Science, Technology & Health: August 2008 Archives
Your printer says its out of ink, but your print jobs aren't coming out faded... what gives? Yes, the ink companies are trying to screw you. Notice I said the ink companies and not the printer companies, because these guys make all their money off selling ink and toner.
I bought a cheap laser printer a couple years ago, and for a while, it worked perfectly. The printer, a Brother HL-2040, was fast, quiet, and produced sheet after sheet of top-quality prints—until one day last year, when it suddenly stopped working. I consulted the user manual and discovered that the printer thought its toner cartridge was empty. It refused to print a thing until I replaced the cartridge. But I'm a toner miser: For as long as I've been using laser printers, it's been my policy to switch to a new cartridge at the last possible moment, when my printouts get as faint as archival copies of the Declaration of Independence. But my printer's pages hadn't been fading at all. Did it really need new toner—or was my printer lying to me?To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.
I always buy third-party ink, and I hate printing in general.
I'm sure the abortion industry will be disappointed, but I'm happy to hear that Japanese researches have extracted stem cells from wisdom teeth.
Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos.Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.
"This is significant in two ways," team leader Hajime Ogushi told AFP. "One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway.
"Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it's easy for us to stock this source of stem cells."
Awesome. Combined with low intensity pulsed ultrasound we'll have an unlimited supply of stem cells! (Assuming regrown teeth have stem cells in them, which they may not; what do I know?)
Electric cars seem hard, but apparently electric motorcycles are easier, and even cooler.
"I love to ride. That's the real reason I did it," he told us with a laugh. "I wanted to make a product that's crazy fast and fun to ride."The Zero X from Zero Motorcycles is an EV you can actually buy right now for $7,450, and it's a real motorcycle. It weighs a bantamweight 140 pounds with the lithium-ion battery, and with a 23-horsepower motor it'll hit 57 mph and leave a fat streak of rubber on the pavement getting there.
Saiki says the street version coming next year will be even quicker.
Looks like fun, but motorcycles are too dangerous for me.
(HT: NW.)
How about another entry in the virtual world series? Enhancing video with still photography.
(HT: BM and BoingBoing.)
Almost two years ago I posted about Microsoft's Photosynth technology, and now they've taken it to the next level with a project called "Finding Paths Through the World's Photos".
Simply astounding.
(HT: I Started Something.)
Regardless of how plausible you find the theory of Darwinian evolution to be, there's still no secular explanation for how life got started in the first place. (For starters, read about the problems posed by earth's oxidizing atmosphere.) So some secular scientists have decided to punt and consider the possibility that life came to earth on a meteor.
This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria."Studies have shown that microbes can survive the shock levels of being launched into space," said Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University. "And as more and more organisms are discovered under extreme conditions, it's become more plausible that things could survive in space for the time it takes to go from one planet to another."
Not long ago, Cockell's claims would have been greeted with scientific derision. But as scientists learn more about Earth and space, the theory, which goes by the grandiose name of "galactic panspermia," seems less far-fetched.
Less far-fetched than the idea that God created earth and the life that's on it? Maybe... if your starting point for every hypothesis is that there is no God.
In April, Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow traced the molecular signatures of earthly amino acids to those of neutron stars."Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here. But they are obviously landing in other places," he said at the time. "If there is another planet that has the water and all of the things that are needed for life, you should be able to get the same process rolling."
Completely unfalsifiable, so it could be true! If you want to put your faith in interplanetary microbes, I guess that's up to you.
Jon Basil Utley gives a detailed diagnosis of what ails the American health care system. Some of the inefficiencies are maddening.
(HT: Instapundit.)
