Sci-Tech News

Because Until We Have Giant Robots, Life Just Isn't Worthwhile

Insert 'Joystick' Humor Here
So the Israeli air force has found that a commonly prescribed medication has the unintentional benefit of easing the stress on the lungs caused by high-altitude, low-oxygen flight.

The medication? Viagra.

A recent study conducted by Israeli doctors among mountain climbers in Africa found a link between erectile dysfunction drugs and improved performance in high altitudes, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot reported on Thursday.

The active ingredient in the drugs was found to make climbers perform better in an environment with less oxygen, which causes fatigue and dizziness.

This has led army doctors to consider giving jet fighter pilots -- who can fly at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet (15,000 metres) -- the same drug, the report said.

"The Viagra family of drugs is considered effective in these conditions because when there is a long shortage in oxygen it leads to high blood pressure in the lungs, and the drugs help fight that," the report quoted military medical sources as saying.

Make up your own immature jokes. Though I do wonder if they can manage the primary intended effect of these drugs with dosing changes, or if pilots will just have to put up with the.. distraction.

Hey, astronauts have to wear diapers. Sometimes the bleeding edge of technology is personally embarassing.

Source: Raw Story

Under the Sea
So progress is being made repairing some of the rash of cables that went out mysteriously last week or so.

No word on why they got cut/slashed/whatever though.

I'm betting it's Dagon.

Source: Reuters

Polaroid Out of Instant Film Business
Headline pretty much says it all -- Polaroid is closing down their instant film business line.

Which leaves them more or less as a brand-name outfit, i.e., they sell their name to unrelated products, like tvs and digi-cams, as a marketing ploy. Much like Atari in the 90s.

Interesting fact: they apparently made commercial versions of that instant film stuff. I had no idea.

Source: The Register

Astro Blog
Apparently this is a good audio-blog for astronomy topics.. I'll have to check it out sometime.

Source: Astronomy Cast

Seven League Boots
I read up on the myth of the Seven League Boots the other day (common Euro-folktale about boots that let you take 21-mile long strides), and that got me to remembering a story I'd seen about mechanical boots some Russkie engineer had designed to let you walk really fast.

Thus, I found this article.

UFA, Russia — Being a star engineering student at the top-notch science university here wasn’t enough to exempt Viktor K. Gordeyev from his physical education class.

Mr. Gordeyev, a specialist in airplane piston engines, sweated it out with everyone else, running laps in lumbering heavy boots in this town in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

He vowed to find an easier way. Eventually, he found one — or at least came close. Mr. Gordeyev invented a gasoline-powered boot that looks like pogo sticks that strap to your shins, and they work on the same principle as the air-cushioned basketball shoe.

But rather than being dismissed as a crackpot invention, his boots — which use tiny pistons — became classified as a Russian military secret until 1994.

Ironically, his boots have the same drawback the boots in the myth did -- they're too physically exhausting.

One result of the Russian space agency testing was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it, undermining the original rationale.

Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this.

Of course, the average human can't run, at all, at 21 mph for any sustained amount of time (that being the top test speed of said boots... apparently it's pretty reliable to run at 10-12 for average peoples, which is still impressive). I wonder if the soviets examined this aspect.. trading off a bit of energy for the option of having a really high speed dash.

Silly Soviets. Just because a technology is monstrously impractical, that doesn't mean it can't be fun!

Source: The Herald Tribue

Polling Science
Interesting comparison of the reliability of various pollsters in this primary season.

I need to take a look at the analysis of the method they used later though. I know some of the results are relatively accurate; Zogby has just sucked this year, because they've been badly weighing various demographics... in SoCal they vastly underestimated the Latino vote and overestimated the Black vote, for example.

Source: Firedoglake

Dragonball Tech (Capsule Corporation Gone Wild)
Sadly, these devices don't fit into magical capsules that can be stuffed into a pocket until needed. But they're still pretty cool for cheap toys. By cool I mean 'possess the potential to be incredibly irritating and fun at the same time'.

On February 8, Bandai announced Dragonball Items Neo, four gadgets with electronic lights and sounds inspired by Akira Toriyama's Dragonball fighting manga and anime. Bandai notified retailers of this series last month, but did not publicly describe the details of each item until this past Friday. The items will be released in Japan at the end of February for 525 yen (about US$4.90) each, including one lemon-soda-flavored candy.

The series includes two wristbands that will automatically "shout" attack calls in Son Goku's voice when the user makes the appropriate hand gestures. For example, the Son Goku Voice Band (Kamehameha ver.) will utter "KA—ME—HA—ME—" when the user presses his or her wrists together while forming the chi energy blast. The Son Goku Voice Band (Genki Dama ver.) will shout "Minna no genki o ora ni wakete kure!" when the user raises his or her hands up in the air to form the sphere of the worlds' life energy.

Man, imagine if you had to shout the full descriptive name of an attack before you used it in real life.

"M-16A2 5.56x45mm NATO Rifle Attack!!"

There's also a replica of the Scouters used in the show that fits over one eye and apparently displays stats on a couple of characters. This is bound to lead to a lot of kids hilariously running into doorframes.

Sources: Anime News Network
Wikipedia (M-16 NATO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle#NATO_standardization

Gamer Girls
So there's something of an uproar over this free mini-mag Nintendo is giving away in the UK, called Girl Gamer. The front cover hits the trifecta of girl stereotypes, involving lots of pink, cooking games and a baby simulator.

Really.

On the other hand, as noted, this was bundled with a preteen magazine... so the audience were already braindead to start with, and big words would have turned them off.

Still, food for thought, on why you'd choose to advertise there in the first place. I mean, sure, you can make a lot of money marketing offensive crap (see Ron Paul for details), and if you are selling to idiots, you might have to, in fact, sell idiotic stuff (again, Ron Paul, newsletter)... but that only flies so long as you accept the proposition of getting into bed with morons for cash (Ron Paul.. no wait, I'll refrain from that joke).

VGCats did an amusing take on this idea as well.

Source: DSFanboy.com

All Time Biggest Flop
Sure, it may have earned this title by a technicality where the producers exploit a SAG loophole to show a movie domestically so they can pay the cast less. So what? It's still an amusing record.

Budget for Zyzzyx Road? 1.2 million dollars. Box Office Gross? 30 dollars.

Hilarious.

Source: Wikipedia
(Note: I heard about this on Olbermann first)

Old Timer
So the Hubble is still doing great science. Not that we have a plan to repair it yet... there's no money for real science when Bush still wants a moon base!

NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, with a boost from a natural "zoom lens," have uncovered what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic "dark ages," just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe.

The detailed images from Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth during the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang but before the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. Images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star- forming galaxy in the dark ages.

"We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 12.8 billion years in the past," said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the research team. "This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time."

Oh well. I shouldn't let Bush get me down EVERY day if I can help it. This is spiffy, let's just reflect on that.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Interesting Premise
If I didn't already have so much to read, I'd want to check this book out. The premise is that the reason we have such a litigious society (about which I'm not sure I agree), is that Republicans have gutted every social institution that people would normally use to resolve problems without the civil courts... so the last resort has become the first.

Wait, this is the tech news section. Hmm. Well, is the law a technology?

I dunno. I'm lazy. It stays here.

Source: Amazon.com