I’m planning some changes for my website for the upcoming release of WordPress 2.1. Basically, I want to start using WordPress as a content management system instead of a plain old blogging tool, and the new version can handle that a bit better than the current one, 2.0.5. But I also want to do some tricky things with where different types fo contrent are stored, and that means delving into WordPress’s internals, including its mod_rewrite rules. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally managed to get it working.

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I don’t have a problem with people eating animals for food per se (although with so many starving humans, it is a tremendous waste of resources). Instead, I have a serious problem with the way the animals are treated. If you think it’s all happy cows wandering in grassy fields, you are sadly mistaken. (WARNING: Ignorance is bliss. Don’t read this if you like your meat or if you’ve got a weak stomach. Personally, I’m having a hard time keeping my breakfast down as it is). This article is about pig factory farms, but the same thing is true for beef and poultry.

Wired News is reporting on an international team of scientists that is developing a microrobot small enough to swim through arteries and the heart. They hope that the robot, as small as two human hairs, will be able to perform microsurgeries on cranial arteries and other areas that are beyond the reach of catheters. This both refutes and supports my notion that nanotechnology will have to draw inspiration from biology rather than our everyday macroscale world.

One the one hand, this contradicts what I said last night about micromechanical approaches not being viable, because, if they can get this robot to work, it obviously will be viable. On the other hand, it very much agrees with my assertions:

“People have tried various techniques, including electromagnetic motors,” [team leader] James Friend said. “But at this scale, electromagnetic motors become impractical because the magnetic fields become so weak.”

Instead of trying to scale down common mechanical systems, like an electromagnetic motor, Friend and his team are building piezoelectric motors, which operate on different principles.

Moreover, the new design doesn’t use propellers:

The microrobot’s design is based on the E. coli bacterium, complete with flagella that will propel it through the body.

As nanotechnology moves from hype to actual products, we will see that most successful designs use new techniques developed for the nanoscale and draw on knowledge from biology.

They just don’t make movies like this anymore. Something like a third of the film is just people walking. But it’s still some of the most tense walking ever. That’s to say nothing of that famous car chase. This movie has no automatic weapons. Nothing blows up. No Michael Bay sweeping camera shots. The characters are flawed and gritty. And (spoiler alert) in the end, the bad guys get away.

Highly recommended.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Hong Kong describe how peptides can self-assemble to control bleeding from surgical wounds. From Nature Nanotechnology:

The key to the success of this particular peptide is that it is water soluble and can be easily delivered by a syringe. Furthermore, self-assembly of the peptides is triggered by the ionic environment of the blood, and when broken down, the amino acid building blocks of the hydrogel can be used by the body to repair the injury.

This a great advance, thanks to nanotechnology. It can save lives on the battlefield or in accidents by stopping bleeding before the wounded are transported to the hospital. I think the other important thing here is that this is a clever application of biology rather than some sort of micromechanical approach. I think I’ve said this before—I think a lot of the important nanotech innovations are going to come from adapting biology, which already operates on the nanoscale, rather than trying to scale down macroscale machines. This is one example of that.