Well Ms. Xiao, your son will be an excellent manager...

....based on his DNA.

Photo from cnn.com

If your child is one of the 30 or so who happen to be going to a special 5 day camp in Chongqing province in China, they could come out with a lot more than pretty art projects and blue ribbons for sports.

Thanks to Shanghai Biochip Corp and this special camp, your child can have their DNA tested and go through a series of exercises/activities so as to help identify their gifts and talents. This program is specially designed to help identify what a child might be gifted at or have a special edge in; at the end the parents are advised on what their child may be the most successful at based on their DNA test results and the camp activities. In an ever shrinking world, competition is now international. In China, where most parents have only a single child, there is a strong competition and a drive to make their child the best and the most successful at whatever they do. The parents are often ambitious and want to give their child the best they can possibly give them, including education and a future.

The parents participating in this program as well as the program directors believe that this program can help them raise their child so as to best understand them and cultivate their natural gifts.

Some critics of this program say that it's pushing too much on kids too early, and forcing them to follow a path from childhood based on what their parents want them to be in the future is going to ruin their childhood and make for a whole lot of miserable kids.

Other critics say that this program is something of a scam, and that the parents are simply blinded into it by their desire for their child to be all that the can be no matter what it takes. These critics criticize the test based on its accuracy and how much it can actually predict, how useful it really is, and the reality behind how much certain genes really play a role in the child's life.



Personally, this reminds me a bit of Gattaca; a movie in which roles and jobs in society of the 'not too distant future' are determined largely based on your genes.

The Jamba Juice Secret Menu

The Jamba Juice Secret Menu

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"Earth's Period of Habitability Nearly Over"

On a cosmological timescale, The Earth’s period of habitability is nearly over

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Toshiba demos facial recognition system for your car

Japanese corporation Toshiba has recently demoed a facial recognition system for your car that asses your facial expressions from 8 cameras around the car, each with a different view. The system can detect tired drivers from blinking rates, and whether or not someone wants to change the radio station by assessing how many times and how they look at the radio station controller.

This technology cannot be used with sunglasses, and people with long hair might have some problems with it because the hair could get in the way of the technology. Toshiba has not released plans to commercialize this technology yet.

Sharp Creates 5 Colour Pixel HD LCD

Sharp has developed an HD LCD that uses the three regular RGB pixels as well as cyan and yellow subpixels. This, Sharp claims, will help the TV more accurately show a fuller range of colours available to the human eye; over 99% of them says Sharp. This new screen will use less backlighting as the standard 3 colour pixel LCDs do since it can show colours more accurately and doesn't need help from the screen light, and yes I know that sentence was stupidly phrased.

The prototype will go on display next week at the Society Information Display conference in San Antonio, Texas and is currently not available to the public.

Open Source Textbooks in California

In an attempt to cut out some of the education budget and save money, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed that by fall 2009, the state will be using open source math and science text books.

Warp Drive: Very Cool, Very Possible

I said possible.

That's right, a drive that allows you to move faster than the speed of light. Speeds above that which light travels at are theoretically not "possible" according to Einstein's theory of relativity, meaning that any given object can't travel above c (the speed of light). To do so it would require unlimited energy/mass. Part of some of the cool stuff we get from E = mc²

So to travel above c you would need something other than rockets propelling your spaceship...and since you can't move the actual space ship faster than light, why not just move a chunk of space-time?

Scientists have already done a few studies that suggest moving space-time might be possible, it's certainly plausible. Some have thought of harnessing dark energy, a mysterious force in the universe responsible for the universe's expansion that takes up about 74% of the universe.

Someday we may have warp drives, but then again, we may have anything in that "someday". Warp drives may not be possible, but there are many optimistic physicists out there. Even if we don't discover a way to be able to attain warp 6 or something, we will undoubtably make many discoveries a long the way.