BBC NEWS | Health | Hysterectomies a stem cell source.
Discarded fallopian tubes from hysterectomies could be a good source of donor stem cells, say researchers.
DailyTech – Researchers Develop Color Changing Microspheres.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside has been able to fabricate microscopic polymer beads that can change colors instantly with the application of an external magnetic field. The most interesting aspect of the color changing properties of the polymer beads is that the color change can be reversed.
The beads are technically magnetochromatic microspheres and have excellent structural stability according to the researchers. The microspheres are also very compatible with multiple types of dispersion media including water, alcohol, hexane, and polymer solutions. This allows the beads to retain their ability to be magnetically tunable in color when dispersed inside a variety of chemicals.
DailyTech – MIT Patterns New Super-Antenna After Human Ear.
New antenna is ultra wide-band while using 1/100th of the power of a standard antenna
DailyTech – Spaceport America Under Construction in New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic is expected to begin launching tourists into space from the spaceport in 2010, as more than 45,000 people have registered to take a trip from New Mexico. The Spaceport America web site each person will have to pay $200,000 per trip to go up to 50,000 feet into the air before accelerating into space.
Specifically, spacecraft will lift off from a 10,000-foot runway, fly up to 50,000 feet, break free and fly up to 62 miles in total height. Each trip will take around two hours with five minutes of weightlessness.
DailyTech – New Memory Can Store Data Safely for 1,000 Years.
Japanese researchers have come up with a new form of ultra-long term memory that they say can last over 1,000 years. They dub their memory the Digital Rosetta Stone, or DRS memory for short.
The system consists of a stack of four 15-inch wafers, each containing special memory chips. The wafers are sealed with SiO2 and SiN to insulate them from oxygen gas and water. This key feature maintains the humidity at below 2 percent, essentially allowing the long life. The wafers will be built on a 45nm CMOS technology and offer 2.5 Tbits of total memory capacity
In order to get at the memory and read from and write to it, researchers use a electron-beam direct-writing technology. A mask ROM on the chips provides inductive coupling and allows contactless communication.
The test prototype used larger scale 0.18?m CMOS technology and 5mm x 5mm test chips. With the reader and the wafers separated from contact by 0.2 mm, a four-channel communication speed of 150Mbps was achieved, using only 56mW of power.
DailyTech – China Blocks Google Access; Confusion Over Internet Filter Remains High.
Google has been accused of spreading pornography — breaking strict Chinese law — and now both the Google.com and its Chinese language counterpart have been unavailable. Furthermore, Gmail and several other Google-based services also were disabled since Wednesday afternoon China time.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Ocean monster shows hidden depths.
For a while during its design, Asahiko Taira told me, the ship became known as “Godzilla-maru”, so unusual and top-heavy were its projected lines.
“We started planning the Chikyu about 15 years ago, and there were some people who thought we were too ambitious,” he recalled.
“But now we can see that the ship is doing what it is designed to do and is opening up new possibilities.”
As director-general of the Center for Deep Earth Exploration (CDex), an arm of Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec), Dr Taira played a key role in steering the Chikyu from vague concept to steel reality.
The idea was simple. Scientists wanted to drill down into the Earth’s crust – and even through the crust – to get samples from the key zones 6 or 7km down where earthquakes and lots of other interesting geological processes begin; but that was impossible with existing ships.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Periodic table gets a new element.
The ubiquitous periodic table will soon have a new addition – the “super-heavy” element 112.
Girl Who Does Not Age, Brooke Greenberg Baffles Doctors – ABC News.
At about 16 pounds and 30 inches, 16-year-old Brooke Greenberg has not aged significantly, physically or apparently cognitively, since she was a toddler.
Decided to share a beta of the upcoming new version of tpic uploader.
If you are using the older 1.x version, do this:
* Run 1.x, disable context-menu, then uninstal it. Now you can proceed to install 2.0 beta.
Warning: context-menu for 2.0 beta works only in 32-bit windows.
New stuff:
- Imageshack direct link fixed; new capture modes: clipboard paste, select active window with hotkey, select window from Aero live thumbs preview (Vista or W7 only); support to upload multiple files in a row; new options to optimize upload speed/auto image resizing; option to store captures.
TechConnect Magazine – PhotoFast to release 2TB 3.5-inch solid state drives.
Japan-based PhotoFast has now announced a new solid state drive family, the G-Monster 3.5 RAID5 WorkStation Edition. According to its maker, the new line-up includes 3.5-inch drives with capacities of 64, 128, 256, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB that feature a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, a RAID controller, 256MB of cache memory and provide a top read/write speed of 270 MB/s.
Research being conducted by French scientists indicates eventual destabilization of Mercury could cause a major impact between Earth and Mars. The research was carried out by two French scientists who reportedly used “arcane mathematical” models to help predict the next five billion years of the galaxy.
Running a computer simulation of 2,501 different scenarios of various planets in the Earth’s solar system, Mercury’s orbit was disrupted, causing a domino effect that led to Earth, Venus and Mars also suffering from solar system disruption. The 2,501 scenarios were over the next five billion years, noting that the solar system is 99 percent likely to continue to operate the exact same way as today without a hiccup.
DailyTech – NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming.
A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate. The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.
Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles. At the cycle’s peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat. According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, “Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene.”
Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder concludes, “The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth’s global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum. The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012.”
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