Future bio-nanotechnology will use computer chips inside living cells

""Today's micro- and nanoelectronic processes already would allow us to produce complex 3-dimensional microscale structures as sensors and actuators" José Antonio Plaza tells Nanowerk. "Complex structures, smaller than cells, can be mass produced with nanometer precision in shape and dimensions and at low cost already. Furthermore, many different materials (semiconductors, metals, and insulators) could be patterned on the silicon chip with accurate dimensions and geometries."<br />
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Plaza [...], together with a team of colleagues, has demonstrated that silicon chips smaller than cells can be produced, collected, and internalized inside living cells by different techniques (lipofection, phagocytosis or microinjection) and, most significantly, they can be used as intracellular sensors."

Tagged with: nanotechnology • transhumanism • MEMS • biotechnology • cell • semiconductor • technology • cyborg • medicine • cyberpunk •

Warning: Your reality is out of date

"These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling."

Tagged with: perception • philosophy • reality • knowledge • change • time • mesofacts •

The unreal art of realistic dialogue

"Writers of fiction are told to "listen" to how people speak in order to create realistic dialogue but, like all our perceptions, our hearing is unreliable. We unconsciously filter out the crap in people's speech to refine sense and meaning. What we're left with is a type of distilled speech far removed from the realism of what we hear and, crucially, we rarely notice this until we see it with our own eyes, while reading a transcript of what someone said.<br />
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The rubric of realism has loomed over literary theory for almost two centuries now, and writers as varied as Irvine Welsh, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin and Peter Carey have all experimented with realistic dialogue to great effect. But even so, you can hear the pure realism in narrative dialogue as easily as you can drive a horse and cart out of a Corot painting."

Tagged with: writing • fiction • dialogue • realism •

Scientists drag quantum mechanics into the visible realm

"For those who got lost in the details, the short version: the device can convert a quantum state to mechanical oscillations and back. And (in the grand scheme of things), it's big." Really don't understand exactly how this works, but if I've got the shape of it right, the implications are seriously Keanu-in-the-Matrix – quantum weirdness at a level observable by the human eye.

Tagged with: physics • science • quantum • mechanics • observation • system •

The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010

"The problem [...] is that publishers bundle two sorts of value when they create a hardcover book: The physical product is more impressive, and you get earlier availability of the book, often a year or more before the paperback version comes out. Unfortunately, book buyers think most of the extra value they're paying for from a hardcover is the physical book. Meanwhile, publishers (and authors) often think the main value of a hardcover is early availability. Many authors and publishers don't want to say this to the public, but hardcover books are a tax on the most enthusiastic fans of an author.<br />
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E-publishing breaks that cozy little arrangement, by separating the early availability value from the better production value. Publishers couldn't figure out what to do about that in 2000. So they often did the conservative thing, pricing ebooks the same as hardcovers. To ebook customers, that felt like exploitation, if not outright fraud.<br />
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It still feels that way today."

Tagged with: digital • ebooks • marketing • publishing • business • markets • technology • pricing •

Russian secrets for sale, no questions asked

"Wrenched from the bowels of government by the forces of runaway capitalism and corruption, the hush-hush databases have made their way to this market in central Moscow where the windows of tiny shops glitter with cellphones, pirated DVDs and porn.<br />
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Compressed on discs, frozen in Cyrillic letters, is a trove of petty squabbles and personal tragedies that make up the fabric of this vast and often lawless land.<br />
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In a country where you have no right to know, but really you can know anything, anybody can anonymously buy discs burned with private information such as rape victimization, financial holdings and the suspicion of CIA involvement. Asking price (it's negotiable): $40 to $60."

Tagged with: data • theft • privacy • digital • Russia • cyberpunk • market •

The Dropout Economy

"Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming."

Tagged with: US • politics • community • economics • lifestyles • new-southsea • libertarianism • recession • education • resilience •

We feel your pain: Extreme empaths

"Evidence from pain synaesthetes would seem to lend some weight to the idea that the brain mirrors the physical aspects of pain, since it would make sense that their physical sensations would arise through some malfunctioning of this mirror system. "It is highly plausible that [sensitivity] for pain is common in all of us, and varies in response to seeing or thinking about another in pain, from tingling through to the actual perception of pain," says Bernadette Fitzgibbon at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.<br />
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There is, however, one key difference between pain synaesthesia and other types of hyper-empathy. Besides having a heightened sensitivity to another's pain, all the documented pain synaesthetes shared one other characteristic – they had all suffered traumatic pain before developing the condition. Many are amputees, and their phantom limb is the site of the pain they feel when faced with another's distress… "

Tagged with: neoroscience • empathy • mind • brain • pain • synaesthesia •