Frank Herbert's Moisture traps

Dune is a great novel. If you haven't read Dune by Frank Herbert yet - go and read it! Even though I've read it quite a few years ago, and read some of its sequels, it is very interesting to read that some of Herbert's ideas might become a reality.

This Slashdot article is very interesting as it points to a possible use to the moisture traps described in Dune.

This is yet another example of how ideas spawned in the SciFi world might make its way into the real world.

From the pages of a SciFi novel to concept works and perhaps later into real-life versions of the inventions, the ideas of our SciFi authors are making their way over.

See also the reference from Stanford.

Star Trek's PADD revisited

Will new eReaders bring the long lost hope to see a PADD sometime in our lifetime to mainstream life? A news article in the New York Times talks about new E-Newspaper Reader that will enable readers to view news and other contents from the electronics device. The device might mimic the look of paper, but it is yet another attempt of real-life to get a hold of a pure sci-fi piece of technology.

Star Trek has had it's own information reader, in form of the PADD. Besides being a Personal Access Display Device, the PADD was a portable method to move information around, a convenient way to carry it, and a mechanism of dictating and recording information.

You can read more about the debate at Digg about it.

More information on the PADD and also here.