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Most Hackaday readers are no doubt familiar with the Faraday cage, at least in name, and nearly everyone owns one: if you’ve ever stood watching a bag of popcorn slowly revolve inside of a microwave, you’be seen Michael Faraday’s 1836 invention in action. Yet despite being such a well known device, the average hacker still doesn’t have one in their arsenal. But why?

It could be that there’s a certain mystique about Faraday cages, an assumption that their construction requires techniques or materials outside the realm of the home hacker. While it’s true that building a perfect Faraday cage for a given frequency involves math and careful attention to detail, putting together a simple model for general purpose use and experimentation turns out to be quick and easy.

As an exercise in minimalist hacking I recently built a basic Faraday cage out of materials sourced from Home Depot, and thought it would be interesting to not only describe its construction but give some ideas as to how one can put it to practical use in the home lab. While it’s hardly a perfect specimen, it clearly works, and it didn’t take anything that can’t be sourced locally pretty much anywhere in the world.

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Circa 2012

Switching your phone off for important meetings or trips to the cinema can be a pain in the ass. Victor Johansson has a solution, though: he’s designed the Escape Jacket, which features a Faraday cage in the inside pocket to immediately take your phone off the grid.

UK-based designer Johansson says that the concept is all about you-time. He explains:

During the research phase of this project the idea of “time as a luxury” came to be a main theme. After trying to find ways to give people more time I finally ended up with the idea of removing (connected) time instead since luxury is often more about the things you remove than the things you add. The idea is that as soon as you leave work, or just want a break you put your phone in the inner pocket of the jacket and you terminate all connectivity.

Continue reading “This Jacket’s Faraday Cage Conveniently Silences Your Phone” | >

Cancer cells are generally much more metabolically active than healthy cells, so some insight into a cancer cell’s behavior and type can be gathered by analyzing its metabolic activity. But getting an accurate assessment of metabolic activity has proven difficult. Several methods, including position emission tomography (or PET) scans, fluorescent dyes, and contrast agents have been used, but each is limited it is usefulness.

Researchers combine PAM and OCR to more quickly measure cancer-cell metabolisms.

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Conventional DNA is comprised of the familiar A, C, G, and T base pairs, but a newly created genetic system is packed with eight, thus doubling the number of letters normally found in self-replicating molecules. Intriguingly, the new system, dubbed “hachimoji,” could resemble the building blocks of extraterrestrial life.

New research published yesterday in Science describes the hachimoji, which means “eight letters” in Japanese. In addition to the conventional four base pairs, this genetic system has an extra four building blocks, dramatically increasingly the information density compared to regular DNA. The scientists behind the work, led by Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, said the new system may be robust enough to support life, that is, to support the processes required for Darwinian self-replication.

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A University of California Irvine student may have stumbled upon an invention to end your phone-charging woes for good. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of where that could take us as a society. Forget about your phone; the world would be a different place without ever having to worry about replacing car batteries, and imagine the uses that it could have in space exploration. Technology is the ultimate wildcard.

A battery that lasts a whole lifetime is now one step closer to becoming a reality thanks to Mya Le Thai, a PhD student who’s been researching how to make better nanowire rechargeable batteries. In theory, her discovery could lead to a battery that lasts centuries—as long as 400 years.

She made the discovery while studying the properties of gold nanowire for commercial batteries. Typically, the gold filaments lose their integrity (and the battery dies) after 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles—“seven thousand at the most,” adds Reginald Penner, head of the chemistry department, who called Thai’s discovery “crazy.”

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What other ramifications to follow? Your subjective quantum immortality coupled with soon-to-be discovered indefinite life extension at the civilizational level would spell out that YOU ARE ACTUALLY TO LIVE FOREVER! One can also see a viable resolution to the so-called ‘Mind-uploading’, or Star Trek ‘Teleporter dilemma’, questioning whether in those instances you create a copy of yourself but kill yourself in the process. By analogy to the previous deliberations, it follows that your consciousness has to “migrate” to your living self, thus making the case for successful consciousness transfer in both methods of disembodiments.

On this note, my friend, I’d like to conclude and profess that you are to live forever as an individuated evolving consciousness in this illusory Matrix-like universe where nothing is what it seems.

-by Alex Vikoulov, futurist, digital philosopher.

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