While we’re worshipping the internet, MIT has come out with an electronic device it says is modeled after the cochlea in the human ear. It's ultra small and, like the human ear, can receive a broad spectrum of signals. In this case radio signals including phone, internet, radio and TV. That's it for the purpose of the press release, but we want to take it a step farther. MIT also came out recently with a video discussing what the author called the sixth sense. It's essentially a tiny constellation of video camera, projector, speaker and wireless internet portal (like a blackberry on steroids) that's serves as a portal to all information and communications available on the internet.

That is the sixth sense: an information superhighway with traffic going to both directions that's as attached to you as your eyes. So lets put the two together, tiny receiver modeled after the inner ear wired to a portal to the information super highway. Next step is the matrix without the chair and Keanu Reeves. The folks touting this technology would be the first to say such an application is far, far down the road. They might even discount it altogether. But that's the beauty of science, you don't have to be a scientists to  think about it. And the way this technology is gaining steam, it sure is fun to think about.

Clearly, there's a reason you go to college to be a physicist. That reason is buried between the lines of this bewildering MIT press release announcing a computer discovery even a plumber can appreciate, if he can take the time to understand it. Computer science has been an evolution of cramming ever more information into smaller and smaller spaces. It's how we went from $100 hand-held calculators to iPhones at half the size and price. Now MIT is making a leap comparable to algae evolving into apes overnight. They think they've found a way to use light instead of electricity to operate key components of computer chips.

The reason you can't get Dr. Zhivago on your iPhone is the electrical connections between the fibre optics. They are the bottleneck and MIT thinks they found away to use a mystery metal called germanium to replace some of those electrical connections with tiny "lasers" that convey much more information using light waves. If you're lost already, don't even try the press release linked above. If you're still reading, let's delve a little deeper into the same document.

There's something about germanium that allows it to be easily wired or "layered" onto silicon chips. There's also something about the electrons whizzing around germanium atoms that allow it to transmit energy in light form instead of electricity. However, the germanium doesn't get all the credit. The scientists "doped" the germanium with phosphous so the metal behaves slightly differently, allowing this tiny germanium "laser" to be built. Kind of like using flux for sweating plumbing fixtures together. We belabor it here because we think it's really cool these scientists are working with atoms the way plumbers work with pieces of pipe. But, when you get right down to it: physics, like plumbing is all engineering. The difference is the size of the surfaces you're working with how much time you spend learning your trade.

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MIT scientists announce they've turned natural gas into electricity without any pollution at a cost comparable to, or less than, conventional power plants. That includes coal, the cheapest power source. MIT's cost calculations come with the caveat that Congress passes the proposed carbon curbing legislation called Cap and Trade. In a slight of semantics more suitable for the Weyerhaeuser press release in INews today, MIT is saying if Cap and Trade is passed and we're forced to pay for our greenhouse gases, their non-polluting natural gas power plant will be the cheapest source of energy around. One can only hope they are right on all points. 

In the meantime, looking a little deeper into this press release, the process it describes uses solid oxygen rather than just ordinary air to burn natural gas to power the generators that produce electricity. Using solid oxygen produces 100 percent CO2 exhaust which is apparently easier to pump underground, a process called carbon capture and sequestration. There are enough qualifiers in this release to qualify it as a couple of pounds of you-know-what. However, we give them half a greenthumb up for effort.

This just came out of MIT. Please read it for yourselves. It's great work that needs to be taken very seriously. The diffusion of pollutants into the air we breath and the water we drink is as big a threat as global warming, it's just farther off on the time horizon. Pollution doesn't just come in chunks and streams, it comes in molecules that work their way into your body and stay there. Bravo MIT. This is the trash tracker, a radio device that will enable MIT researchers to track the life of garbage from the time you buy it in the store to the time it ends up somewhere it should or shouldn't.