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Submission + - Nanotube Storage Using Mechanical Arm (yahoo.com)

Submitted by SubComdTaco
SubComdTaco writes: to translate data into electrical signals.

Professor Eleanor Campbell, from the University of Edinburgh's school of chemistry, who took part in the study, said: "This is a novel approach to designing memory storage devices. Using a mechanical method combined with the benefits of nanotechnology enables a system with superior speed and energy efficiency compared with existing devices.

"The idea is quite novel — using the mechanical switch to charge and discharge without having a voltage constantly applied to the device.
Censorship

Submission + - Wyden Asks DHS To Explain Domain Seizures (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With Homeland Security continuing to seize domain names without warning and without giving site operators a chance to respond to charges, it appears that at least some people in the US government are quite concerned about this turn of events. Techdirt has a copy of the full letter Senator Wyden has sent to both Attorney General Eric Holder and ICE director John Morton, asking a series of pointed questions concerning the domain seizures and how they impact due process, free speech and sovereign rule in foreign countries.

Comment LDS Church, Personal Ancesteral File software (Score 1) 292

by SubComdTaco (#34610982) Attached to: Best Open Source Genealogy Software?
http://www.ldsgenealogy.com/ "The LDS Church offers free genealogy software that you can use as you do your genealogy research. It is called Personal Ancestral File (PAF) and is one of the best software programs for genealogy. It helps users organize their family history records. It can produce, either on screen or on paper, family histories, pedigree charts, family group records, and other reports to help users in their search for missing ancestors."
Cellphones

Submission + - 4G: is it worth the hype? (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing: 4G access. The first 4G phone, Spring Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the difference between 4G and 3G technology.
Book Reviews

Submission + - Review : SketchUp 7.1 Architectural Visualization (packtpub.com)

Submitted by dango0
dango0 writes: The SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization – Beginner’s Guide is a detailed guide, that will literally take you by the hand and teach you how to make stunning photo-realistic and artistic visuals of your projects, with free software, and free resources that you can find all over the internet.

So let me start my review, because I can’t wait to tell you guys about the things you can learn through this book.

About the Autor and why this guy knows what he’s talking about:

Robin de Jongh is a consulting engineer and designer who has successfully used SketchUp for multi-million pound new developments, and a whole bunch of smaller projects, from steel staircases to new product prototypes. He previously ran an architectural and product visualization company. Robin holds a degree in Computer Aided Product Design and is a professional engineer registered with the Institution of Engineering Designers in the UK. He writes a blog about SketchUp for design professionals at www.provelo.co.uk.

So uhmmm, yeah with the knowledge you will gain from this book you will set up your work and dress it up for a kill in such a way that it jumps off your screen, grabs your audience by the guts and never lets them go, because this is the first guide on SketchUp that goes beyond the basic modeling exercises that you can typically find in the online video tutorials. So keep on reading.

Frankly, when I saw that the book has 400 pages+, I thought this thing is full of fluff, and will bore me to death. But to my pleasant surprise I found a lot of descriptive pictures, and that’s exactly what a visual based guy like me understands best. So, without further ado, I’ll make a brief presentation of the chapters that will enlighten your path to fast, easy and breath taking presentations of your projects:

Chapter 1 – Quick Start Tutorial

This chapter is a fast forward for those impatient to get to the realistic sketchup scenes. Here you’ll find out how to model the scene, fix the lights, add textures, background, and make a quick render in Kerkythea.

Chapter 2 – Plug in and Gear Up

You will find that with a couple of free plugins and some other software you can turn SketchUp into a fully functional 3D modeling, visualization and animation suite similar to . let’s say 3D Max!!! (well the truth is this part made my jaw drop)

Chapter 3 – Composing the scene (free sample available)

This chapter will teach you how to make modeling a less hard work by setting your scene prior to starting work. Here you’ll use CAD plans, site images or even Google Earth to build the optimized scene for quick rendering or animation. (I know you will love this part of the book, so I got a sample of this chapter from the publisher for you guys – See it Here)

Chapter 4 – Modelling for Visualization

The pro modeling methods you can learn here will save you both the time, and the hassle of working with large polygon counts that can slow down your PC considerably, and at the same time will show you how to make those photo real renderings we all love in a blink of an eye.

Chapter 5 – Applying Textures and Materials for Photo-Real Rendering

Since the world evolved really fast lately, we have at our disposal a lot of free online image resources, professional digital cameras, and so a really effective way of bringing the “model” to life. The tutorials you’ll discover in this chapter will show you some unique photo and material handling tools to create surreal, mega easily textured scenes.

Chapter 6 – Entourage the SketchUp Way

Now you have a scene, with modeled buildings and applied textures, and the next step you wanna take is to make it shine with some Entourage, like cars, furniture, and of course trees and bushes and other nice things. In this chapter you’ll learn how to find the best libraries, and also to create your own (that you can give to others, for FREE or CASH).

