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POPS First Electronic Ink Magazine Cover Expected “The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones.” Science fiction readers have been looking forward to this development for a long time, and can give us an idea of what this technology will look like in coming years. For example, writer Greg Bear had a very clear view of the Esquire E-ink cover in 2003 in "Darwin's Children." He wrote about e-paper covers with speaker chips.
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POPSPlanet and star in puzzling waltz Instead, the system might have started out that way. "It could be a coincidence, but I don't like explanations based on coincidence," says Aigrain. She suggests that magnetic fields might have helped to lock the system together, but stresses that it is pure speculation at this point. During its mission, COROT should discover many more planets. Aigrain and her colleagues hope they will then have a better idea whether synchronised systems are common, and what causes the phenomenon.
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POPS'Fuel battery' could take cars beyond petrol ts negative electrode, or anode, is made from vanadium boride, which serves double-duty as a fuel too. But unlike the flowing fuel of a fuel cell, the material is held internally, like the anode material of a battery. The vanadium boride reacts with a constant stream of oxygen, as in a fuel cell, provided by the positive electrode, or cathode. This brings in a supply of air from outside. The cell has a theoretical energy capacity of 27 kilowatt hours per litre, compared to 9.7 kilowatt hours per litre for gasoline. But both approaches are limited by practical factors to smaller figures.
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POPSDinosaur evolutionary tree unveiledby
Mohir Yesterday 7:47 AM It remained at that low level throughout the following Cretaceous period, a time of plenty in Earth's terrestrial history in which flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals all became much more numerous. Dinosaurs apparently did not take advantage of the abundant food supply that emerged during the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. "Our supertree allows us to look for unusual patterns across the whole of dinosaurs for the first time," says Lloyd. "It is the most comprehensive picture ever produced of how dinosaurs evolved."
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POPSGPS for the Moon -Helping Humans Navigate the Lunar Surface "We will help with navigation, but also with astronauts' health as well," Li said. "We want them to avoid the stress of getting lost, or getting frustrated with the equipment. Lunar navigation isn't just a technology problem, it's also biomedical." The researchers have named the entire system the Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS).
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POPSWhat Do Your Genes Say About You? The Future of Personal Genomics The company 23andMe announced its DNA testing service last month in San Diego. You might think such a comprehensive analysis would costs thousands, but the process is actually relatively affordable. For less than $1,000 customers are able to learn virtually everything science currently knows about their biological code. For those wary of needles, you’ll be comforted to know that the DNA is retrieved conveniently and painlessly from a home mail-in saliva test kit.
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POPSHuman-frog hybrids reveal autism's secrets To see if abnormalities in neurotransmitter signalling also underlie autism, Miledi's team collected brain samples from six deceased autistic patients, aged eight to 39. They fused brain-cell membranes, which house neurotransmitter receptors, together with Xenopus egg membranes. As a control, they did the same thing with brain cells from patients with no history of mental disorder. Miledi's team then doused the frog eggs in neurotransmitter chemicals, and measured the voltage generated within each egg. The neurotransmitter chemicals tell brain cells to pump charged molecules in and out the membrane, creating a voltage across the membrane. Since Xenopus eggs do not respond to the neurotransmitters, the human proteins are completely responsible for any electric current generated. Four of six autistic brains responded to neurotransmitters chemicals less vigorously than the controls.
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POPSFirst paper based transistor Furthermore, electric characterization of devices showed that the hybrid FETs’ performance outpace those of amorphous silicon TFTs, and rival with the actual state of the art of oxide thin film transistors. These results suggest promising new disposable electronics devices, like paper displays, smart labels, smart packaging, bio-applications, RFID tags, among others. te
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POPSA dash of lime -- a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven is the brains behind the plan to resurrect the lime process. He argues that it could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost 'stranded' energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit – like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts – and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.
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POPSNew Scifi Story About How Google Achieves Consciousness rom the story: When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.
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POPS1998: Syphilis Genome Sequenced; 2008: Syphilis on the Rise Incidence is up among women, African-Americans and, most prominently, gay men, who account for 64 percent of the more than 12,000 people diagnosed last year with either primary or secondary syphilis infections. Primary infections appear as ulcers or shankers on the genitals, anus or mouth; secondary infections result in rashes on the foot's sole or the palm of the hand as well as hair loss and lesions on or around the genitalia.
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POPSGoodbye To Faulty Software? The program that performs the computation is equivalent to the proof of the theorem. By proving the theorem the program is guaranteed to be correct. It is not that simple, of course, but so promising is type theory that since 1989 the EU has been funding a string of projects to develop it under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. That style of working is going to change so that we spend more effort on actually writing programs than testing them.
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POPSSnag Films -The Documentary Widget Many of the most prominent documentary filmmakers are participating not only by having their films distributed via SnagFilms, but by engaging with their audience through blogs and offering special “bonus” material, as well as suggesting nonprofit organizations that viewers motivated by these films can link to and support via charitable contributions, volunteering or spreading the word.
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POPS"Do Humans Have 23 years to Go?" Play Superstruct and Find Out -Invent the Future! “The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which it a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.” According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.
