Refrigerators are pretty energy-inefficient. So discovering materials that can produce a giant magetocaloric effect could help save a lot of energy someday. But I’m not sure which effect has more promise the thermoelectric effect or the giant magnetocaloric effect. The giant magnetocaloric effect definitely wins on having a cool name, though.
The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.
Apple has a culture of doing things in “insanely great” ways. Sure, people can argue that they don’t always achieve “greatness” — but the attempt to do so generally produces products of higher caliber than nearly all other consumer electronics/software. Consumers can tell the difference, and until Apple bets big on a total flop, Apple’s business will likely continue to grow nicely for quite some time. Even if Google’s Android marketshare overtakes the iPhone….
The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish might be the key to learning about why animals age. Individual jellyfish can grow up from a polyp into an adult jelly — and then revert back to a polyp. Obviously, whatever genetic trick these jellyfish have… could be a trick that only jellyfish or other very simple organisms are able to perform. But it’s still a neat trick.
“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by an invention of ours.” — Ben Franklin
Occassionally, I check out Archive.org to see what websites looked like a few years ago… But recently, it seems like the Archive isn’t really archiving new material. They say they’re “just a bit behind” in indexing — and that the data that has been donated to them via Alexa has a stipulation that only data older than 6 months can be displayed in the Archive.
But with Twitter/Youtube/Facebook and all sorts of “real-time” internet data being created at an incredible pace… is it even possible for Archive.org to keep up with its archive? The US Library of Congress is already archiving all public Tweets, but it seems like the efforts to archive the internet zeitgeist is becoming a nearly impossible task.
I came across an interesting writeup of a successful Kickstarter project where the project creator admits to having a back-up plan:
At the time, I also thought that if we didn’t reach our Kickstarter goal by the deadline, then I would move to the Indiegogo platform and ask all our original backers to re-pledge their amounts so we could collect immediately (that’s one major difference between Kickstarter and Indiegogo). I realized we probably would lose close to 25% of the backers this way (due to various factors) — but it was better than nothing.
This strategy makes me wonder how many competitors can exist in the “crowdfunding platform” market. EBay dominates the “online auction” market despite several attempts from others to compete with eBay…. so is there a similar winner-takes-all market for crowdfunding platforms? If project creators daisy-chain their crowdfunding projects, why don’t the do it in parallel? Hmm.
In any case, crowdfunding projects aren’t “set it and forget it” efforts. It takes a lot of legwork, passion and fan engagement to pull it off.
Japan is aiming for a moon base to be constructed by robots before 2020. This is a seriously good idea that NASA should have been working on for decades now, instead of shuttling people up to the ISS. I guess the ISS is cool and all, but a permanent moon base built and maintained by robots? How can you beat that? Even if the Japanese don’t get their moon base built on time — at least they’ve invested in developing robot technology that could be incredibly useful to their aging population on Earth. Robot technologies have dividends for the Earth-based economy, something that the ISS and the proposals to go Mars or an asteroid don’t.
Cold Fusion was easily dismissed as “non-science” by anyone who read the original papers from Pons & Fleischman… I took a class in college that went over the journal submissions, demonstrating “what not to do” in science. Mocking other chemists is a widespread hobby among the chemical sciences.
However, Cold Fusion is making a comeback now. But it’s more focused on nailing down how “excess heat” can be observed from various calorimetry experiments. There also seem to be some researchers looking into “low energy” nuclear chemistry, but I’m skeptical about what they’re really looking at… I think they’re mostly trying to get funding for doing research that has a world-changing impact but a vanishingly low probability of working… It’s like “placebo” science — it might make someone feel better, but the effects are all in someone’s interpretation.
NASA and GM are working on robonauts..? Looks sorta like Honda’s bipedal robots, but these Robonauts seem to be focused on “waist-up” functions instead of walking.
