iWomb: Microchip Birth Control From Bill Gates

Whether you plan to help give birth to one of the impending fresh several billions of people that will grace the world over the next decade (or especially if you're not), there is some interesting news, oddly from the technology field.  The Bill Gates Foundation has announced plans for a microchip that, when embedded under the skin, would work as an active contraceptive for up to sixteen years.

The chip, speculated on by Gates at MIT and now in development phases thanks to the Massachusetts company MicroCHIPS, holds reservoirs of birth control hormone which it would evenly time-release to be effective over a long duration.  Implanted in the arm, abdomen, or buttock, the chip is an unobtrusive 20mm x 20 mm x 7mm.  It would activate by a small electric reaction heating a seal to melt 30 microgram reserves of anti-baby hormone daily.

Much as the electric vibrator preceded the arrival of the electric iron, vacuum cleaner, and toaster, could this healthily sexual, simple and useful device lead the way for even more great discoveries for the common person?  Perhaps this could be the first wave of acceptable tech for regular humans to begin digitally augmenting their bodies.

Sexy science.

The Electricity Diet: Meet Bacterial "Biowires"

The mysteries of electricity can be fascinating in their omnipresent yet mysterious ways. A recent discovery of electricity-eating bacteria has raised questions about how these organisms may use their need for electricity to power nanobots and other technologies of the future.

As singularityhub.com reports, eight different types of electricity-chomping bacteria have been identified, shedding an entirely new light on the microbial world. UCLA scientists experiment on these creatures by running a current through seafloor sediment and observing the "biowires" that the bacteria form as they feed.

The bacteria can share their charge all along the wires they construct, and only require scant other trace elements (like sulphur, nitrogen and phosphorous) to survive.

Chief scientist Kenneth Nealson explained, “In the same way that photosynthetic bacteria or algae need only sunlight—they use the energy of the photons to reduce carbon dioxide to sugars, and go from there—our bacteria use the energy of electrons from the electrode to power the reduction of CO2 to sugar.”

The bacteria, once harnessed for power, may be able to create and fuel independent nano-machines that will fuel themselves from their environment to accomplish tasks too difficult, dangerous, or small-scale for humans.

The electricity diet is not recommended for humans.  Image courtesy 

www.kurzweilai.net.

ACLU and Human Rights Watch To NSA: Stop Spying On Journalists, Sources

Two human rights groups have come forward to voice their worries over hyper-invasive government monitoring derailing the efforts of many assiduous journalists.  As reported by the Washington Post, the ever-encroaching surveillance network that spies on emails, phone calls, and other digital data is making journalists' jobs harder and those willing to tell their stories more paranoid.

Both Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union came forward today to support a report decrying both the NSA's broad scope of operations as well as Obama's policy of locking up whistleblowers.  This combination, they say, is infringing on confidentiality not just between reporters and their subjects but even up to lawyers and their criminal defendants.  Both activist groups called for greater transparency regarding the methods of collecting, storing, and analyzing citizens' data.

ABC reporter Brian Ross, one of the 46 journalists, 42 lawyers, and assorted security professionals who presented the anti-surveillance report, mentioned that he now begins phone conversations with the phrase, "I'm a U.S. citizen, are you?"  This is due to laws (though many are currently up for debate) restricting the unfettered surveillance of Americans.  However the government maintains all of their watchdoggery is for "national security", and their constant worries about letting classified information leak have grown undeniably overbearing.  Hopefully thanks to this report, those that monitor our calls will soon be getting called out.

Image courtesy www.aclu.org.

Students Create $350 3-D Printed Prosthetic Arm

The future will be full of 3-D printed materials, and as this progresses we will recognize more and more that these creations will not just be helpful in daily life, but may also save astounding amount of money and effort for specialized fields and devices. Such was the case this week when Albert Manero, a Ph.d student in engineering at the University of Central Florida, helped outfit Alex, a 6-year-old boy, with a 3-D printed arm that cost only $350. Alex had been born missing part of his right arm, and that's where science stepped in.

Manero had teamed up with Alex's mom via the e-NABLE project, which seeks to create 3-D printed hands via online efforts, and after seven weeks of tests with an engineering team, finally created a working prototype. As reported by www.cbc.ca, Alex quickly learned how to use the technology in conjunction with his upper arm strength. Manero noted, "The first thing he did when he could actually control it a little bit was hug his mother."

Since Alex is young and will require upgrades as he grows, additional parts for the arm mechanism can be printed out, at a cost of $20-$50. A conventional prosthetic arm could run up to $40,000.

High five for 3-D printed arms!

Alex Pring and his innovative, inexpensive new arm.

Space Station Sunday: Kick The Tires And Light The Fires

This week, activities on the ISS included a diverse array of scientific tests as well as the arrival of a Russian cargo ship bearing supplies. The Russian ship Progress 55, which had been docked aboard the ISS since April, was filled with trash and set free to de-orbit on Monday. Its successor Progress 56 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazahkstan on Wednesday, arriving at the ISS only six hours later with a payload of food and other supplies.

As reported by NASA, scientific tests of note on the ISS this week included:

-analysis of intra-ocular pressure of astronauts' eyes to determine and improve how long-duration spaceflight affects astronauts' vision (microgravity forces bodily fluids upwards towards the skull, often applying unwanted pressure to ocular nerves.)

