κυβερνητική

Abbiamo visto come Augusto fosse il Gran Timoniere, ma il "timoniere" lo troviamo anche nella tecnologia. Da http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/cibernetica/
cibernètica s. f. [dall’ingl. cybernetics, che riprende, con nuovo sign., il gr. κυβερνητική (τέχνη) «arte del pilota»]. – Disciplina, prevalentemente promossa dagli studî del matematico amer. N. Wiener (intorno al 1947), basati sulla riconosciuta analogia funzionale dei meccanismi di comunicazione e di autoregolazione (mediante il feedback) negli esseri viventi e nella macchina. La cibernetica integra nozioni e modelli neurofisiologici e biologicomolecolari con la teoria matematica dell’informazione, la teoria dei sistemi e la ricerca operativa, per progettare sistemi di controllo che comprendono processi di generazione, conservazione, trasmissione e utilizzo dell’informazione; tali sistemi sono incorporati sia nei servomeccanismi sia negli elaboratori elettronici.

Da https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cibernetica
La parola greca antica kybernetes (κυβερνήτης) indica il pilota di una nave. La radice kyber sta per "timone" e trova un parallelo nel latino guber, che ritroviamo nel gubernator, timoniere. Kyber e guber fanno evidente riferimento ad una comune progenitrice indoeuropea che significava timone. In ambedue le lingue il termine ha anche un significato metaforico per indicare colui che guida o governa una città o uno Stato. Già in  Platone è attestata l'accezione politica del termine che viene ripreso nel 1834 da Ampère. Per il controllo delle macchine,  James Clerk Maxwell, nel 1868 nel suo lavoro sul funzionamento di un regolatore, introdusse il termine governor, per indicare il meccanismo di regolazione. "Indipendentemente da Platone ed Ampere, ma con un esplicito omaggio a Maxwell, il termine fu reintrodotto da Wiener nell'estate del 1947, anglicizzato in cybernetics, nell'atto di dare il titolo al proprio libro pubblicato l'anno successivo: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Nelle intenzioni del suo autore, il libro proponeva un vasto programma di ricerca ed, in prospettiva, teneva a battesimo una nuova scienza, fondata appunto sullo studio unificato di animali e macchine dal punto di vista delle teorie del controllo automatico, della comunicazione e del calcolo automatico."

Cupriavidus metallidurans

"The ability to create gold from base materials has eluded alchemists since the Middle Ages, but two U.S. university professors have found a way to produce small amounts of gold using metal-loving bacteria to make the magic. ... the two professors at Michigan State University found that a certain type of metal-loving bacteria can transform high amounts of the toxic chemical compound gold chloride from a liquid into solid 24-karat gold. " Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia at Michigan State, found that the bacteria, Cupriavidus metallidurans, can withstand concentrations of gold chloride 25 times higher than previously reported by scientists.
More at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kitconews/2012/10/05/focus-microbial-alchemy-produces-gold-from-toxic-chemical/

Crean memoria de cristal capaz de guardar datos por millones de años

Crean memoria de cristal capaz de guardar datos por millones de años
(ConNuestroPeru) "La información se podrá leer con la ayuda de un microscopio óptico. La empresa japonesa Hitachi ha presentado un prototipo de almacenamiento digital de información consistente en pequeñas láminas de cristal de cuarzo capaces de guardar datos durante millones de años."

Flying pyramids

Intrinsic Stability of a Body Hovering in an Oscillating Airflow

Bin Liu, Leif Ristroph, Annie Weathers, Stephen Childress, and Jun Zhang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 068103 (2012)

Published February 9, 2012

Synopsis: Floats Like a Pyramid, Physics, APS

"Writing in Physical Review Letters, Bin Liu and co-workers at New York University present results from experiments on an inanimate pyramid-shaped flyer, or “bug.” Their choice of the shape was made in view of previous experiments with tethered flight, which showed that pyramids could hover in an airflow."

