Did you know that you can read if the first letter and the last letter are in the right place and all the in between letters are mixed up? Image from http://viral.lycos.co.uk/attachments/3561/Reading_Test.jpg.
Reading_Test.jpg (JPEG Image, 575×600 pixels) – Scaled (96%).
I like this idea of controling animal populations through birth control. I was just telling my parents about a woman in San Francisco who was catching stray cats, neutering them and rereleasing them. People were upset with her for rereleasing them! They’d have been way more upset if she killed them and they certainly didn’t need all the street kittens she prevented.
One BIG caveat. I think birth control for animals should only be used in situations where humans have encouraged overbreeding. For example, animals that no longer migrate because food is plentiful in human environments. Or stray cats that live out of dumpsters. We’re playing god and we need to be mindful of that!
Smart Dust is a new technology. Researchers are developing a network that consists of very small sensors that would float in the air like specs of dust. (Currently they are 5mm on a side and cost $5. They are working on getting them to 1 mm and $1.) These “motes” or smart dust would be able to notice things about their environment and communicate it back to a central location. They might sense things like traffic problems, weather (temperature and humidty), the movement of people, etc. Michael Crichton’s science fiction book Prey is built on the idea of smart dust that gains sentience. You can read more about Smart Dust here: According to this article, Moon-sized diamond found in space, they’ve found a moon sized diamond in space. It’s a crystallised white dwarf star. It weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, however it’s 50 light-years from earth, so I doubt it will be feasible to mine for quite a while. Quite an incentive though … maybe even more so than going to Mars.Cyberkinetics
Smart Dust
Moon sized diamonds