InvisblePinkUnicorn - Slashdot User

Submission + - Deep Impact Probe to Look for Earth-sized Planets (eurekalert.org)

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @10:23AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "NASA has given University of Maryland scientists the green light to fly the Deep Impact probe to Comet Hartley 2. The spacecraft will fly by Earth on New Year's Eve at the beginning of a more than two-and-a-half-year journey to Hartley 2. During the first six months of the journey to Hartley 2, they will use the larger of the two telescopes on Deep Impact to search for Earth-sized planets around five stars selected as likely candidates for such planets. Upon arriving at the comet, Deep Impact will conduct an extended flyby of Hartley 2 using all three of the spacecraft's instruments — two telescopes with digital color cameras and an infrared spectrometer."

Submission + - Artificial Blood Vessels Grown on a Nano-Template (eurekalert.org)

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Tuesday December 18, 2007 @10:52AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at MIT have found a way to induce cells to form parallel tube-like structures that could one day serve as tiny engineered blood vessels. The researchers found that they can control the cells' development by growing them on a surface with nano-scale patterning. The work focuses on vascular tissue, which includes capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels, and is an important part of the circulatory system. The team has created a surface that can serve as a template to grow capillary tubes aligned in a specific direction. The cells, known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), not only elongate in the direction of the grooves, but also align themselves along the grooves. That results in a multicellular structure with defined edges — a band structure. Once the band structures form, the researchers apply a commonly used gel that induces cells to form three-dimensional tubes."

Submission + - Nanotube-Excreting Bacteria Allow Mass Production (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Friday December 07, 2007 @05:59PM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Engineers at the University of California, Riverside have found semiconducting nanotubes produced by living bacteria — a discovery that could help in the creation of a new generation of nanoelectronic devices. According to the lead researcher, 'We have shown that a jar with a bug in it can create potentially useful nanostructures.' This is the first time nanotubes have been shown to be produced by biological rather than chemical means. This research began when they observed something unexpected happening while attempting to clean up arsenic contamination using the metal-reducing bacterium Shewanella. In a process that is not yet fully understood, the bacterium secretes polysacarides that seem to produce the template for the arsenic-sulfide nanotubes. These nanotubes behave as metals with electrical and photoconductive properties useful in nanoelectronics. The article abstract is available from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Submission + - Toyota Unveils Violin Playing Robot (reuters.com)

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eldavojohn

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @01:54PM

eldavojohn writes: "Toyota has unveiled a robot that play the violin. From the article,

The race to produce the first practical home robots has heated up with Toyota's new range — including one that plays the violin. In a demonstration of the new robots' achievements, Toyota brought out a 152 cm (5 ft), two-legged robot dexterous enough to play a few stanzas — complete with vibrato sound — from Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance", a popular tune at graduation ceremonies. Toyota said it planned to further advance the robot's dexterity to enable it to use tools and assist with domestic duties and nursing and medical care. The robot has 17 joints in both of its hands and arms now.
It seems there have been small — or maybe even strange, impractical — advances in robotics repeatedly with demonstrations of robots performing a specialized task. Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting?"

Submission + - Best Windows Error Ever May Rip Time-Space Continu (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by

stoolpigeon

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @01:53PM

stoolpigeon writes: "In what computer analysts and physicists all over the world have classified as "a clear and present danger to the survivability of the Human Race and the Universe as we know it," LA area-man and Gizmodo reader Kevin Barbee reports that his Windows Vista Problem Reporting has reported that it has stopped reporting."

Submission + - Microsoft's OOXML claims its first scalp! (theopensourcerer.com)

Submitted by

The Open Sourcerer

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @01:24PM

The Open Sourcerer writes: "In what is an astonishingly outspoken report, Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 WG1 has given insight into the total mess that Microsoft/ECMA has caused during their scandalous, underhand and unremitting attempts to get — what is a very poorly written specification — approved as an ISO standard. "The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting "standardization by corporation", something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible. I wish my colleagues every success for their future efforts, which I sincerely hope will not prove to be as wasted as I fear they could be." The Open Sourcerer"

Submission + - YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation (eurekalert.org)

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @12:32PM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube, related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead research, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."

Submission + - 'Flying Fish' Plane Takes Off and Lands in Water (umich.edu)

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @12:19PM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed an autonomous 'flying fish' sea-plane with a 7-foot wingspan — the first such plane that can initiate and perform its own takeoffs and landings on water. According to the article, the plane 'drifts until its onboard GPS tells the craft it has floated too far. That triggers the takeoff sequence, which gets the plane airborne in just 10 meters. Other GPS coordinates trigger the landing sequence.' The project homepage includes photos of the plane taking off and landing."