http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.068103

Nano 'ears' for nano whispers

"MOVE over microphones, nanophones have arrived. A gold sphere just 60 nanometres in diameter is the most sensitive listening device ever created, paving the way for soundtracks to formerly silent movies of bacteria and other single-celled organisms.
Alexander Ohlinger at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (LMU), Germany, and colleagues suspended gold nanoparticles in a drop of water. They trapped one sphere in a laser beam and then fired rapid pulses of light from a second laser at others a few micrometres away. The pulses heated the nanoparticles, which disturbed the water around them, generating pressure, or sound, waves."
Gold nano 'ears' set to listen in on cells - health - 13 January 2012 - New Scientist

An Arctic solution to the data storage

Cold storage - an Arctic solution to the data storage cooling problem | In-depth | The Engineer
"We generate a storm of data throughout the day, whether we want to or not ... And the amount of data we generate personally is dwarfed by the numbers generated by government, industry and commerce. All this data has to be stored and this is giving rise to a new form of building, characteristic to the early 21st century: the data centre. Sharing some of the form and characteristics of ages-old strongrooms and more modern hardened bunkers, these are the locations that keep the numbers vital to our lifestyles, and the fortunes of government and industry, safe. But this has also generated a set of problems for civil engineers. The most vital thing that a data centre has to do is to keep its ranks of computer servers running. For that, they need two things: power and cooling..."

2011: The Year of Materials

Vibrant displays head to market, invisibility cloaks become more practical, and batteries store more energy...
The Year in Materials - Technology Review

Acoustic freezer

Thermoacoustic engines (sometimes called "TA engines") are thermoacoustic devices which use high-amplitude sound waves to pump heat from one place to another, or conversely use a heat difference to induce high-amplitude sound waves. In general, thermoacoustic engines can be divided into standing wave and travelling wave devices. These two types of thermoacoustics devices can again be divided into two thermodynamic classes, a prime mover (or simply heat engine), and a heat pump. The prime mover creates work using heat, whereas a heat pump creates or moves heat using work. Compared to vapor refrigerators, thermoacoustic refrigerators have no ozone-depleting or toxic coolant and few or no moving parts therefore require no dynamic sealing or lubrication.
More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine

Biofuel for flights

"Lufthansa, Europe's second-largest airline, became the first carrier in the world to offer regular scheduled flights running on biofuel, with four daily round trips between Hamburg and Frankfurt.
The airline will use a biofuel blend using 50 per cent so- called hydrotreated renewable jet fuel, Lufthansa said. The fuel is made from feedstocks including inedible plants and wood chips. Lufthansa will fly an Airbus A321 on the services." Read more
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/lufthansa-begins-worlds-first-regular-biofuel-flights-20110718-1hks1.html

An acoustic superlens from a few cans of cola

""Acoustic metamaterial" may sound exotic, but researchers in France have managed to assemble one from a few multipacks of cola cans. Arranged in a grid, the drinks cans act as a superlens for sound, focusing acoustic waves into much smaller regions than their metre-long wavelengths typically allow. The cans act as resonators, directing the volume of the sound to peak in a space just a few centimetres wide, and this heightened precision could improve acoustic-actuator systems."

How to make a superlens from a few cans of cola - physicsworld.com

Wearable Sensors for Remote Healthcare

Using Wearable Sensors for Remote Healthcare Monitoring System

A. P. Abidoye, N. A. Azeez, A. O Adesina, K. K Agbele, H. O. Nyongesa

KEYWORDS: Wireless Sensor Networks, Wireless Body Area Networks, ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4, PDA, 3G, Medical Server

Recent technological advances in wireless communications and wireless sensor networks have enabled the design of low-cost, intelligent, tiny, and lightweight medical sensor nodes that can be strategically placed on human body, create a wireless body area network (WBAN) to monitor various physiological vital signs for a long period of time and providing real-time feedback to the user and medical staff. WBANs promise to revolutionize health monitoring. In this paper, medical sensors were used to collect physiological data from patients and transmit it to Intelligent Personal digital Assistant (IPDA) using ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 standard and to medical server using 3G communications. We introduced priority scheduling and data compression into the system to increase transmission rate of physiological critical signals which improve the bandwidth utilization. It also extends the life time of hand-held personal server by reducing power consumption during transmission. On the journal Journal of Sensor Technology

