Oct 30, 2005

Selected Week News #3

The Man Who Would Murder Death
By Thomas Bartlett
From The Chronicle of Higher Education


The article tells about Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who´s a former Computer Scientist who turned to research on aging and has, to be polite, a lot of unusual ideas about preventing death by becoming old. Sounds a little like science fiction, but biology is evolving very quick now and this century will bring as much revolutions as we saw on physics and information technology last century. It´s interesting to be aware.



Wilma the Capacitor
By Paul Noel and Mary-Sue Haliburton
From Open Source Energy Network


This article suggests that hurricanes can act as natural particle accelerators and have capacitor properties that explain why they simply do not disperse. I remember that I learned that vortices are very stable fluid configurations per se, but a hurricane has a lot of interactions with the environment and I don´t know how all this interactions interfere in the stability.



Walking Small: The First Bipedal Molecule
By Ker Than
From LiveScience


Almost everyday I see some article about nanodevices. This is a very interesting one talking about a molecule that has a shape that let it walk as if it was a bipedal bug. All this little machines will play an important role mainly in the medicine of this century, but also in a lot of other fields like material engineering and chemistry. Just wait and see.

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