-the Aquatic Habitat for Zebrafish Muscle Study environment was tended to by German astronaut Alexander Gerst. This experiment examines at a molecular level the atrophy of muscles in microgravity by using zebrafish (small freshwater vertebrates) as test subjects. The fish live in two aquariums with a closed-loop water supply, and analysis of their muscles as well as those of the astronauts may help prevent the loss of muscle mass in space.

-the BASS (Burning And Suppression of Solids)-II Experiment was worked on by flight engineer Reid Wiseman. The experiment, which has a special Combustion Integrated Rack equipped with a combustion glovebox, 100 fuel samples, fuel and oxidizer controls as well as five cameras, aims to assess which materials may be MORE flammable in space than on earth, and how the reactions studied can aid fire detection and prevention on both Earth and the ISS. As stated by NASA, "BASS-II tests the hypothesis that materials in microgravity, with adequate ventilation, burn as well if not better than the same material in normal gravity with other conditions being identical (pressure, oxygen concentration, temperature, etc.). The main variables being tested are the effects of ambient oxygen concentration, ventilation flow velocity, and fuel type, thickness, and geometry." The spherical shape in which flames burn in space allows for more thorough analysis of the combustion's possible effects.


The ISS astronauts also took time to respect the history of their institution, citing the Apollo missions as early inspirations as they spoke via radio with Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as well as Apollo 13 astronaut (and Apollo 11 backup commander) Jim Lovell. The vintage astronauts had gathered for the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center's Operations and Checkout Building in honor of Neil Armstrong as part of the moon landing's 45th anniversary celebrations.

A  customs form from our early astral immigrants, celebrating 45 years of repatriation to Earth.

Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development in Python

There are both advantages and disadvantages to being self-taught in any given discipline. In certain cases, the advantages and disadvantages can overlap or even coincide. For example, when you are self-taught, you are not confined by institutional structures and courses of study. On the one hand, this allows for a distinct measure of freedom to pursue one’s own interests in the field, which would not necessarily be afforded to a person following a traditional disciplinary curriculum. On the other hand, this also means that it can be quite easy to develop gaps in one’s basic knowledge of the discipline, for the simple reason that these areas of study did not fall within your area of interest.

I discovered one such gap in my study of programming in general, and Python in particular, a number of months ago when I came across a quote online that went something like this: “Code that is not tested is broken by definition.”  Testing? “You mean running the code to see if it works?” I thought to myself. Within the next hour I had my first exposure to the method of test-driven development and the Python unittest module.

This was literally the exact opposite of how I had approached my own programming projects up until then, which might be termed “error-driven development”: write some code; run it; see if it works; if it doesn’t work, tinker at random until it does; write some more code and repeat. I quickly realized that, according to the above quote, all my code was broken, by definition. 

The test-driven development model is the reverse of this: write a test, run it and watch it fail; write some code to make the test pass; refactor; write another test and repeat. It was an enlightening experience to attempt writing even a simple program under a test-driven model, as it was immediately obvious that I had only the vaguest notions about things that I thought I knew fairly well.

Since then, I’ve re-written a number of programs I’d created for myself under a completely test-driven developmental model, and have integrated testing into my everyday coding practice. I’ve also collected a bunch of resources that I've found helpful along the way, which you can find below. Also, as you may know, of late there has been something of a controversy brewing on the merit and value of test driven software development. Some links on this are supplied at the end. As always, further recommendations are welcome in the comments!

Overview of Test-Driven Development (Video Lectures)

• Understanding Test Driven Development
• Unit Testing Best Practices
• Test Driven Development: That's Not What We Meant (Critical review of TDD practice)

Unit Testing in Python (Video Lectures)

• Introduction to Unittest
• Unit Testing Makes Your Code Better
• Units Need Testing Too

Python Unittest Module Docs

• Python 2.7 unittest
• Python 3.4 unittest

Python Unittest Intro Tutorials

• Dive Into Python: Unit Testing
• Dive Into Python 3: Unit Testing
• Learn Python the Hard Way: Automated Testing
• Introduction to Unit Testing in Python and Ruby
• Introduction to Unittest
• Unittest Introduction
• Unit Testing with Python
• Improve Your Python: Understanding Unit Testing 
• Testing Python Command Line Apps

Test Driven Development in Python

• TDD in Python in Five Minutes 
• Beginning Test Driven Development in Python 
• Unit Testing and TDD in Python
• Test Driven Development in Python Part 1
• Test Driven Development in Python Part 2

Unit Testing Today

• Is TDD Dead?
• Is Test Driven Development Dead?
• TDD is Dead. Long Live Testing!
• Examining the 'TDD is Dead' Controversy

Congressional Vandals Blocked from Wikipedia

As the old saying goes, there is no distinctly criminal class in the United States, except for the Congress.  BBC reports that the US Congress IP address space has been banned from making edits on Wikipedia for repeated acts of intellectual dishonesty and digital vandalism.  Perhaps they should be arrested under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and sentenced to decades in prison.  Excerpt:

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

The 10-day block comes after anonymous changes were made to entries on politicians and businesses, as well as events like the Kennedy assassination . . .

Edits from computers using the IP address belonging to the House of Representatives have been banned before, following similar acts of vandalism . . . Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told the BBC that the incident did not surprise him, and vandalism has "always gone on and it always will".