With the new Kepler telescope findings having hit the news-feeds this month, I thought I would post an update to my original data. The tally of Kepler planetary candidates now stands at 2,326, with one particularly noteworthy find: Kepler-22b. Also known as Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 87.01, or Kepler Input Catalog ID 10593626, this planet deserves special attention, as it is one of the first confirmed planets that resides within the habitable zone of its star. At only 2.4 times Earth’s diameter, and with an orbital period of around 290 days, it seems to be a pretty close match to the Earth. The Kepler web-site has a nice article describing the planet, with the image below showing how it stacks up against the inner planets in our own solar system. NASA Mission Page – Kepler (image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech) After reading about the new planet, and trying to find the raw…
Microelectronics extends… who knows where
I attended a two-day symposium at Arizona State University this past September, where technologists came together to discuss trends in microelectronic packaging. It was specifically geared toward medical electronics, but the presentations spanned a wide range of applications. Most people don’t know or care how their iPhone manages to pack so much functionality into such a small volume, nor how a thousand songs can emanate from a bauble that weighs less than their keychain, but each of these now commonplace items is made possible by two key trends: The continued pace of shrinking microelectronics (Moore’s Law) The ability to pack those tiny transistors into smaller and smaller volumes (More than Moore) A company (mc10) that is taking regular computer chips, making them so thin that the silicon material from which they’re made is as flexible as paper, and then mounting them on plastic so they become flexible and stretchable. MC10…
The Future
As a science fiction aficionado, I’ve always been intrigued by speculating about the future. No one has ever got it completely right, but some writers have given us glimpses of what is possible. That future might be bleak or awesome, filled with technological wonders or a desolate, post-apocalyptic disaster. For me, that’s what makes science fiction so fun to read. Depending on your tastes, you can look forward to the coming years with anticipation, or dread the spinning hands of the clock as they mark the passage of the moments we know toward some dimly perceived Armageddon. The reality of those predictions is that they’re never quite right. Some aspects of both the positive and negative appear when the present inevitably collides with the future, and we walk the middle ground, never progressing as fast or far as the futurists would like, and never falling into some form of ultimate…