Solar Powered Mobile Phone

Another cool toy (not PS3) is arriving Japan!
Just read from the news that solar powered portable phones begin to test by the Tokyosiders. But it sounds to me that the solar cell phone is still a untested prototype. Also,there is no indication if this gadget will go on sale . We may still need to wait for a long time for viable, self-contained power in our mobile phones.

News Link: Solar powered super phone!

Mice Hate Cheese

Caption: “No cheese please!” (Source: Sky News)

The popular legend is that mice like cheese, but this legend is false. According to a new scientific study, mice don't like cheese after all as they would reject something as strong in smell and rich in taste as cheese. They would rather have food with high sugar content such as chocolate or fruit.

I was quite surprised when I saw this news. Since I was a child, I have a strong belief, like millions of children, that the best way to catch a mouse is to entice it into a trap with a tasty chunk of cheese. I never doubt that. Now clearly the supposition of mice liking cheese is just a popular premise.

Well, I have no idea when and who started this myth. But for those who started this lie should have some sort of punishment as they'd created such a big lie!

News: Mice hate cheese, new study reveals

Cryonics: Freezing for the future?

“Cryonics (often mistakenly called "cryogenics") is the practice of cryo-preserving humans or animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. The process is not currently reversible, and by law can only be performed on humans after legal death in anticipation that the early stages of clinical death may be reversible in the future”
– Wikipedia Definition

Recently, I heard a story from the TV about an American lady decided to “cryonics” herself before she finished her last breath. Put it into simple, Cryonics is the term for freezing humans to prolong life. People who chose to have Cryonic has a common belief that future medicine will enable molecular-level repair and regeneration their body, disease and aging are also assumed to be reversible after decades or a century. The program also said that people can have different options when doing a cryonics process: for entire body frozen is AUD$160,000, or just have the head preserved at the cut rate of AUD$80,000. The rationales of those who choose the head-only option are hoping that when they are brought back to life, science will give them new bodies as people don't want to bring someone 99.5 years old back in a 99.5-year-old body. The “company” Alcor who provides cryonics services claimed itself is a non-profit organization (located in Scottsdale and Arizona).

Similar to most of the experts and scientists, I am very skeptical about the reversibility of the processes. Although science already have shown that a frozen rabbit kidney can be defrosted and successfully reimplanted it in the living animal, restoring a frozen kidney to an animal in a lab is still a very long way from bringing back to life a human being. No-one has been able to capture the vast complexity of thoughts, memory and personality that makes us what we are. So, for me it is also ethically unacceptable.

Science fiction now is becoming science fact on a daily basis. It is just like what happens in the animation Futurama. Well I would like to live as long as I can, but definitely I don’t want to “prolong” my life for decades or centuries by this kind of freezing process.

Links:
News story: Back from the dead
If you want to bet on the future medicine: Cryonics Institute

Post-Normal Science

Caption: Post-Normal Science can be located in relation to the more traditional complementary strategies, by means of a diagram . (by J. Ravetz)


These few days I am doing some reading and research on the concept of “Post-normal science” to help me diagnose the process of environmental policy making. It might be a bit sophisticated or boring for those who are not interested in the environmental stuff, but I still found it is an interesting concept to share as it can trigger us to rethink about the role and the nature of science.

Post-Normal Science is a concept to describe the methodology of scientific “facts” inquiry in contemporary conditions, especially in the environmental science and policy arena. The so-called objective “truth” or hard “scientific facts” from science research itself is no longer adequate to deal with the uncertainty, decision stakes and complexity of environmental problems. Most of environmental policy are value-driven that soft subjective human value are “hard” in various ways, for which the scientific inputs are irremediably “soft” instead. It is a new form of scientific “facts” construction and interpretation with the involvement and participation of different stakeholder & local knowledge to construct new “facts” as a basis for policy making. To put it simplier, post-normal science is:

Scientific facts+ extended facts (such as local knowledge) + human value = new perception of "scientific facts" as policy basis

After reading enormous amount of related readings, there are only two words in my mind about what happens with science in the environmental arena, i.e. “politicizing science”.
By the way, science researches are always goal-driven and value-laden. What we need to do, as a general citizen or reader or whatever, is to be more sensible with those scientific reports or articles, and think about what are the drives behind such scientific publishing, maybe we can find more interesting stories after.

Further Information: The Post-normal Time