The cool new tech thing for kids is...Windows? Wait, what?

So my life and job leads me to interact with a lot of tech-forward teenagers, and I've noticed a weird trend in the last year or so: Windows is suddenly cool. (I was going to say "cool again", but was it ever?). 

It wasn't long ago that I believed that computers of any sort, let alone Windows machines, were on their way to obsolescence for anything but actual work. But in the last year or so suddenly every kid wants to either have a Windows laptop, or, if they have a Mac, to have Windows on it using BootCamp or something similar. My son has barely touched his iPad in weeks. 

This is primarily because the computer games they want to play are on Steam. Terraria in particular is most popular, but there are others like Spelunky and BroForce. I'm not saying they exactly _like_ Windows. Everyone still complains about how terrible it is, and they argue over whether to use Windows 10 or Windows 7 (anything but 8). But they all want it. Not sure what this means, but it's interesting.

Mad scientists create artificial life!

Finally, scientists start to take the whole 'playing God' thing seriously. Jack Szostak's project at Harvard Medical School makes Craig Ventner's team's artificial bacterium look like an 8th grade science project.

Housewarming party as soon as my house comes out of the printer

This is too cool. If Caterpillar gets its way, we will soon be able to print out an entire house.

It will probably be one of those loss-leader operations. The house-printer only costs 150 bucks. But it's half a million for the cartridge.

Artificial bones now

Wow. Via IO9, researchers at Georgia Tech have now made artificial bone that blends into tendons the way real bones do. Add that to the use of menstrual blood to regrow limbs in mice, one way or another the loss of a limb is likely to become a temporary condition even within my lifetime.

Free hydrogen from bacteria?

You hear a lot of people - especially car manufacturers - talking about how ten years from now all the cars are going to be running on hydrogen fuel cells. Of course they've been giving us the "ten years in the future" line for the past thirty years, but still, it sounds nice.

But the issue has always been this: where do you get all that free hydrogen? Hydrogen is not rare, of course; it's by far the most common substance in the universe. But on Earth most hydrogen atoms are hooked up, mostly with a couple of oxygens, making water. That's basically what a fuel cell does, so to get the fuel for the cell you have to separate the hydrogen from the water too, leading to the whole second law of thermodynamics, leaving you inevitably behind in the exchange.

Now, however, scientists are working on getting nitrogen-fixing bacteria to do the work for us. If they succeed, it could be a potentially unlimited source of renewable fuel. Cross your fingers.

I want a micro-spacecraft for my birthday

Well, my birthday is coming up (sept 3rd). No particular need to get me anything. But if you have millions of dollars at your disposal & would really like to make my day you could get me one of the 10-50 lb. spacecraft that this technology apparently makes available.

I think that this might turn out to be one of the most underrated scientific stories of the year. Imagine the possibility if anyone could launch a tiny little 50 lb. spaceship full of whatever. On the bad side, you could have countless more unnecessary litter & crap in space. But on the good side, this could be a huge step towards privatization of space travel.

Army, DIA says "Wouldn't psychic powers be cool?"

Lots of papers recently put out by the big gun-boys about mind control and telepathy. First the DIA puts out a paper suggesting that they could maybe control enemies' minds using the latest in neuroscience. But from what I can tell that just means make the enemy less motivated to fight. Umm... okay, I guess you could hit them with a massive THC bomb, and then parachute a million lava lamps in there and let them freak.

Now the army has a paper about telepathic soldiers. They call this "synthetic" telepathy, as opposed to, um, you know, the real kind. I guess this would be technically possible, though whether you could do it without a room-sized piece of equipment is another issue.

All of this stuff would be pretty terrifying, but right now these papers seem to be on the level of "wouldn't it be cool if we could do x?" Maybe their next paper will be about flying soldiers that are bulletproof & have x-ray vision.

Jet trains and robots - thanks Charlie!

Stross must have been watching the The Jetsons!