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CES 2009: SD Association Announces 2TB Memory Card Standard for Phones - Gearlog

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:49:56 -0800

2 Terabyte SD Card

Polyphasic Sleep

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:10:57 -0800

Polyphasic Sleep

When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do | Baltimore City Paper

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:07:52 -0800

When Books Could Change Your Life
I don't copy so much text onto my blog too often, but this is certainly a superbly expressed series of information on books and something like psycho-sexual development.

"A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: "You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old." I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true.

Let's all admit it: We never got over those first loves. Listen to the difference in the voices of any groups of well-read, overeducated people discussing contemporary fiction, or the greatest books they've ever read, and the voices of those same people, only two drinks later, talking about the books they loved as kids. The Betsy Tacy Books! I loved those books! The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet! I can't believe you know that! The Little House on the Prairie books! Oh, my God--did you read The Long Winter? So good. Hey--does anyone else remember The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree?

It's not just that these books, unlike adult literature, have been left unsullied by professors turning them into objects of tedious study. We love these books, dearly and uncritically, the way we love the smell of our first girlfriend's perfume, no matter how cheap or tacky it might have been. Let's be honest: We all know that Ulysses and A la recherch� du temps perdu are "better" books than The Velveteen Rabbit or The Little Prince, but come on--which would you take with you on a spaceship to salvage from the dying Earth?

Let me put it another way: When was the last time a book changed your life? I don't mean offered you new insights or ideas or moved you--I mean profoundly changed the way you see the world or shaped the kind of person you are? If you're like me, it's been longer than you'd like to admit. I recently read Eli Sagan's Cannibalism: Human Aggression Cultural Form, which enabled me to see capitalism as a highly sublimated form of aggression, on the same continuum as headhunting, warfare, and slavery, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which gave me a greater equanimity about the esteem of others and assuaged my fear of death. But if I ever end up holed up in my parents' farmhouse holding off the bulldozers with a machine gun while listening to Beethoven's late quartets, it'll be because of the story "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

About the last time in our lives when books have this kind of potent effect on us is in our early 20s, which not coincidentally tends to be the age of people you see poring over Nietzsche or that awful Ayn Rand. There's something alarming about this. I don't want to believe that our personalities ossify so much in adulthood that we're no longer capable of being changed by art. But part of the reason art loses its power over us, of course, is, simply and sadly, that we get old; our personalities, as soft, impressionable, and tempting as freshly poured sidewalk cement when young, gradually set and harden over the years with whatever graffiti passers-by scrawled there still indelibly inscribed in it. But when a 14-year-old gushes that the Twilight series are the best books she's ever read in her whole life, it's easy for grownups to forget that this is not necessarily hyperbole. At that age, we haven't heard any clich�s, and even dumb ideas are new...

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The Art of Invisibility [PICS]

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:12:48 -0800

Camouflage

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081211/sc_afp/sciencejapanbrainoffbeat_081211052641

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:45:18 -0800

Dreams to a Computer Screen
Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron.

"It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity," the private institute said in a statement.

"By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams."

When people look at an object, the eye's retina recognises an image that is converted into electrical signals which go into the brain's visual cortex.

The team, led by chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani, succeeded in catching the signals and then reconstructing what people see.

In their experiment, the researchers showed people the six letters in the word "neuron" and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity.

The team said that it first figured out people's individual brain patterns by showing them some 400 different still images.

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http://www.zmescience.com/meet-the-worlds-only-immortal-animal

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:59:34 -0800

The Immortal Animal
Of all the millions of animals we've studied and taxonomized, only one can truly be deemed "immortal". The hydrozoa (something like a large predatory jellyfish-anemone creature) known as Turritopsis nutricula, is capable of cheating death by "reversing its life-cycle".

The T. nutricula is a solitary hydrozoa. Normally, these creatures reproduce asexually and create polyps, from which the mature medusae (jellyfish) grow. In the case of our immortal friend however, the mature medusae turn back into polyps using a process called "transdifferentiation". They're able to change certain (non-stem) cells into other kinds of cells. So the life cycle goes polyp-medusa-polyp-medusa-polyp... indefinitely, effectively rendering it the only immortal being, due to its perpetual life-cycle.

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Mushrooms that Glow in the Dark

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:33:43 -0800

Very Bioluminescent Mushrooms

These mushrooms, native to parts of Brazil and Japan, glow bright green (hence the name Mycena chlorophos).
They glow due to a process called bioluminescence. Basically, all living cells can emit an extra photon or two during their life cycle, something to do with rare oxidation, too much energy, an electron jumping down a shell and releasing a photon (if you're a scientist/science enthusiast, you got my train of thought). All living matter emits these biophotons, but they're usually far too minuscule to be observed by the naked eye.

These mushrooms are different, they want to glow and they do. They're especially observed during the late summer months, in forests undisturbed by humans in Japan.

Yet another fascinating thing for me to observe when I visit Japan! =)

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http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=triple-helix-designing-a-new-molecule

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:28:50 -0800

PNA and the Triple Helix

A nice new molecular structure out there, to help us make life and drugs (two of my favourite things)! So you can see why I'm overly excited. =)

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is an artificially synthesized polymer similar to DNA or RNA.
It's hypothesized here that "new kind of life" can be created, by altering DNA and RNA - what we've interpreted to be, essentially, the "building blocks of life". Peptide nucleic acid (PNA), Morpholino and locked nucleic acid (LNA), glycol nucleic acid (GNA) and threose nucleic acid (TNA) are all artificial variants of the natural nucleic acids.

Whether this could actually progress us into an age of better understanding of life-forms is certain. But just how far could we get?

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TV in a PC

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:15:54 -0700

Linux Server With An Extra Display

When this guy decided to mod his linux server, he tried something different- embedding a "TV" display right into the unit, directly into the GPU.

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