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e-cigarettes Featured Science Vaping 

Who is “Big Vaping”: a small slice of the e-cigarette misinformation war

Earlier today, Vox put out an article titled “How Big Vaping is misinforming the public about e-cigarettes“. In it, the author attempts to paint the growing grassroots vaping movement with the same brush as Big Tobacco. Unlike most online news sources, Vox doesn’t have a comment section directly below their articles, so I’m posting this here. The quotes are from the original article. It’s also Saturday morning, and I haven’t had my coffee yet… While the state campaign reminds its citizens that all the Big Tobacco companies also own e-cigarette…

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Computing Hardware Science 

Nano quadroters in autonomous action

The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab has been working with quadrotors from some time, demonstrating how the flying robots can be used for everything from assembling structures to flying through moving hula hoops. Back in January, they put out a video demonstrating the capabilities of their minaturized ‘nano quadrotors’ flying in formation. Vijay Kumar of U Penn gave a talk at TED 2012, and the video above goes into greater detail about the hows and whys of quadrotor development and application.  The second half of the video shows even more complex…

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Featured Science video 

Swiss satellite to clean our cosmic front lawn

Life imitates art, right? That doesn’t have to mean it’s good art to result in a good cause. In that vein, the Swiss Space Center yesterday announced that they’ll be launching the CleanSpace One project, with its first goal to build and deploy a “janitor satellite” named CleanSpace One, with the singular task of tracking down the detrius we’ve left stranded in our solar front yard. The space junk will then be carried back towards Earth, with the goal of burning up during re-entry.

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Arts Featured Film Science 

Time lapse video from the International Space Station

The video above is comprised of a series of time lapse images taken from the International Space Station over the late summer of this year, then edited and set to music. The camera, known as the “Super Sensitive High Definition TV” or SS-HDTV, works in extremely low light situations, and has managed to capture some detailed visuals of the planet. Whether it’s natural phenomena such auroras and lightning storms, or the vast electrical grid that we as humans have covered the planet with, the footage is nothing less than stunning.

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Computing Featured Science 

Microsoft HoloDesk makes remote Jenga possible

There are few things in life that scream ‘from the future’ like holograms, especially interactive holograms. That’s what Microsoft Research is showing off in this video of their HoloDesk project. At the core is a Kinect and a some head tracking software working in conjunction with a see-through display. It allows users to pick up and manipulate 3D objects, including a virtualized smartphone interface, as well as collaborate remotely.

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Computing Featured Hardware Science 

Mind-Probing HUD Glasses Finally Invented: Cyborgs Rejoice

He’s walking in the thoroughfare when a woman stops him and asks him for the time. As he check his psi-spectacle readout, a red alert pops up over her head — she’s anxious. What about?

Scene from a futuristic cyberpunk novel? No, apparently this is now a modern day scenario that has resulted from the research of one Rosalind Picard and others from MIT.

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Arts Featured Film Photography Science 

Lytro lets users focus on capturing the moment, not fiddling with auto focus.

The company Lytro uses a new light field sensor that allows digital cameras to record all the light that is moving in all directions in its field of view. The most obvious benefit is that there would be no need to focus before the pictures are shot. Once the image is captured, the user can select the focal point.

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Featured Science 

Saturday Morning Science 15

Arsenic and Old Life– I grew up reading science fiction and was introduced at a young age to the idea that life might have a different chemical basis than the standard  arrangement based on carbon. Silicon based  life was already a cliché long before I saw the old classic Star Trek episode The Devil in the Dark wherein a Federation mining colony is terrorised by a life-form that could ingest  rock and move through solid matter as if it were swimming in water.  I remember asking my father, a chemical…

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Computing Featured Gaming Science 

Saturday Morning Science 014

The deep nature of life as we know it just got weirder. One of my favourite books on biology is Jacques Monod’s magisterial Chance and Necessity. It is a step by step description of how life evolves at the microbiological level without any predefined plan, purely as a by-product of random forces.

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Computing Featured Science 

Saturday Morning Science 013

The world’s first commercial quantum computer meets its “early adopter”…What was imagined as rare and unique now looks to be numerous and common and enough with the killer drones: what about a robot for the best in us? Schrodinger’s Catbox Arrives!!! It’s powered by a 128 cubit processor, it has a 100 square footprint, it looks like the monolith from 2001: a Space Odyssey trying out for the role of of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull and it’s yours for 10 million dollars.  Originally this space would have held…

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Featured Science Zombies 

Saturday Morning Science 012

The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Roadhouse Blues- The Doors The silly season is well under way. Today the world is going to end. Joe Stalin engineered the Roswell saucer crash. The Centre for Disease Control went viral with a zombie attack piece. And don’t get me started about Lars Von Trier, his silly “worlds in collision” movie or his public airing of his private Fuhrerbunker. I’m glad this is a science column. I could just walk away and say none of this is on my beat….

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Featured Science 

Saturday Morning Science 011

Caveman Blues -I’ve been working up a piece about Neanderthals, collecting links on current research and rereading older theories about our enigmatic, long lost relatives. The problem is; we just keep finding stuff and it keeps getting written up as somehow conclusive or definitive when it’s really just cumulative. Take for example two findings from this week, I’ll cite the Science Digest articles, not because the folks at that site are doing anything wrong (in fact they are getting tighter on their writing and presentation) but because even the good…

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