Headlines from Outerspace

Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem, but are in fact useless.

There are times when too many good headlines pop up all at once. Here's a sampling of what's going on circa 2018. In 2028, will this all be passé? In 2008, would it have been unfathomable?

On-chip excitation of nanodiamonds embedded in plasmonic waveguides
Oct 2018, phys.org

No clue, just headline wordporn.

Bitcoin miner sent to prison for stealing electricity from train network in China
Oct 2018, The Independent

A man in China has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after stealing electricity from a train network in order to mine bitcoin.

Two Companies Are Going to Manufacture Optical Fibers in Space
Sep 2018, Futurism

Eventually we will all live in computers orbiting the Earth. For now, this is an early example of otherworldly computer manufacturing.

Building a better brain-in-a-dish, faster and cheaper
Sept 2018, phys.org

"What we've done is establish a proof-of-principle protocol for a systematic, automated process to generate large numbers of brain organoids," said Alysson R. Muotri, Ph.D., professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.


Image source: Gee, I sure wish I could attribute a source to this image, but it's been fetched by my "generic search engine" from pinterest (go figure, right?). In case readers here don't know what pinterest is, it's a way for image users to short-circuit Google's own copyright policies (under firm guidance by Getty) by taking images out of their source page and placing them on another page with way higher "finding power," as you might expect by any page owned by the search engine itself.