Technology is so awesome!
Well, lately I’ve been reading a lot of extremely cool stuff about some cutting edge scientific research and technologies. I’m going to post at length about each of the following (exceedingly awesome) topics:
- Mind reading! Scientists have figured out a way to correlate brain blood flow patterns to features of images. They are able to achieve remarkably high accuracy in prediction using this technology! Their experiment went something like showing one out of 100 or 1000 images to a person, and then trying to guess which of the images it was based on the blood flow data. Isn’t it crazy that this works!? The implications are quite serious and far-reaching, and I will discuss this in my post!
- Tissue regeneration! Another “science fiction/fantasy” technology is far closer to reality than I had imagined. I’ll talk about some recent and current research trials in which tissue is not transplanted from a donor, but regrown from the host’s own tissue. Not only does this work for repairing things like a small loss of muscle and skin, but they can regrow entire organs! (Right now, just bladders, as far as I’ve seen. But that’s still amazing!) I haven’t found any scholarly articles about this yet, just news and corporate stuff, but I’ll probably have some good references by the time I post about this. Again, quite potent implications here!
- Self-repairing plastics! The field of exotic materials is also apparently hacking its way with a giant machete through territory that no more than a decade or two ago belonged only to the fanciful imagination of sci-fi authors! Imagine that when you drop your plate and break it, instead of throwing it out and buying more, you just hold the pieces together and someone points a blow-dryer at it and it’s fixed. Or you drop your laptop and the case cracks — no more worrying, living with it, repairs, new laptop, etc. You just warm it up a bit and the crack will vanish! I’ll present what I can find from scholarly publications about this, and then speculate in more detail about applications of such technology!
Maybe there will be some other stuff too! I’ve been coming across lots of great tech and science news lately, which is quite exciting! If you’re interested in this kind of news, make sure you come back here tomorrow and check out what I’ve written. I’ll include references to reputable scholarly sources, too! “Chthenos at WordPress, the science news source you can trust!”
