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| Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com. |
| Fish can get seasick, too |
| 11:25:06 am mst / 25 December 2000 found by paul / filed in science / source Ananova 44 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Marine scientist Erlend Moksnes said that a Norwegian lighthouse keeper brought him a cod that he had recently caught that was suffering from very unusual symptoms. After studying the fish, Moksnes diagnosed it with seasickness caused swimming in rough waters that had temporarily disrupted the fish equivalent of the inner ear. |
| My favorite part: "...once the cod had recovered, the lighthouse keeper ate it". |
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| Modular robots for search and rescue |
| 1:01:57 pm mst / 25 December 2000 found by paul / filed in robotics / source Science Daily 27 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| USC scientists have designed modular configurable robots built from autonomous units that can seek each other out and combine to form more powerful units that work as a unified system. The units can be coordinated with software equivalents of "hormones" that send messages between the various components. |
| Although the prototypes are still fairly crude, check out some movies here! |
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| Chinese theater to zap mobile phone users |
| 3:35:29 pm mst / 25 December 2000 found by paul / filed in culture / source Ananova 40 hits / 2 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Because many Chinese theater-goers are notorious for refusing to turn off their cell phones during the performances, the Shanghai Grand Theatre will install a "ray gun" that jams all incoming mobile phone signals. |
| Unfortunately, this would never work in the US because some loudmouth would sue the theater owners. |
| read 2 comments |
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| Did light travel faster in the past? |
| 11:46:26 pm mst / 25 December 2000 found by paul / filed in science / source The Times 71 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Cosmologists Joao Magueijo and Andreas Albrecht believe that the speed of light was much faster just after the Big Bang, then slowed down to its present value afterwards. Their theory supposedly explains a number of cosmological puzzles about the current distribution of mass and energy in the universe, and is also supported by empirical evidence "that light from some types of stars has been changed in ways that can only be explained by it having a much higher speed when it was first emitted". |
| Come to think of it, I have been feeling more sluggish lately... |
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