Useful Technology | MarsBlog.net

Advanced Prosthetics

Granted, these ideas have been around since I was reading Omni in high school, but what’s different is that nowadays we’ve got the right technology to make them feasible: DARPA Pushes Bionic Arm Boundaries

What’s particularly interesting about this is the possibility – as they improve the granularity of motor and feedback signals – of […]

Advanced Robotics

So, who thinks Carl and I were too sporty with the diggers and other robots in In the Shadow of Ares?

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the […]

Mars on Iceland, v2.0

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of […]

zeroHouse

Ann Althouse links to another in a long procession of “big idea houses” – what is zeroHouse?

The zeroHouse is a small, prefabricated house that can easily be shipped and quickly erected. It features a full kitchen, bath, and all elements necessary to comfortably support four adults. What sets the zeroHouse apart from other prefabricated […]

Life Imitates Art #983745345367: The Wallscreen

One of the fictional technologies we imaged for In the Shadow of Ares is the “wallscreen”, a wallpaper-like display of practically unlimited extent which interacts with the characters’ mobile agents and other computing systems. In the scene where this technology is introduced, Amber’s mother is playing an ambience video loop of a tropical beach, which […]

Lessons in Nuclear Safety from Fukushima

Technology Review has a short article on what has been learned since the meltdowns last year – What We Learned About Nuclear Safety From Fukushima:

Reactors and radioactive materials at Fukushima Daiichi were destabilized by back-to-back beyond design-basis events. First was the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that felled the plant’s power lines, triggering diesel generators to […]

Synthetic Meat – Coming Soon to a Burger Joint Near You?

Well, maybe not all that soon – they’re predicting 10-20 years, which would fit nicely with our timeline for In the Shadow of Ares: Scientists Prepare Test-Tube Burger

Starting with bovine stem cells, the Dutch researchers have grown muscle fibres up to 3cm long and 0.5mm thick. The fibres are tethered and exercised as […]

Promising Radiation-Exposure Treatments

This could certainly be useful in martian and lunar settlements, and perhaps moreso on the way to and from them – Researchers successfully treat previously lethal doses of radiation:

“The fact that this treatment can be administered up to a day after radiation exposure is so important,” said Millie Donlon, DARPA’s program manager for this […]

Secret Space History

I love it when things like this happen: Top-secret U.S. surveillance satellite, now declassified, gets a public showing in Virginia. Pity that it won’t be kept at Udvar-Hazy.

I really need to make a trip/pilgrimage there sometime.

Since 9/11

I think like most Americans old enough to remember 9/11, I remember it almost moment by moment, as clear as if it had happened yesterday. Which makes it strange to think that it’s been ten years now — I remember it more clearly than a lot of news events that happened in the past year […]

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