OK, weirdest hits to my site - Someone looking for Boy Band wallpaper, the measurements of a certain Pop Tart, and passcodes for an operating system that requires them for registration.

I phrased things this way so that I don't get any higher on the searches. 

10:36:37 AM    

Small Times.  A breakthrough in creating inexpensive polymer actuators.  The cross fertilization continues.  At $1 a pound, this could form the basis of inexpensive polymer muscles for robotics.  Imagine one of DARPAs "soldiers of the future" with an extra 50 pounds of polymer muscle in an external suit:  scary. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Alternate uses: Muscled limbs that replace prosthetics. Super reactive suspensions for cars.  Super quiet motors - instead of having pistons in an engine, replace them with a web of Polymer Actuators in each cylinder, only fire as much as you need to to keep the crank turning, and fire more as needed.

8:15:29 AM    

The Financial Times reports on recent developments in anti-gravity research. [via Davos Newbies] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

What especially interests me is this:

Meanwhile, Mr Podkletnov, now based at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre, has taken his ideas further. Last year he published another paper - backed by Giovanni Modanese, an Italian physicist, detailing work on an "impulse gravity generator" that is capable of exerting a repulsive force on all matter.

Using a strong electrical discharge source and a superconducting "emitter", the equipment has produced a "gravity impulse", Mr Podkletnov says, "that is very short in time and propagates with great speed (practically instantaneously) along the line of discharge, passing through different objects without any observable loss of energy".

The result, he maintains, is a repulsive action on any object the beam hits, that is proportional to its mass. When fitted to a laser pointing device, Mr Podkletnov says, his laboratory installation has already demonstrated its ability to knock over objects more than a kilometre away. The same installation, he maintains, could hit objects up to 200km away with the same power.

Kinda gives new meaning to "Reach out and touch someone." Seriously though, this could serve as a great way to get objects into space, by either equipping a ship with a set of these beams that are focused on a launch pad, or by having the beams ground based, and firing at the ship. That way, no proportion of your payload is dedicated to fuel, and you can save a massive amount of weight (and therefore cost) in terms of what you are putting into space.

Ground based solutions could include (here he goes) a truck based minesweeper that can safely detonate mines from a distance, crowd control, bomb detonation, and building demolition. Improved safety for workers who work at high elevation, by having an instant on area below them that will catch them should they fall. Invisible barriers/fences. New forms of art and sculpture that invisibly suspend objects in the air. The world's quietest gun.

Fun applications: Action figures that really fly, engines for remote control planes, the world's quietest leaf blower, new forms of amusement park rides where there are "areas of lift" that allow people to cross chasms and water without visable means of support.

7:56:54 AM