Comment Massive typo in summary. (Score 4, Informative) 439
From TFA:
The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight.
The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight.
Not geeky enough. We should be arguing for an extension to the HTML standard allowing a number to be tagged as a distance and assigned a unit, thereby allowing the browser to convert automatically to the units preferred by the reader.
It's really a cool concept. The semantic web movement is allowing this through RDF notation. That's what we really should be arguing for on
Is there any morally correct application for 'writing' false memories into a brain?
Identifying the areas responsible for trauma and bad memories can be useful for treatment of patients who have experienced things like car crashes. It can help by reducing the effects associated with these memories.
The thing about research is that lots of times the applications are not immediately obvious. Academia does research all the time on subjects that people don't have uses for yet. You're right in pointing out the possible negative side effects of this knowledge though. It's something that is very often unavoidable in research. A good example of this would be nuclear fission and it's range of uses.
As hardware gets cheaper and/or for larger accounts, it might even make sense to put together a dedicated banking appliance offering, basically the cheapo embedded ARM embodiment of the above.
And for added convenience, you could even have the dedicated appliance dispense cash on the spot! Of course, you'd need to add locks and harden the case with heavier steel.
Wait a sec....
There are people who are in it for the human aspect - usually the doctors. Then there's the people who are in it for the money: The pharmaceutical companies.
I resent this comment. I'm well on track to entering a career in drug research, either with a university or a pharmaceutical company. I couldn't care less if I made less than 80k a year (very little for the amount of education required in this field), and I'm completely in it for the benefit to humanity stemming from my work.
However, my skills are better suited towards doing research and working with computers than they are with diagnosing people and memorizing lists of symptoms. I also think that I would have more benefit to humanity by designing medications for multiple patients than if I were diagnosing one patient at a time.
I'd be very surprised if I were among a minority in this respect. People aren't as evil as you think (most of the time).
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