Cryonics

Things on the cryonics front are looking good.  With the advances Alcor has made in cryonics using their cryoprotectant that becomes glassy instead of cryatalline, and this new, we'll be looking real good before long

[...]

Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can’t wait – saving people with serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes brain death.

Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, oxygen demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury stretches. Alam has suspended 200 pigs for an hour each, and although experimental protocol calls for different levels of care for each pig, the ones that got optimal treatment all survived.  

Self driving car

Finally, I've been waiting for this forever.  It can't come soon enough for me.

German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself - and at speeds of up to 150mph.

It can weave with tyres screeching around tricky bends and chicanes, and through tightly coned off tracks - without any help or intervention from a human.

[...]

The GTi has electronic 'eyes' that use radar and laser sensors in the grille to 'read' the road and send the details back to its computer brain. A sat-nav system tracks its exact position with pin-point precision to within an inch.

The car can then work out the twists and turns it has to negotiate - before setting off at break-neck speed through a laid out course on a test track.

On a race circuit, it drove itself faster and more precisely than the VW engineers could manage - and can accelerate independently up to its top speed of 150mph.

To prove it is no trick, guests were invited to design for themselves a variety of different courses - using road cones - and then watch the car fly around them on its own at a test track near their world headquarters in Wolfsburg in northern Germany.

[...]

'The computer calculates where and at what speed the GTi has clearance between the cones. The GPS satellite enables navigation to within less than an inch.'

---

Find this story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=393401&in_page_id=1770
©2006 Associated New Media

Slow-frozen people

Good news for cryonics:

WASHINGTON – The latest research on water - still one of the least understood of all liquids despite a century of intensive study – seems to support the possibility that cells, tissues and even the entire human body could be cryopreserved without formation of damaging ice crystals, according to University of Helsinki researcher Anatoli Bogdan, Ph.D.

He conducted the study, scheduled for the July 6 issue of the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B, one of 34 peer-review journals published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

In medicine, cryopreservation involves preserving organs and tissues for transplantation or other uses. Only certain kinds of cells and tissues, including sperm and embryos, currently can be frozen and successfully rewarmed. A major problem hindering wider use of cryopreservation is formation of ice crystals, which damage cell structures.

cryopreservation may be most familiar, however, as the controversial idea that humans, stricken with incurable diseases, might be frozen and then revived years or decades later when cures are available.

Bogdan's experiments involved a form of water termed "glassy water," or low-density amorphous ice (LDA), which is produced by slowly supercooling diluted aqueous droplets. LDA melts into highly viscous water (HVW). Bogdan reports that HVW is not a new form of water, as some scientists believed.

"That HVW is not a new form of water (i.e., normal and glassy water are thermodynamically connected) may have some interesting practical implications in cryobiology, medicine, and cryonics." Bogdan said.

"It may seem fantastic, but the fact that in aqueous solution, [the] water component can be slowly supercooled to the glassy state and warmed back without the crystallization implies that, in principle, if the suitable cryoprotectant is created, cells in plants and living matter could withstand a large supercooling and survive," Bogdan explained. In present cryopreservation, the cells being preserved are often damaged due to freezing of water either on cooling or subsequent warming to room temperature.

"Damage of the cells occurs due to the extra-cellular and intra-cellular ice formation which leads to dehydration and separation into the ice and concentrated unfrozen solution. If we could, by slow cooling/warming, supercool and then warm the cells without the crystallization of water then the cells would be undamaged."

Half-terahertz performance

A research team from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology has demonstrated the first silicon-germanium transistor able to operate at frequencies above 500 GHz. Though the record performance was attained at extremely cold temperatures, the results suggest that the upper bound for performance in silicon-germanium devices may be higher than originally expected.

Ultra-high-frequency silicon-germanium circuits have potential applications in many communications systems, defense systems, space electronics platforms, and remote sensing systems. Achieving such extreme speeds in silicon-based technology – which can be manufactured using conventional low-cost techniques – could provide a pathway to high-volume applications. Until now, only integrated circuits fabricated from more costly III-V compound semiconductor materials have achieved such extreme levels of transistor performance.

[...]

Looks like there's still some kick in the old technology yet.  The frequency difference between this and what is in our desktops now is like the difference between a 286 and an old pentium.  I'd say we can squeeze a few more generations out of the old fab techniques yet.

Anything Into Oil

Original article here.
Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end.

This is just too excellent.  You get generator grade oil from waste streams, in addition to solid and liquid fertilizer that is better than any others out there.