Entries from February 2007 ↓

When earthquakes happen sandy soil can turn into a liquid-like state that can be disastrous to buildings built over it. Suddenly the stable ground that you built your house on, is not so stable. This is especially a concern in coastal cities.
Now scientists think they can turn that sandy soil into rock, just by injecting a type of bacteria into the soil under your home. The bacteria actually causes calcium to collect around the individual sand grains. Cementing them together to form a type of sandstone. The bacteria type is a natural, rather than engineered type, and is non-toxic. It simply has never been used in this way before.
Turning sandy soil into rock is not a new idea. There are chemicals that can be injected into soil to turn it into rock. the problem with the chemicals is that they are toxic, and will poison the ground they are injected into. So they really aren’t an option for your home.
The scientists say that it hasn’t been tested yet outside of the lab. So there may be unforeseen problems with this method.
Check out the full article here.

A group of Chinese scientists is reporting that they have found a way to control pigeons in flight. they accomplished this by implanting electrodes into the pigeons brain. By sending signals to those electrodes, they can remote control the pigeons while they are flying. The scientists say they have no idea what this technology might be used for, and can’t think of any practical reasons for doing this. Basically, in true geek fashion, it sounds like they did it just to see if they could.
You can read about it here and here

There is a big story floating around the Internet right now about Jesus’ tomb. Director James Cameron has just finished a documentary in which he claims to have found Jesus’ tomb and his immediate family. Furthermore, he claims that Jesus is still in the tomb along with his alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, and son Judah.
What proof does he have? Basically none.
He claims that the names on the coffins are too significant to be coincidence. The names inscribed are Jesua and Mariameme. He claims that Mariameme means Mary Magdalene and Jesua means Jesus. He further mentions DNA evidence as proving this conclusively. But if you read his own press site and all the news stories, it becomes clear that the only thing his DNA tests proved was that Jesua was related to people buried in the tomb. Which is not the same thing as proving that he was the Jesus in the Bible.
According to the chief archaeologist who excavated the site, Amos Kloner, the names listed were common at that time. Furthermore, while the name Jesua is a known alternate name for Jesus, the name Mariameme is not considered an alternate for Mary. So basically, this is nothing but a sensationalist stunt to get publicity for his film. No one who sees the evidence is going to be swayed in either direction by it.
You can read the BBC story here.
The official Discovery Channel Documentary page here.

Someone sent me the following in an email. I thought it was pretty funny, so I posted it here.

HERE’S THE FINAL WORD ON NUTRITION AND HEALTH. IT’S A RELIEF TO KNOW THE
TRUTH AFTER ALL THOSE CONFLICTING MEDICAL STUDIES!!!

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the
British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the
British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than
the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart
attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION: EAT AND DRINK WHAT YOU LIKE. SPEAKING ENGLISH IS APPARENTLY
WHAT KILLS YOU!!!

The graphic above comes from the American Heart Association website. Follow the link for their recommendations on heart disease prevention.

I went and saw Breach last night. It was actually a pretty good movie. Breach is based on the true story of Robert Hanssen. Hanssen is an FBI agent that started spying for the Russians in 1985. He was caught in 2001 and is currently serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. His story is actually pretty interesting, and the movie was pretty good.
Check out his story on Wikipedia, and check out a CNN news release about it.

A giant sinkhole opened up in a poor neighborhood in Guatemala city. The sinkhole is over 300 feet deep. Several houses and a truck were sucked into the hole when it opened. The bodies of two of people have already been found and a third person is still missing.

I don’t think I have ever seen a sinkhole this big. Check out the links below for more info.
BBC coverage of giant sinkhole
Associated press writer Juan Llorca

The mars rovers just recently got an update to their software that should allow them to keep from getting confused by large rocks that are in the way. Since the lag time between earth and mars is about 20 minutes, the rovers often have to act in a semi-independent fashion. The scientists will tell the rover to go towards a certain location, but if the rover has any issues in following that command, it will have to deal with them itself. Previously, if the rover found a large object in it’s path, it could get confused and require input from NASA before it could get around it. This was due to the limited planning abilities when it was choosing a route. Now it can plan and map out a path up to 50 meters ahead.

You can read about the problem and the update here.

I ran across this interesting site that sells Metal art sculptures. I’m really not sure how to describe them. Look at the picture I posted and you will see what I mean. The cool thing about these art pieces is that they are all designed using a computer and complex math. Pretty cool stuff. Check out his site for a lot more pieces. Also, the art is all for sale at pretty reasonable prices. If my house had been decorated in a different style, I would probably get a few of these for display. Sadly, most of these pieces won’t go with the decor in my house.

Interesting metallic sculptures.

Check out this article. It looks like a concert pianist passed off recordings from other pianists as her own recordings and no one found out for years. Itunes does a bunch of calculations on CDs when it plays them to try to find a match in its database. It does that so that it can display track information, artist info and graphics to you while it plays the CD. Itunes identified the CDs from this atrist as being recorded by other Pianists. Which made a music magazine editor suspicious. He went and had them checked out. It turns out that all of her CDs are other peoples CDs.

Check the article out here

As more and more media becomes digital, this kind of thing is probably going to get more common. Just a few months ago, there were some articles about using Google’s book search to find plagiarism in older well established books. So if you copied someone else’s work and think you got away with it because you did it years ago and no one found out, you might be getting a wake up call. I wonder if there is any kind of statute of limitations on things like violating copyright? Probably not.

Found this article about an experiment that some scientists did with data storage. Basically they stored data in the DNA of a particular form of bacteria and then read that data back out.
That isn’t really anything new. People have written data into DNA and read it back out before. There was even a prototype computer a few years back that used DNA.
What’s new about this experiment is that they stored the data in a living bacteria culture. Then they caused the bacteria to grow for 100 generations. Taking the youngest generation, they then extracted the data out of the DNA of that generation. So the data they introduced into the DNA of the original bacteria was inherited by its descendants and was able to be read back after 100 generations. That is a pretty significant accomplishment that could lead to living growing computers and storage systems.

You can check out the original article here.