overinvest in infrastructure over the next few decades may be be Quite A Good Idea in any case (fiscal stimulus, anyone?).

But is this giving up too soon?

[image from Troon Lifeboat on flickr]