The Wake

Voice mail transcription services have been around for a few years now but like most things it only gets big when Google does it.

Google Voice does more than just voice mail transcription; it will give you one number to ring all or a select number of your phones, free SMS and can record and store your calls online. It all sounds terribly convenient and there may be many users of Google Voice who utilize all these functions. Apple was considered innovative with their “visual voicemail”—which iPhone owners could use to see the name or number of the person leaving a voicemail and selectively listen or playback sections of the voicemail. With Google voice integration (available on any phone) users can opt to receive e-mails or text messages with a transcription of the voicemail along …

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You may have heard about the idea behind these eyeglasses a few years ago. The lenses are completely adjustable by the consumer. No more expensive replacing of lenses and frames when your eyes require a new prescription.

Adspecs, an invention of a Professor Joshua Silver at Oxford University, utilizes a clear oil to fill the eyeglasses lenses, thus making the prescription adjustable for any individual. Silver hopes to distribute a billion pairs of his glasses around the world by 2020 to combat the millions of individuals with debilitating eyesight problems.

Because Adspecs are not meant for the eager consumer who demands the latest style from his or her eyewear they don’t appear in the most attractive forms. They could be considered ‘timeless’ in that Harry-Potter-wore-them-for-seven-years sort of way. As of now, the technology used limits …

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March 30th was another significant anti-climax for doomsday-ers. Zapped with seven tera-electron volts, protons underneath the Swiss-French border raced around a 27 kilometer track at a fraction below the speed of light just to smash into each other, play-acting the universe moments after the big bang or, to use the analogy of some scientists, the absolute worst freeway accident imaginable. The astute reader may note that, no matter how fast they were going, an accident involving only two cars couldn’t be the worst one imaginable. Yet the analogy still works; these particle collisions are happening at the rate of 50-100 per second, with plans to increase the rate to 300 a second. Just imagine a 300-car pile-up. Then imagine it happening at light speed. More than 10 million of these miniature big bangs have occurred …

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AIDS may have come to us from monkeys, but now it has worked its way over to koalas. According to recent data, 50 to 90 percent of our fuzzy Australian friends are infected with either KIDS, the koala version of AIDS, or Chlamydia. Scientists blame the high rates of STDS among koalas on deforestation; the koalas are forced to live closer together in a more stressful environment, and thus rates of infection increase. While the high rate of infection is shocking, many of the koalas infected with the KIDS virus never contract full-blown KIDS. The koala version of Chlamydia attacks the eyes and bladder of the koalas, in addition to the reproductive organs.

Researchers are working on a Chlamydia vaccination for the koalas, but other options, like medication to treat KIDS, are not a top …

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If you simply skim over the facts regarding the U of M’s latest blockbuster grant you will see that the Department of Energy has awarded the U with 8 million dollars to construct a wind turbine that doesn’t produce any viable power. In the logic of money and energy it is no doubt unusual, even risky, for a $ sign and a large string of 0’s to not be tied to a guaranteed usable, sellable megawatt output. However, the U of M institute which has leveraged the acquisition of the grant money, The Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE), has entirely different and more critical plans for the new wind turbine to take residence in the UMore Park: research.

The IREE was founded in 2003 at the point when the climate change discussion …

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The split between conservationists and environmentalists is upon us. Across the country (and beyond it) our beloved national scenery is being threatened by the greens, of all people. More precisely, greens are attacking mountaintops. With windmills.

Greens, naturally, aren’t the only ones attacking mountaintops. The tentative emergence of wind energy in states such as North Carolina is in some ways a response to mountaintop removal, which essentially destroys hilltops in search of coal. This practice tends to cause pollution, erosion, and all kinds of things that don’t sound that bad unless you live by something that used to be a river.

By this yardstick, the proposals of environmentalists really don’t seem like an assault at all. Lining hill crests with windmills actually seems like common sense, if you want windmills to be where wind is. …

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Cloning has been one of those “hot topics” for years. One of the things you find round-table discussions about late at night when flipping between PBS and the science channel or on the slate for high school debate class. Should we clone sheep? People? Babies? Well here’s a new one: soon we may be able to clone our ancient rival/ancestor, the Neanderthal.

Scientists in Germany have been working for the past five years on accurately sequencing a Neanderthal genome, from which a possible next step would be the re-creation of a living, breathing Neanderthal.