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POPSThe Role of Light on Human Health Rea envisions "real-time light prescriptions" to help people receive or avoid light at the appropriate times. Simple measures to control when and how much circadian light we receive could help nightshift workers stay alert on the job and sleep more effectively during the day, help cure jet lag, decrease depression, and generally help everyone get a proper night's sleep. The ability to modify circadian rhythm could potentially mitigate the negative health effects that some researchers believe are brought on by disruptions to the light-dark cycle. Recent studies have found a link between health and changes in the natural circadian rhythm. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute published a series of articles, for example, that showed night shift workers had a higher incidence of breast cancer; and, last year, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer cited night work as a potential breast cancer risk factor.
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POPSAchilles Heel Of HIV Found?
“Unlike the changeable regions of its envelope, HIV needs at least one region that must remain constant to attach to cells. If this region changes, HIV cannot infect cells. Equally important, HIV does not want this constant region to provoke the body’s defense system. So, HIV uses the same constant cellular attachment site to silence B lymphocytes - the antibody producing cells. The result is that the body is fooled into making abundant antibodies to the changeable regions of HIV but not to its cellular attachment site. Immunologists call such regions superantigens. HIV’s cleverness is unmatched. No other virus uses this trick to evade the body’s defenses.” Paul’s group has engineered antibodies with enzymatic activity, also known as abzymes, which can attack the Achilles heel of the virus in a precise way. “The abzymes recognize essentially all of the diverse HIV forms found across the world. This solves the problem of HIV changeability. The next step is to confirm our theory in huma
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POPSMechanism Behind Mind-body Connection Discovered The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes.
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POPSResearchers Generate Hydrogen Without The Carbon Footprint Grimes and his team produce hydrogen from solar energy, using two different groups of nanotubes in a photoelectrochemical diode. They report in the July issue of Nano Letters that using incident sunlight, "such photocorrosion-stable diodes generate a photocurrent of approximately 0.25 milliampere per centimeter square, at a photoconversion efficiency of 0.30 percent." "It seems that nanotube geometry is the best geometry for production of hydrogen from photolysis of water," says Grimes
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POPSTo Trust or Not to Trust? It has been hypothesized that oxytocin, a hormone recognized for its role in social attachment and facilitation of social interactions, is also important in the formation of trust. For instance, application of oxytocin to “investors” in experimental games increases their tendency to engage in social risks and trust someone else with their money (see this and this). The study by Baumgartner and his colleagues highlights the neural mechanisms through which oxytocin acts to facilitate trust behavior by investigating what happens in the brain when trust breaks down.
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POPSFlatfish caught evolving, thanks to its roving eye Now Friedman reports finding two different missing links. They are fossil fish with their eyes in different places on the two sides of their skulls - one in the normal position and one closer to the midline (see Diagram). One is Amphistium, a previously described genus found in several fossil deposits in Europe, in which the asymmetry went unnoticed because in fish fossils only one side of the animal is generally preserve. The other is Heteronectes, a new genus. At 10 to 20 centimetres long, the specimens were clearly adults and not larvae in which the eyes were migrating
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POPSUnderstanding Hearing, Molecule By Molecule other sensory system in biology and the electrical engineering world is capable of this feat. “It’s one of the most beautifully deigned systems in the body,” says Manfred Auer of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division. “But how it really works remains a mystery. Our goal is to determine what the system looks like, so we can determine how it functions.”
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POPSWill Our Future Brains Be Smaller? Why does the brain need these two decision-making areas? What benefit does the new cortex bring? After all, extra brain means extra weight and energy required to carry it around. Furthermore, is the older sub-cortical system now largely redundant? If so, could we expect it to atrophy in future humans so our brains become smaller? The results of their modelling showed that when the threat level is high, such as the risk of being attacked by a dangerous animal, it is very useful to have the fast-acting, if inaccurate, system. But when dealing with situations which don't occur very often, or complex scenarios with many conflicting cues such as social situations, the cortical system is of more use than the sub-cortical system.
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POPSWill "Th!nk" Ignite an Electronic Car Revolution in the U.S.? Think City is one of two models that are out already, together with the Think Ox, with a choice of either lithium or a sodium battery, it's range is enough to take a suburban dweller to the downtown office and back, with zero carbon footprint. The car is thoughfully fully computerized and allows a key-less entry. It features real time navigation, web, e-mail and open source interfaces, intelligent and sustainable driving and route calculations. The DNA-key gives the user feedback on charging status and sends messages, for example, for pre-heat or pre-cool options via GPRS. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the company's current vehicles cost less than $25,000.
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POPSBio-Earth: Are Planets Living Super-Organisms? He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life. To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.
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POPSIran: You Suck At Photoshop. Here's the caption on the NYT illustration above: In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange).
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POPSOctopus vs Rubik’s cube No one has suggested that any of the octopuses will actually solve the puzzle, but there’s a very slim chance they might. At the risk of re-igniting the now dormant ‘Echinoderms or Molluscs’ blog war, show us a starfish that can do that…
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