Well here we are, living at a time when our technological prowess is increasing exponentially. New discoveries are being made daily in almost every field and some of these inventions and discoveries can be applied to one or more other fields. As we progress, we sometimes seem to be tempting fate. I am talking about things like the new collider that is being built in Europe, that is said might create mini black holes. Hey I don't want to see black holes created where I live, do you? Oh I forgot they are invisible. Scientists tell us not to worry because if these black holes are created they will only last a tiny fraction of a second. Hey what if they are wrong and even one starts to grow? They should take steps to make sure that this never happens. If black holes exist and there is a new theory that they don't, then there is really no known way to contain them. Maybe some other advanced races went this route and their entire planet was eventually swallowed? I know that this sounds far fetched, but these guys are really playing with stuff that could not only destroy the earth, but maybe even the entire solar system or more. It is very hard to accept the comment of not to worry, when history indicates that scientists have been wrong so many times before.

New Technology Allows NASA To Watch For Forest Fires
Graphic Source: NASA

Look at what is happening to memory. No I am not talking about human or even animal memory, I am talking about memory devices like the type that you put into your computer, music player or camera. In the last couple of years the memory capacity of these memory cards has increased at a furious pace. About six years ago I bought a camera and it came with a 4 meg memory card, which was considered a big deal. The other day I went and bough a tiny USB memory device that that plugs into a computer and it had a capacity of 8 gigabytes and cost $29.95 at the Microcenter Stores. If my calculations are correct then that device holds 200,000 times as much data as the original 4 megabyte one, which probably had cost about the same at the time, if it was purchased separately. Going back even further, I remember when I purchased memory for an Amiga Computer that had just come out. It was the Amiga 1000, and had a place to plug in an additional 250,000 bytes of storage, which was 1/16th that of the 4 megabyte camera card and that cost a couple of hundred dollars I believe There are now memory cards that hold 64 gigabytes of information and are so small that they get lost in a shirt pocket. A new invention is about to revolutionize memory storage, I will tell you about it in a second, but first let me tell you how the present memory works. All the data you store is saved in 0s and 1s. This means that you have only two choice on the way the data is stored. If you had more choices, you could store more data. A Phase-change memory cell will allow storage to take place using 4 states or 4 different choices, thus greatly increasing the amount of storage capacity in the same space. Preliminary testing has shown that this system can double storage capacity right now. Here is the best part, it cost nothing more to make a memory card using this system. Guess what, the new system is also faster. I think that we will all be seeing this new system soon.

Sometimes technology comes in the form a familiar face, but it's function may be completely different than we suspect. What could be more common than a flashlight? If I took a flashlight out of my pocket, would you run away? I don't think so, but that may change soon. There is a new weapon out there that actually is a flashlight, but the beam of this flashlight is completely different than the beam of a traditional one. This flashlight is actually a weapon. It is classified as non-lethal. The thing is that if this beam is shined on you, you may wish that you were dead. You see the beam has a way of making you violently ill. The light is the brainchild of Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc.

Sometime technology produces bizarre forms of ordinary inventions that make you say to yourself, "who would ever want this crazy thing?" The answer is that there is almost always someone out there for every invention and some inventions have specialized uses. Let's look at the tooth phone. Yes this is not a misprint, I am talking about a cell phone embedded in a molar. While you and I may have no use for such a device, the military might embrace it, or services like the CIA. A tiny cell phone is put into your molar and when a call is received the sound is sent in the form of vibrations through you skull to your inner ear. You are the only one that can hear the conversation that is taking place. The problem that existed with this cell was initially was that it only received, I don't know whether this has been corrected or not?

Nothing in the petroleum business seems to be of any help to us. It doesn't matter how much they increase efficiency because they keep all those profits. Anyway the oil industry has got a new device that allows them to cheaply separate sludge into oil and water. This will not only increase the supply of oil but, allow the CEOs to get bigger bonuses. Japan came out with an interesting invention. It is a robot that looks like a woman for all the world. It is the exact replica of a woman and even has a full set of teeth. It better have, because this robot is a robot dental patient. Here is how it works. You practice on it's teeth and if you are too rough or inaccurate with your tools, the robot responds with "ouch that hurts". The idea of the robot was to invent a device that would get dentists used to not hurting patients when they performed dental work on them. I don't think that anyone could argue with this idea. I would have taken it a step further and had the robot bite the finger of the dentist to teach them to be more careful, oh well I guess we will just have to settle.