But what exactly is a Neanderthal? The term seems to have become little more than an insult to be thrown around on the playground by ten-year-olds with a penchant for multi-syllabic words. In fact, the Neanderthal is an extinct species of the Homo …

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Although depression was classified as a disorder over 50 years ago, it existed long before the advent of modern classification methods. According to these scientific methods that now characterize the disease, nearly 121 million people worldwide are affected by depression. Many of these cases are left untreated. Unlike modern diseases such as cancer, obesity), depression’s origin has been contemplated since the time of philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Depression remains a prevalent and troublesome disorder despite the changes in social and environmental conditions over human history. Thus, it is important to ask: why has natural selection not culled it out through the course of evolution?

The human genome contains about 23,000 coding genes, each of which can be regulated by multiple others. There is …

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There is poetry all around us—in the way we walk, the way trees shiver snow off their branches, and even the way we slip and fall on a patch of unforeseen ice—it is easy to overlook the rhythmic beauty of our world. But there is one place poetry is far from expected: in bacteria. And in this case, we’re not talking about metaphoric poetry.

Christian Bök, an experimental poet native to Canada, is intent on creating poetry that can withstand any natural nightmare—he is coding his work into a genetic sequence and translating it onto the world’s most resistant bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. Listed as the toughest bacterium in The Guinness Book of World Records, it is known specifically for its …

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Hypothetical situation: you are a rat. There is a bowl of cake frosting in front of you. Do you eat it? The answer is yes. You eat it all.

So you’ve eaten an entire bowl of cake frosting—why would you do such a thing? You weren’t that hungry. Now we’re at an impasse. The frosting is gone. It’s behind (or within) you now. Are you satisfied? Was it worth it? You have no answer for what you did, of course. You’re a rat.

Professionals are trying to find answers to this question. While you were eating cake frosting, highly paid researchers were analyzing your tiny rat brain in an effort to figure out what made that cake frosting so darn appetizing. Like many …

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So you say you’re sick of all the bullshit on TV. Pets that can talk, progress on the bill on drying paint, that kind of thing? Well, sink your ass into that booth, Mr. PBR, because I’ve got some cool stuff for you to read. It’s got intrigue, adventure, and oh, also, it’s about algae.

So I suppose everyone’s entitled to their own interests, but let me tell you, algae do it for me, and I’m going to tell you why. First, algae were among the earliest forms of life. Rather than killing and eating other organisms to power their growth and reproduction like some other assholes do, algae harness the sun’s energy. By providing food and oxygen, algae set the table so that more complex life forms …

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Farmers in the Upper Midwest, and Minnesota in particular, are on the forefront of technology today with widespread implementation of satellite data to allow for better crop management. Far from the satellite images used by Google Maps et al., which may be several years old and out of season, farmers have access to new data continuously throughout the growing season. NASA’s Earth Observatory reports that an ever-increasing proportion of farmers have found themselves dependent on monthly updates from satellite imagery. They are of particular interest in the organic farming community. Organic farmers, while making a concerted effort to maintain yields without the use of pesticides, must also take into account other factors of the local environment. Since nearby operations on other farms may not necessarily be organic, even true-color satellite imagery can pick …

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Scientists recently shot a bus-sized rocket into the moon in a search for evidence of ice and water on the moon.

The moon bombing commenced at 6:31 a.m. central time, and did not deliver the explosion that was expected by NASA, and that most of the amateur astronomers were watching for.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, began by orbiting around the earth, then shooting a rocket into the Cabeus crater of the moon. The first rocket was followed by a second that slammed into the same area of the moon. The Cabeus crater is 60 miles wide, and situated near the south pole.

A large plume of debris was expected after the collision, and was supposed to be visible from earth through a 10-inch or larger telescope. This led many …

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The ongoing quest to help the blind see has been a long, arduous endeavor that’s embarked innovation in physics and biology for centuries. Age-related blindness is a problem on the rise – the federal government spent four billion dollars on related remedies in 2005. Ten million Americans face macular degeneration – a figure that is only expected to grow. But we may be on the brink of a breakthrough; researchers are now in the final steps of constructing a wireless microchip to insert in the eye that would ultimately transmit visual information to the brain.

The Boston Retinal Implant Project was founded in the 1980s as a collaboration of the Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and the …

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The PATRIOT act has long faded from popular consciousness and Google seems to be a bigger threat to the concept of privacy. Paranoid speculation is leaning more towards corporate espionage dystopian theories than government-run ones. RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology can accomodate both, and as 2007’s incorporation of RFID chips into U.S. passports demonstrated, it seems to be mostly following the trend. 

Radio Frequency Identification refers to cheap, ubiquitous tags attached to objects that emit a distinct radio wave. Businesses use them frequently for tracking various products along the supply line, but their use has expanded drastically. These tags can not be read from anywhere; whatever reads them has to be relatively close, yet privacy concerns are largely focused on how easy it is for anyone to …

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