Submission + - Violent Media Suppresses Aggression Inhibitors (columbia.edu)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Thursday December 06, 2007 @12:10PM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "We all knew the link probably existed, but feared the inevitable legislative result of finding conclusive evidence that exposure to violent media makes a person more likely to act aggressively. Now, researchers at Columbia University's Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that a brain network responsible for suppressing behaviors like inappropriate or unwarranted aggression (including the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and the amygdala) became less active after study subjects watched several short clips from popular movies depicting acts of violence. These changes could render people less able to control their own aggressive behavior. The authors found that less activation in this network was characteristic of people reporting an above average tendency to behave aggressively, as measured through a personality test. None of these changes in brain activity occurred when subjects watched non-violent but equally engaging movies depicting scenes of horror or physical activity."

Submission + - World's Most Powerful MRI Offers Metabolic Imaging (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Wednesday December 05, 2007 @11:28AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "The world's most powerful medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the 9.4 Tesla at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has successfully completed safety trials, and may soon offer a real-time view of biological processes in the human brain. From the article: 'Currently, physicians often must wait weeks to see if a tumor is shrinking in response to therapy. With the 9.4T, it will be possible to see if individual cells within the tumor are dying long before the tumor has begun to shrink. MRI's currently visualize water molecules to track biochemical processes. By visualizing the sodium ions involved in those processes instead, the 9.4T permits researchers to directly follow one of the most important energy-consuming processes in the cellular machinery in the brain.' The research group has provided a photo gallery showing off the MRI and its capabilities."

Submission + - Spintronics Research Makes Major Breakthrough (eurekalert.org) 1

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Monday December 03, 2007 @05:37PM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Spintronics is the field of research into developing devices that rely on electron spin rather than electron charge. A major advance has been made by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), where they have for the first time generated, modulated, and electrically detected a pure spin current in silicon, the semiconductor used most widely in the electronic device industry. Progress in this field is expected to lead to devices which provide higher performance with lower power consumption and heat dissipation. Basic research efforts at NRL and elsewhere have shown that spin angular momentum, another fundamental property of the electron, can be used to store and process information in metal and semiconductor based devices. The article abstract is available from Applied Physics Letters."

Submission + - The mainframe's new best friend: OpenSolaris (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Monday December 03, 2007 @05:32PM

coondoggie writes: "There was a time not too long ago when IBM would have called out the National Guard to keep anyone other than IBM away from its mainframe technology. Not so much any more. The latest evidence: Last week Big Blue along with Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated Sun's Solaris operating system running on the Big Iron. Specifically OpenSolaris was running on the mainframe's z/VM subsystem which allows more than 1,000 virtual images on a single hypervisor. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22587"

Submission + - NVIDIA's nForce 780i, Three-Way SLI For Intel CPUs (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Monday December 03, 2007 @05:30PM

MojoKid writes: "Details are starting to trickle in about NVIDIA's next generation chipset architecture beyond the nForce 680i that will enable three-way SLI for the Intel platform. The Asus P5N-T motherboard seen here, utilizes NVIDIA's new NF200 PCI Express Switch chip in conjunction with both the 780i Northbridge and nForce 570 MCP Southbridge (now called 780i MCP), to provide two full X16 slots of PCI Express 2.0 connectivity and one X16 Gen 1 slot for multi-GPU graphics rendering."

Submission + - Love of broccoli begins in womb

Submitted by

mernil

on Monday December 03, 2007 @05:27PM

mernil writes: "Timesonline reports "WOMEN can give their children a lifelong taste for "healthy but horrible" foods such as broccoli and brussels sprouts simply by eating them during pregnancy or while breast-feeding, researchers have found. "Flavours from the mother's diet are transmitted through amniotic fluid and mother's milk. A baby learns to like a food's taste when the mother eats that food on a regular basis," said Julie Mennella, of Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute in Philadelphia, who did the study."

Submission + - First Stars Powered by Dark Matter Annihilation (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Monday December 03, 2007 @11:10AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "According to researchers at the University of Utah, the earliest stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible 'dark stars' 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun, and maintained by the annihilation of dark matter. From the article: 'The findings suggest that dark matter neutralinos interacted so they annihilated each other, producing subatomic particles called quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks. That generated heat. As a proto-stellar cloud of hydrogen and helium tried to cool and shrink, the dark matter would keep it hot and large, preventing fusion from igniting the star.' This would have occurrerd some 80 million to 100 million years after the big bang."

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