ISSN Print: 2161-122X
ISSN Online: 2161-1238
Website: http://www.scirp.org/journal/jst

DNA transistor

"Passivated nanopores withstand extreme voltages.
Solid-state nanopores are a core element of next-generation single molecule tools in the field of nanobiotechnology, most prominently in the area of DNA-sequencing technology. Researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center have recently introduced a nanopore-based DNA sequencing platform, which they call a DNA transistor. Thin-film electrodes are integrated into the nanopore device for electrically interacting with translocating DNA. They have now shown that TiN electrodes inside a nanopore can be passivated and completely shielded against electrochemical deterioration even when extreme voltages are applied."

http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/lab/46476

electrochemical impedance spectroscopy

"Functionalized electrochemical impedance spectroscopy device targets personalized medicine.
Rapid, sensitive, accurate, miniaturized and inexpensive biosensors are highly desirable for assisting clinical medical diagnosis. Researchers based at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, have developed such a portable bio-sensing platform to detect intermolecular interactions using nanogold-enhanced electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS)."

http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/lab/46448

Plant a New Language in Your Garden

"A world memory champion and a neuroscientist have joined forces to create a language-learning website called Memrise, which combines mnemonic tricks with a game to help users learn quickly and efficiently. Its carefully paced learning structure and competitive points system, the app's developers believe, make their site more effective than other language-learning tools. Memrise makes learning a game with virtual gardens that users must tend. As they do, they also earn points and thereby fight their way up a community-wide leaderboard."

Plant a New Language in Your Mind - Technology Review

Enborne crop circle

From Google Maps.

"A SHARP-eyed Newbury resident spotted this strange formation off the Enborne Road in Newbury while studying computer satellite images. Construction manager Rob Fox, of St John’s Road, was looking for an alternative route to work using on-line aerial maps when he spotted what appeared to be a crop circle outline in ploughed earth."
http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/News/Article.aspx?articleID=10089

Aircrafts make clouds rain

"For more than 50 years it has been known that aircraft can punch large holes or carve out canals inside clouds as they pass through them – but no-one had been able to explain exactly why this happens. Now researchers in the US have identified the cause by comparing satellite images of clouds with the results of computer modelling. They say that the phenomenon could lead to extra precipitation in the vicinity of major airports."

Aircraft punch holes in clouds and make it rain - physicsworld.com

Automated factories in space

"Future space equipment could one day be built in off-planet automated factories, following a new programme by UK firm Magna Parva.
The Technology Strategy Board-funded scheme will develop the idea of off-planet manufacturing for technology such as solar sails and antenna reflectors, which could cut the costs and complexity of such structures.
If this equipment were manufactured in space it could be made thinner, lighter and with fewer parts because it would not have to withstand the force of Earth’s gravity or fold compactly into a launch vehicle."

Programme looks forward to automated factories in space | News | The Engineer

Cool microscope feels the heat

"Physicists in Germany have invented a new kind of microscope that uses a gas of extremely cold atoms to map the surface of nanoscale structures. The researchers say that their device is complimentary to atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) and that they ultimately hope to create a probe with precision that is limited only by fundamental quantum uncertainties."

Cool microscope feels the heat - physicsworld.com

Origami and shopping bags

"Engineers from Oxford University have used the principles of origami to create the first rigid, flat-folding shopping bag with a rectangular base.
The project started off as a mathematical curiosity for Dr Zhong You, a lecturer at Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, but it may have important implications for the packaging industry."
Origami principles lead to rigid, flat-folding shopping bag | News | The Engineer

'Memristor' could mimic brain neurons in future

"Computers that mimic the human brain in the way they process data have moved a step closer to reality thanks to new research from the US. Researchers at Hewlett Packard (HP) and California University in Santa Barbara have used highly focused X-rays to, for the first time, map out the nanoscale properties of a newly understood circuit element called a memory resistor or ‘memristor’. These have the ability to ‘remember’ how much electronic charge passes through them and one day may be able to act like synapses within electronic circuits, mimicking the complex network of neurons present in the brain."

'Memristor' could one day mimic complex brain neurons | News | The Engineer