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EPFL scientists have developed a tiny, portable personal implantable blood testing laboratory that sends data through mobile phone network
Yes, it’s all going according to the plan.
Back in 2007, US researchers have simulated half a virtual brain of a mouse on a supercomputer. Interestingly, Ray Kurzweil, in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near“, accurately predicted the amount of computing power necessary for that scientific achievement.
What’s really interesting is the prediction that he made for 2013. Check this graphic:
I know this is old news1, but I guess it’s worth the consideration: asteroid 2011 AG5, an asteroid roughly the size of a football stadium, is thought to be in a (albeit improbable) collision course to Earth.
- In Internet Years™, it’s ancient really! [↩]
Continuing the work with analog sensors on the Raspberry Pi, I decided to test the PulseSensor‘s behavior in building a pulse sensing application. The Pulse Sensor is a well-designed plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino but considering that it’s a simple analog sensor that sends values between 0 and 1023, it’s easy enough to use with the MCP3008 ADC on the RPi.
As a programming teacher, I don’t agree with everything that Bret Victor states in this article, but some of the ideas portrayed here for a learnable programming environment are outstanding. Go read it, now.
I know that there are probably a bunch of other implementations of the Conway’s Game of Life in Javascript out there, but I wanted to try to create a new version that included (properly enjoyable) music that would be generated by the evolution of the cells in the game.
However, the use of the Web Audio API (I didn’t want to use MP3 or WAV) for this end proved somehow useless mainly because the sounds it generates are only comparable to those of the good old days of dial-up connections. Moreover, the API is only available (for now) in Google Chrome and Mac OS X’s Safari’s latest version.
Perhaps, in the future, I’ll change it once there’s some more interesting way of doing that and that works across more browsers.
So, for now, enjoy only the visual aspect of the game.
What do you get when you mix a Swedish House Mafia‘s music video, an ad for Absolut Vodka and a futuristic vision of entertaining races? This visually-stunning video, that’s what:
I’m starting a new semester where I’ll be teaching about Concurrent and Distributed Programming. This cartoon pretty much sums up the whole thing:
Source: Geek And Poke
Remember when I wrote about the “magic dust”, a vision of the possible future of nano-technology? Well, it seems that this kind of innovation (although not from a nano-technology point of view) will be available sooner than I expected, with the arrival of a new spray containing neonatal cells that can help skin heal faster.
As usual, the future looks fascinating.