Picture a movie where robotic flies swarm and wipe out one town after another. Someone escapes and tries to warn the authorities. No one will believe our hero that robotic flies threaten to wipe out humanity. How does it end? Harmless and useful for humanity or the foundation of a nightmare future? CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 2, 2010 -- Engineers at Harvard University have created a millionth-scale automobile differential to govern the flight of minuscule aerial robots that could someday be used to probe environmental hazards, forest fires, and other places too perilous for people. Their new approach is the first to passively balance the aerodynamic forces encountered by these miniature flying devices, letting their wings flap asymmetrically in response to...

An internal study on the approach of Peak Oil done by the military of Germany (which was not supposed to see the light of day) shows the German military expecting drastic changes in the international order as a result of Peak Oil. The issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further. The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language...

The New York Times reports on a push in medicine: Age-related muscle loss is as bad as bone loss and should also be labeled and treated as a disease. In addition, geriatric specialists, in particular, are now trying to establish the age-related loss of muscles as a medical condition under the name sarcopenia, from the Greek for loss of flesh. Simply put, sarcopenia is to muscle what osteoporosis is to bone. “In the future, sarcopenia will be known as much as osteoporosis is now,” said Dr. Bruno Vellas, president of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics. I welcome the labeling of every aspect of aging as a disease because only diseases get research and treatment. General aging does not...

Blame your bad grades on your dopamine gene variants. The academic performance of adolescents will suffer in at least one of four key subjects –– English, math, science, history –– if their DNA contains one or more of three specific dopamine gene variations, according to a study led by renowned biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of The Florida State University. The research sheds new light on the genetic components of academic performance during middle and high school, and on the interplay of specific genes and environmental factors such as peer behavior or school conditions. They looked at 2,500 kids enrolled in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over 14 years to reach this conclusion. Once gene sequencing becomes really...

You might find this pathetic. In the first month of the city's promotional campaign launched July 10, more than 1,500 male fans of the Japanese dating-simulation game LovePlus+ have flocked to Atami for a romantic date with their videogame character girlfriends. The men are real. The girls are cartoon characters on a screen. The trips are actual, can be expensive and aim to re-create the virtual weekend outing featured in the game, a product of Konami Corp. played on Nintendo Co.'s DS videogame system. Imagine how popular virtual girlfriends will become as computer processors and software make them more life-like. I almost erroneously typed "realistic" rather than life-like. Of course, the guys don't want realistic. Or maybe the realistic women...

University of Haifa researchers found evidence that Light At Night (LAN) has harmful health effects. Bright city lights might boost your risks of cancer by suppressing melatonin production. The results show once again the clear link between LAN and cancer: the cancerous growths in mice exposed to “short days” were smallest (0.85 cubic cm. average), while those mice exposed to the interval of LAN during dark hours had larger growths (1.84 cubic cm. average) and those exposed to “long days” even larger growths (5.92 cubic cm. average). The study also discovered that suppression of melatonin definitely influences development of the tumor. The size of tumor in mice exposed to “long days” but treated with melatonin was only 0.62 cubic cm....

While Moore's Law for increasing computer chip transistor density won't go on for more than another 20 years it is still happening. Intel introduced 32 nanometer chips in 2009 and will introduce 22 nm chips in 2011. The New York Times reports on Rice University and Hewlett-Packard researchers who have developed 5 nanometer logic devices. These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfills the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as much as today’s highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using...

City size needed for successful industries has shrunk due to cheap air flights and low costs and high speeds for telecommunications and internet access. EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A city’s size no longer is the key factor in building vibrant local economies, according to a study by a Michigan State University sociologist. Zachary Neal found that although America's largest cities once had the most sophisticated economies, today that honor goes to cities with many connections to other places, regardless of their size. The study was published online Aug. 30 in the research journal City and Community. The rise of commercial aviation, high-speed rail, the Internet and other technological advances have allowed smaller cities to compete with urban powers such as...

Want to live a long long time and get rejuvenation therapies? First avoid dying in an air accident in a less developed country. HANOVER, MD, September 1, 2010 – Passengers who fly in Developing World countries face 13 times the risk of being killed in an air accident as passengers in the First World. The more economically advanced countries in the Developing World have better overall safety records than the others, but even their death risk per flight is seven times as high as that in First World countries. These results come from research by Arnold Barnett, a prof at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Click thru and read the details if you plan to fly outside the most developed...

Rent-a-womb is a big international business in India. You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Note this combination: Hardly regulated and safe. I bet surrogacy dad Patri Friedman is not surprised. Once it becomes possible to create eggs by turning adult cells back into stem cells even women in their later 40s and later will be able to have biological children using surrogacy. Many women who spend her 20s and 30s making lots...