A doctor claims that he has invented a way to stop most mosquito borne diseases. He tells us that female mosquitoes must eat 10 times the amount of nectar and fruit juices than the amount of blood that they take in. This is to keep up their energy so that they can fly. He has created traps that sort of inoculate the mosquitoes and kill the diseases within the insect, but not the insect. This is especially important in Africa where there are so many mosquito borne diseases. The doctor claims that these traps will prevent hundreds of millions of people around the world from getting these diseases. I am not clear on why we are not just killing these pests, but I do know that everything serves a purpose and killing all the mosquitoes might effect the food chain.

Not all inventions are useful. Some are really junk. I don't know about you, but I get several catalogs in the mail that advertise a bunch of cheesy things. One day I decided to try one, thinking that it might just turn out to be a good idea. I am sure many of you have seen this advertised on television. It was sort of a carpet affair that supposedly had all kinds of flower seeds in it;. The idea was to roll it out on the ground, water it every day and watch all the varieties of flowers grow. In my case, since I have a a sprinkler system, all I had to do is roll it out. I bought 2 of these mats and rolled each one out on either side of the stoop at the front of the house. The directions stated that I would start to see flowers in about 3 weeks and that they would all be grown in about 6 weeks to 2 months. At the 3 week period I went out and inspected my flower mats very closely. There was not one flower to be seen. As weeks went by there was still nothing. Finally one flower poked its way up. There I was with 2 eight or ten foot flower mats and only 1 flower. The ad had said that there would be thousands of them. Maybe they had grown upside down? Just kidding. That was the last time I ever bought any of the stuff in that catalog.

NASA has invented a new robot that they intend to send to the moon. It is named Athlete, which stands for All Terrain Hex Limbed Extra Terrestrial Explorer. Below is a flash movie of the robot's functions from NASA.

Flash Movie Of Athlete

Not all new technology is helpful, as a matter of fact some of it is downright scary. India is about to produce submarine launch capable missiles. This is about the worst type of technology to have to defend against. Can you imagine if many of these third world countries decide that they want them? I am sure this will happen and if they are fitted with a nuclear or biological warhead, some of those religious zealots might decide that it is time to take out the infidels. No, I am not one that is in favor of giving this type of technology to everyone. It is bad enough that anyone has it.

The Japanese are going to send one of their astronauts up on our space shuttle and he is going to conduct an experiment. He is going to throw a boomerang in zero gravity. Why is he doing this? It is for the most human of reasons. He received a request from Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion. Hey this is a great idea. We take a multi billion dollar space shuttle and spend hundreds of millions of dollars launching it at the peril of people's lives and we test a boomerang, not for any scientific reasons but to satisfy someone's curiosity. The astronaut even had to go through boomerang training. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture? I know, I am supposed to be talking about new technology and the space shuttle is definitely old technology, sorry about that. Luckily I own this site or I couldn't have gotten away with that.

New tests are allowing researchers to tell the shape of drums without ever seeing them. This is done by analyzing the sound in a certain way. While this may seem rather useless, I am sure that it will have some scientific applications. It may turn out that someday we will be able to tell the exact shape of objects, even very distant ones, by the sounds coming from them. While we have no way of doing this right now, wouldn't it be something if we could build a picture of a distant object in space?

The National Science Foundation has partnered up with Google and IBM. Some may ask if this is a strange joining of forces, but in truth, both Google and IBM had something that the NSF can use. What could it possibly be? Why it is computing power of course. For those of you that have seen how SETI uses home computers in such a way that they create one huge super computer, you know what I am talking about. For the rest of you, I will be glad to explain what I am talking about. It is called distributive computing. That is where tasks are divided up into packets and these packets are sent out to individual computers. If you have millions of computers out there that will allow you to use their down time, you could get each one to act like a part of a gigantic computer system, as they all churn away working on your problem. This is exactly what the NSF wants to test. They have many theories that they want to try on such a system.