Charles Stross has an essay up on the BBC website about lifelogging and the future of compact data storage. If you’ve read a lot of his novels or followed his blog closely, a lot of these ideas won’t be totally new to you, but it’s interesting to read them pared down and packaged for Joe Average.
NASA gets ready to send Phoenix to Martian pole
NASA is getting ready for its next Mars Lander to be launched. The Phoenix will be landing in the polar region, where we know ice exists.
Ice means water. Water might mean a better chance of determining if life exists on Mars. It will be checking the conditions to see if they’re amenable to life.
That seems to be a bit of a wishy-washy mission statement, though, and it would be a bit more exciting in their press releases to know if these instruments can do more than just check conditions and maybe give us a hint about the big question: is there life?
A magnetic generator that actually works as advertised
Once you’ve indulged in a bit of schadenfreude and watched the CEO of ‘perpetual motion’ company Steorn explaining why it is that his demo failed to work, marvel at the fact that magnetism can be used to create a ready source of energy – this
little gadget is powered by small vibrations {correction} moving a bundle of tiny magnets, which creates a tiny electric current that can power an equally tiny electronic device, like a sensor. How great would it be to have a phone you could recharge with a vigorous shake?
Robot soccer at the nanoscale
It appears that my home nation’s (inexplicably) best-loved sport has pervaded as far as the nanoscale; Georgia Tech is hosting a soccer competition for nanobots that takes place on a field smaller than a grain of rice. Not much space for the referee to hide, then.
Spacesuits and Sixguns – free fiction online
It’s official – there really is more free genre fiction online than I will ever have time to read, even if I stopped reading anything else. Still, diversity is a sign of a healthy growing market, so they say; so those of you who have more spare time than myself (which is most of you, I’m guessing) may want to wander over to check out the third issue of Spacesuits And Sixguns. If the fiction is of a similar quality to the artwork, it won’t be a wasted visit.