Source: weirdasianews
Scientists at Hiroshima University’s Institute for Amphibian Biology in Hiroshima, western Japan, have bred transparent frogs whose organs can be seen through their skin.
Source: weirdasianews
They created the flowers by implanting the gene that leads to the synthesis of the blue pigment Delphinidin in pansies. The pigment does not exist naturally in roses.
Source: engadget
Source: Dailytech
European astronomers have continued the run of discoveries of smaller planets with the discovery of a trio of “super-Earths” rotating around the star HD 40307, located 42 light-years from Earth towards the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations. The new planets have masses of 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of Earth and orbits of 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days respectively.
Source: weirdasianews
Recently, there has been an increase in executions of North Koreans who are caught using or possessing cell phones.
Read the entire article at the source.
This is pretty cool, *when it works. It lets you easily install Fedora in a usb pendrive as a live system.
Get it here: https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator
However, as it’s Linux, there’s of course trouble and problems. If you can’t get it to boot, here’s the fix:
http://forums.blagblagblag.org/viewtopic.php?t=4365
cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdc
(Change sdc to your drive letter)
If that doesn’t work, try here:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=104367
If those solutions still don’t work, just give up, this is trash Linux after all and is bound to fail.
Source: Dailytech
Los Alamos researchers are putting this power to work with a program dubbed PetaVision. The program was created to model neuron and synapse interaction in the visual cortex of the human brain. The brain uses over a billion neurons and trillions of synapses alone to process the visual information it receives and is one of the most complicated processes known to exist in grey matter.
Supercomputers like Roadrunner bring new possibilities for modeling human recognition systems, and the advances are not likely to stop there. In the past, computers have been unable to flawlessly perform cognitive tasks that the human brain does easily; tasks like picking out a face in a crowd, or detecting oncoming vehicles in traffic. Such a large step up in processing power may enable scientists to breech this difficult wall in mimicry.
The researchers used PetaVision to set a processing record with Roadrunner, spinning up to an astonishing 1.144 petaflop/s. “Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago,” explains Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos.
The supercomputer’s architecture is based on a hybrid node system. Each node contains two AMD Opteron dual-core and four PowerXCell 8i processers. The PowerXCell CPUs are derived from the same Cell processor used in the Sony Playstation 3 and act as computational accelerators for the Opterons.
Source: Dailytech
The new system, known as Gestix, eliminates the need for complex and largely ineffective sterilization procedures on today’s OR touch screens. When surgeons first start with the system, they train it and learn to use it by learning to move their hand in one of eight directions away from a neutral area, fast. This movement scrolls the image. They also learn to zoom in and out by rotating their hand clockwise or counterclockwise. To avoid misleading signals, when the doctor is done, they drop their hand which triggers a sleep mode.
The hand motions are captured using a Canon VC-C4 camera and they are processed by an Intel Pentium processor and a Matrox Standard II Video Capture device. The system was tested to much success at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C during two “in vivo” neurosurgical brain biopsies. This may be the first time such a system was used with an “in vivo” procedure, according to the researchers.
Sources: (click for more info and pictures)
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander may have found ice
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander has reportedly found dice-sized ice crumbs that may have melted after being uncovered more than four days ago. As Phoenix dug around and took images of the Martian soil, scientists noticed several small cubes that vanished over a span of a several days.
Yesterday’s announcement by NASA of the discovery of water ice on Mars by its Phoenix Lander probe made big news everywhere. The discovery involved the observation of water ice sublimating into the air – that is, the water went from solid to vapor state without reaching the liquid stage.
Source: Yahoo News
“I am talking about loving relationships about 40 years from now,” David Levy, author of the book “Love + sex with robots”, told AFP at an international conference held last week at the University of Maastricht in the south-east of the country.
“… when there are robots that have also emotions, personality, consciousness. They can talk to you, they can make you laugh. They can … say they love you just like a human would say ‘I love you’, and say it as though they mean it …”
Robots as sex toys should already be on the market within five years, predicted Levy, “a sort of an upgrade of the sex dolls on sale now”.
These would have electronic speech and sensors that make them utter “nice sounds” when a human caresses their “erogenous zones”.
Source: Dailytech
Source: Dailytech
Very interesting news supporting the evolution theories.
Over 44,000 generations were observed and only minor mutations were observed, as is typical in these kinds of studies. Typical beneficial mutations — larger cell size, faster growth rates, and lower peak population densities — were observed.
Then at generation 31,500 something shocking happened. The bacteria evolved, gaining an entirely new gene that could process citrate, a nutrient that the bacteria could not previously use. To put this in context, lack of citrate metabolism is one of E. coli’s identifying traits. And the newly evolved bacteria proceeded to dominate over their citrate-intolerant kin.
Source: Dailytech
The new technology, developed by researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, takes ordinary cellulose and puts it through special processing. The end result is a paper, made out of normal wood pulp that has an incredible tensile strength of 1.6 times that of iron. The paper sports 214 MPa of tensile strength, easily trumping iron (130 MPa) and heavy duty paper (103 MPa). Tensile strength helps to measure how resistant a material is to ripping, and how much weight it can support.
The new paper is composed of nano-sized whiskers of cellulose. Cellulose, the crystalline polymer of glucose, is what makes up cell walls and makes plants so rigid. On a nanoscale, cellulose fibers beat steel and glass in strength, but paper is composed of larger cellulose strands that are prone to breakage under stress. Typical commercial paper has a tensile strength of a mere 30 MPa, indicating its weakness.
To make super paper, researchers first had to make the cellulose fibers super small. Head researcher Lars Berglund used enzymes and mechanical beating to tear the cellulose fibers to a mere 1,000 of their original size. Then the researchers added carboxymethanol, which coated the fibers in carbonyl groups. These groups produced hydrogen bonds, further strengthening the material.
go
Source: Dailytech
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