133543
submission
jakosc writes:
The Economist this week has an interesting article about increasing the efficiency of wind-powered generators by turning them into Flying Wind Farms. These tethered generators would harness high speed jet stream winds above 15,000 ft and in theory could give outputs of 40MW per generator (pdf) The developer's website has more details of some of the safety, technological and economic issues.
133461
submission
jakosc writes:
The Register has a short commentry about a proposed new set of laws of robotics for war robots by John S Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Unlike Azimov's three laws of robotics Canning proposes (pdf) that we should "Let machines target other machines and let men target men." although this sounds OK in principle, "a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.."
99442
submission
jakosc writes:
Plos Biology has an interesting article on the avoidance of the word 'Evolution' in scientific papers and grants. In 'Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word' Antonovics et al. claim that "In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word "evolution" is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve." Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word "evolution" by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives."
