Category Archives: Technology and Society

Not Just For Robots Any More

Now, this is what I’ve been waiting for (well, at least until they come up with superior technology to replace it):

As reported in the London Daily Mail, Yacoub’s team harvested the stem cells and used a chemical cocktail to coax them into becoming heart cells. Placed on a “scaffold” made of biodegradable plastic, they grew and fused together to form discs of heart valve tissue just an inch wide. As the valves developed, the scaffold decayed, leaving behind solid tissue.

Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, noted: “Although there has been huge progress in developing mechanical replacements, they still work mechanically and not physiologically

Dr. Strangelove Redux?

Did the Soviets build a doomsday machine that’s still operational?

Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert ohttp://www.slate.com/id/2173108n the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair “requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community.”

Blair’s troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.

Sleep tight…

[Update on Thursday morning]

Alan K. Henderson is having a flashback. Errrr…make that flashforward.