Oh, Those Muppets

The well known and sticky song Mah Nà Mah Nà was made famous by The Muppet Show, a family TV program created by Jim Henson and running from 1976 to 1981. The song was written by the Italian film score composer Piero Umiliani and originally accompanied a softcore porn movie called Svezia Inferno E Paradiso. Tsk-tsk. What next? Kermit cavorting with Teletubbies?

Skipping the Barcode Tattoo

The Human Genome Project was an effort to sequence the entire human genome. The human genome contains about 23,000 genes and 3 billion base pairs. The project was completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost over 3 billion dollars.

Today a human genome can be sequenced in about 6 weeks at a cost of $60,000. Researchers who predicted that the cost may be as low as $1000 in three years have been leapfrogged by two companies who claim to be able to do it in one day for $100. At this cost it will soon become part of the standard physical.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to begin collecting the DNA of any citizen who is arrested and any foreigner who is detained. As usual, the U.K. is way ahead on this. British police want to collect the DNA of potential criminals including children as young a 5 years old if they exhibit anti-social behavior.

Let’s Call It National Barbecue Month

Hoof and mouth disease, a virus deadly to livestock, has been researched since 1954 in a government lab on Plum Island, NY. Since that time there have been some accidental releases of the virus, but none escaped the island. That’s why the lab in ON an island.

In 2002 the government ran a simulation of a hoof and mouth outbreak. It resulted in tens of millions of cattle killed by National Guardsmen, riots and protests and a 25-mile burial trench for the carcasses. “It was a mess,” said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who played the president.

Now the government wants to move Plum Island’s lab to the mainland and Kansas is one of the proposed sites. What does Senator Roberts have to say about that, huh? “It will mean jobs,” he says. It will mean research and development, he says.

Yeah, and if all else fails it will mean jobs digging that 25-mile barbecue pit.

The Stuff We Leave Behind

The European Space Agency has just published some pictures of the space debris surrounding Earth. Ancient civilizations have often been identified by the garbage heaps they leave behind. I guess it’s no different in space.

Your Next Surgeon May Be Robot.

Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a snake-like robot called the CardioArm. It is inserted into an incision in the chest and is then guided by joystick. The robot’s “head” has both a camera and end effectors capable of performing cardiac ablation, a procedure that delivers electrical pulses to the heart and can destroy problematic tissue.

In 2006 an Italian man in Milan had heart surgery performed by an autonomous robot. The surgery was initiated and monitored by a surgeon in Boston, but the robot performed the surgery without further intervention. Knee surgery[video] is often performed by a doctor sitting at a console and manipulating a 3D image.

Robots are not just getting smarter, they’re getting smaller. Brain researchers use tiny gene probes that seek out specific areas of the brain, allowing an fMRI to monitor activity. They enter the body as eyedrops. “Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence….” The military has developed a surgical robot small enough to carry into battlezones. The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon in a safe location. Nanoparticles[video] can be guided to specific areas in the body where they release microdoses of drugs. Since the drugs are delivered directly to the problem area the doses can be as much as one thousand times lower.

[Obligatory grovel]
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Creating a Zombie Horde? No Worry, They’re Not Moving.

Kids watch a lot of TV. According to the FCC most children will have watched 3 years of it by the time they are 6 years old. Since sleep takes up about one third of our lives this means that 75% of a child’s waking life is spent in a stupor, as Wolfram Hahn’s creepy photos document.

The report continues with more disturbing statistics. Americans have the TV on for 8 to 11 hours a day. 66% of American children have a TV in their bedroom.

In all fairness, the FCC report says these children spent the time in front of the television, so I guess they could have been sleeping at the same time. How this might invade dreaming is too scary to even think about.