Hopefully Interesting

Followers of this blog may remember some previous posts I'd made about new non-volatile memory that looked like it could also fulfill the same role that RAM does now.  That is, it's reasonably dense and fast and so could be used as the working memory of your computer but also doesn't lose the information it holds when you turn off the power. Well, yet another type of memory with these properties has been in the news recently.  The stuff is called NRAM after "nanotube."  The nanotubes in the name are the same carbon nanotubes that people talk about making a space elevator  with if they can be made long enough and in sufficient bulk.   People have been trying to make transistors out of nanotubes for a while and they work but there's a big problem with manufacturing them at scale.  You make a big silicon chip with conventional techniques with a bunch of pads on it which you want the nanotubes to stick to.  You wash it with a solution containing the t...

There was an article in IEEE Spectrum recently about insurance and driverless cars.  It was basically talking about how you'd expect the manufacturer of the driverless control to take over the job of insuring the cars when they operate in driverless mode because they're big enough to and they have more information than anyone else.  The price of this would probably be part of the cars price.  It occurs to me that if insurance for a car's automated and manual modes become separated and if the automated insurance is bundled then this will be a force pushing for 100% automated roads if driverless cars take off. Now, clearly this would be a major hit for the insurance industry and all those people whose livelihood depends on insuring vehicles are going to be putting pressure on politicians to stop these forces from affecting them somehow.  I'd expect a major push to require all cars to have manual driving insurance whether the car has a manual mode or not.  But...

Remember  Philae, that robotic probe that the Rosetta mission dropped onto that comet?  It turns out that harpooning comets is tricky as this rather cute  xkcd comit sequence  explained and Philae bounced a few times after landing and came to rest in a shadowed cleft where it couldn't power itself (pictures of journey and cleft here ).  Scientists had hoped that as the comet got closer to the sun the increased light would be enough for Philae to power itself up and resume communications.  Luckily that's exactly what happened .  It looks like Philae is working well enough to give us all the measurements we wanted as it passed near to the sun.

For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th...

Someone made a map of all the languages of Europe arranged by lexical distance.  Looking at it you might wonder why English is considered Germanic but apparently our grammar is distinctly Germanic despite the number of French words we've absorbed. A lot of the time I tend to just look at the income tax when thinking about progressive or regressive taxation but this blog post  reminded me that there are a lot of good and services that have specific taxes attached to them and they tend to disproportionately be things consumed by poor people.  A lot of other good stuff there too. Some Italian scientists basically just sprayed some spiders with water that had carbon nanotubes in it and found that they made silk  stronger than any known material .  That's mad science for you. Remember those bright spots on Ceres?  As Dawn gets closer we're getting  better pictures .  It's looking for like ice. Our robot made the news ! There's this thing cal...

I noticed The Tech , MIT's student newspaper has a front page article on a call for MIT to divest from fossil fuel companies and various faculty members weighing in.  There was some back and forth in it but the thing that I think is most important about divestment wasn't mentioned by any of the participants.  To put it baldly: divestment doesn't accomplish anything. Now, US universities have about $415 billion dollars in investments between them.  The ten biggest oil companies have a market capitalization of 1,800 billion between them.  So you might think that all universities divesting could lower the stocks of the gas companies by 20% or so.  Except the denominator you want is actually all the money everyone is investing in all stocks, or about $65 trillion .  So without the investments of the universities you'd only expect their stocks to go down by half a percent. In economics there's something called the efficient market hypothesis which is sort...

The most exciting stuff over the last month has probably been everything that's happened in genetic engineering via a tool called CRISPR, described in detail  here .  This technique has apparently only been around for a couple of years but it's making big waves.  In the  blog post  where I heard about this some scientists in the comments were predicting that we'd see this used on humans soon and sure enough it seems that the rumors were right and some scientists had  altered non-viable embryos . In other genetic engineering news, some scientists have altered rice  to preform photosynthesis in the more efficient way that corn does Oh, and some people are hoping to use CRISPR to turn elephant embryos into Woolly Mammoths too. In Mars news there are apparently  belts of glaciers  running around the planet.  Also this is a really pretty mineral vein formation . And elsewhere in space, this person did a very good job of putting all th...