The Beijing Times has announced that China has recently begun constructing Maglev trains, transportation that can go speeds of about 600 kilometres per hour. They have been around for some time and are already in use in Japan, or as everyone else knows it the land of futuristic everything.
Maglev trains, derived from Magnetic Levitation, work on the principle that trains can hover and propel themselves using magnets instead of using wheels, thereby reducing friction substantially and increasing the top speed from one hundred to several hundred kilometres per hour. The science behind their operation is actually quite simple. There are two motors, one to levitate the train and the other one to propel the train. The one levitating the train works like the magnets we all played with back in elementary school; put a magnet close to another magnet and it pushes it away. In the life-sized version the track is one of the magnets, and the other one is on the train. The propelling magnet is nothing but a good old electric motor that's been linearized: stretched out along the train, with the other part of the motor overlaying the side of the track. The ability to float and push itself along the track allows it to go phenomenal speeds.
Nordic telecommunications company TeliaSonera, and its Nepalese subsidiary, Ncell, have become the first company to provide a 3G high speed connection in the Mount Everest region. This includes access from the summit. This brand spanking new service will allow access to Facebook, Twitter, and Google for mountain climbers and mountain goats alike.
Now, the summit of Everest's peak is 29,029 feet above sea level (or 8,848 metres for my fellow Canadians). To give you some perspective this is almost equal to 16 CN Towers stacked one on top of another, that's a lot of glass floors to look through.
A new paper published by Nature Medicine has found that your lungs contain taste receptors, and they can specifically sense bitterness!
Dr. Stephen B. Liggett MD, a pulmonologist at University of Maryland School of Medicine, and his team of researchers discovered the bitter taste receptors (TAS2Rs) by accident while studying human airway smooth muscle (ASM) receptors. What's even more surprising is that the TAS2 receptors found in the lung's smooth muscle cells are identical to those found on your tongue. There are a few exceptions of course; the lung's taste receptors are not grouped together like they are in the tongue (better known as taste buds), and they have no sensory link to the brain, which explains why you can't taste awful bitterness every time you travel to a very polluted city and simply inhale.
The recent economic collapse and following recession has affected nearly everyone on the planet, nowhere is this more evident than in the manufacturing sector. The majority of the jobs lost in recent years (at least in the States and in Canada) has been technical labour, generally in auto assembly and other manufacturing positions. A new form of manufacturing, called Lights Out manufacturing, will most likely make this problem worse since it increases production efficiency. But before we discuss the social aspects, we`ll take a look at just how cool it all is.
One of the largest companies currently using this method of production is Japan based FANUC (Factory Automatic Numerical Control) Ltd. This company specializes in robotics manufacturing: servo motors, mechanical arms etc, all with a slight twist. There is minimal human involvement in the entire process. What they've essentially produced is robots, that build other robots. That is in a nutshell what Lights Out manufacturing is, a funny term stating that because there are no humans present in the factory the lights could technically be turned off without any change in operations.
As you sit here reading this, FANUC robots are building and assembling other robots at a rate of about 50 per day (remember, they don't need to take breaks) and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days. The only time humans visit is to deliver the robots to their clients, primarily auto manufacturers. According to FANUC vice-president Gary Zywiol, "Not only is it lights-out, we turn off the air conditioning and heat too". These robots are so efficient, companies like Panasonic have been able to produce up to 2 million plasma screen televisions per month, all with a whopping 15 people monitoring the factory floor.
Here is the famed robot-robot factory. In this case, they're producing servo motors which will be used in moving the arms of their fellow brothers and sisters.
Notice the complete lack of human involvement, and the sweet sounding servo motors in action.
On the social side of things, it's almost inevitable to not think of the further job losses associated with this kind of production. It'll eventually replace almost all manual labour jobs in the manufacturing industry, probably contributing even more to the poor economic situation we've found ourselves in. I know that personally, I should be more worried and feeling bad about the future job losses associated with this new assembly method, but to be 100% honest, I'm really not. I realize that having so many people out of work will cause definitive social, political, and economic strife, not to mention that it's quite cruel to our fellow humans who rely on jobs like these to feed their families and live their day to day lives. but I also feel that the revolving wheel of technological advancement is something which cannot be ignored. To be brutally honest about the whole thing, these machines and the manufacturing methods make human laborours simply obsolete: we have machines that never take breaks and can work non-stop, require no income, no benefits, no health plans, and take no sick days; it's a no-brainer why manufacturing companies would prefer this method. Even so, the same was probably said of the printing press when it was first invented: it took away the well-being of priests and scribes who would traditionally spend time copying and writing by hand. And despite all that, I remain optimistic that although manufacturing jobs might disappear, computer programming jobs will take their place as more of these robots require complex programming. The jobs simply transfer from one venue to the next. Am I being too optimistic? Perhaps, but who knows, perhaps the blue-collar worker of the future will look like Bill Gates....just an amusing afterthought.
According to Wired magazine and the United States air force, on Saturday 23, 2010 (this past Saturday), the launch control officers of Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming lost communications with 50 LGM-30F-Minuteman II Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). If you don't have a clue what these are, here's a
short video of the resulting, minute, practically unnoticeable damage caused by the impact of this little toy.
Now, as this sinks in for you, this was such a serious matter that warranted the attention of many high-ups in the US Air Force, especially considering that it would be quite rare to loose communication and monitoring of all the missile silos in the entire base. It was even tweeted by an ex Air Force missile launch officer, reading "This is 50 ICBMs dropping off at once. I never heard of anything like it". It seems to me that if an actual nuclear weapon were to go off at a reasonable distance for us to somewhat survive, we'd probably be reading tweets about it before we even felt the explosion.
I'll leave the rest of the technical details about the situation for you to read over at Wired, right now I think what deserves our focused attention is the simple question "why?". Why do we even have these missiles still lying around? In an age of nearly constant worldwide communication, commerce, and business, why on earth would we need missiles (50 of them in one area to be exact, but there's plenty more around the world), that can obliterate small nations or large cities in the blink of an eye? I can't even imagine ever being so upset with someone that the last resort for resolving our issues would be to incinerate them and the land beneath them. The cold war is long over and my humble opinion is that these things have got to go. They have absolutely no use, not for defensive purposes, and not for offensive purposes (I doubt anyone would want to see WWII repeated). On top of that, they seem to be in the hands of people with very twitchy trigger fingers, something that should get everyone's red flags springing up. And finally, we have iffy control over them so they may launch without our direction, at any time, sort of like it almost did this past Saturday; it only takes one to start trouble and cause havoc after all.
So perhaps when my part time Benihana cooking instructor said " Stop twirling that knife, you'll hurt yourself or others", maybe he was right. I suppose if I'm the collective conscious of the western world, and the knife is a bomb with the power of 50 million tons of TNT ... well then touche Mr. Sakamoto, touche.