Chapter 7 – Non Photo Real with SketchUp

Some other free software that you will learn how to use is GIMP, a powerful photo editing photo suite, that can simulate sketchy pencil and watercolor styles. And yeah, almost forgot about this, you will learn the AWESOME “Dennis Technique”.

Chapter 8 – Photo-realistic rendering

Some in depth presentation and step by step introduction into Kerkythea, the amazing free rendering software, with proven best settings for test renders and final outdoor and indoor scenes. This chapter amazed me, because it covers everything you need to know about getting professional photo-realistic renders out of a simple SketchUp model.

Chapter 9 – Important Compositing and After Effects in GIMP

We all know that the rendering process isn’t the end of the line, because there’s lots of subtle but important after effects you can apply to make the image even more effective. This particular chapter covers how to add reflections without rendering, creating depth of field effects from a depth render, adjusting levels for realistic daylight scenes, compositing real and rendered images.

Chapter 10 – Walkthroughs and Flyovers

Here you will find tutorials that will show you how to create storyboards, set up cameras and paths in SketchUp with extra plugin functionality, export test animations and final renders. Photo real animations are then composited to make a simple showreel.
Chapter 11 – Presenting Visuals in LayOut

This final chapter I really enjoyed since I like to play with layouts. The layout module is bundled as part of SketchUp Pro and is introduced in this final chapter for those who wish to explore the free trial before committing to Pro. You will learn how to bring together SketchUp models and artistic or rendered output into a screen presentation or printed portfolio, adding borders, text and dimensions.
Conclusion:

Without any doubt, the SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization Beginner’s Guide really uncoveres the power of SketchUp as a modeling and rendering software. The best part about SketchUp, as you might already know, is that it’s FREE, and all of the other software you’re encouraged to use in this book are free as well. A little phrase that I really liked from the book was “If it’s not free it’s not worth having”. Think about it, other people are paying as high as $3,990.00 for a Autodesk 3ds Max, and other image processing tools like Photoshop or what not, and you can have this other software that delivers almost the same results for FREE.

I’m an Architect, and I’ve worked with paid software before, but I gotta tell you, the free software are most of the time way better than the paid ones, for the simple fact that it’s made by passionate people that upgrade and tweak it all the time. So if you want to learn how to use a free software that delivers results time after time, please check out this book. I guarantee, you won’t throw your money away, the price for this book is way too low for the knowledge it shares and the results you can achieve.

Submission + - Theory of Fastest Gunfighter Tested (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SubComdTaco
SubComdTaco writes: Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform "planned actions".

In an experimental "duel", published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they studied the speed of these two types of movement.

As well as unpicking Wild West mythology, scientists hope the findings will shed light on movement disorders.

The team say the results could help diagnose conditions such as Parkinson's disease.

Gun-free duels: Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other. Each was secretly given instructions of how long to wait before pushing a row of buttons. "There was no 'go' signal," said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research.

"All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent — just like in the gunslingers legend."

Those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.

Submission + - Tapering Waveguide Captures a Rianbow (newscientist.com)

Submitted by SubComdTaco
SubComdTaco writes: "In 2007, Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, and colleagues proposed a technique to trap light inside a tapering waveguide, which is a structure that guides light waves down its length. The waveguide in question would use metamaterials – exotic materials that can bend light sharply.

The idea is that as the waveguide tapers, the components of the light are made to stop in turn at ever narrower points. That's because any given component of the light cannot pass through an opening that's smaller than its wavelength. This leads to a "trapped rainbow"."

"While numerical models showed that such waveguides would work in theory, making them out of metamaterials remained a distant dream. Now Vera Smolyaninova of Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues have used a convex lens to create the tapered waveguide and trap a rainbow of light.

They coated one side of a 4.5-millimetre-diameter lens with a gold film 30 nanometre thick, and laid the lens – gold-side down – on a flat glass slide which was also coated with film of gold. Viewed side-on, the space between the curved lens and the flat slide was a layer of air that narrowed to zero thickness where the lens touched the slide – essentially a tapered waveguide.

When they shone a multi-wavelength laser beam at the open end of the gilded waveguide, a trapped rainbow formed inside. This could be seen as a series of coloured rings when the lens was viewed from above with a microscope: the visible light leaked through the thin gold film."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's top devs don't seem to like own tools (computerworld.com)

Submitted by ericatcw
ericatcw writes: Through tools such as Visual Basic and Visual Studio, Microsoft may have done more than any other vendor to make drag and drop-style programming mainstream. But its superstar developers seem to prefer old-school modes of hacking code. During the panel at the Professional Developers Conference earlier this month, the devs also revealed why they think writing tight, bare-metal code will come back into fashion, and why parallel programming hasn't caught up with the processors yet.

Submission + - Moving Into Real World Software Development

Submitted by sick_em
sick_em writes: As a collegiate software developer I have dealt with endless examples of academia programming, keeping the work that I have done that I find interesting or useful (my school kindly gives us copyrights to our work). One of my academic projects in the pipeline is gaining an increasing amount of commercial value because it deals with a relatively obscure field where the current competition is capable of charging outlandish fees simply because of lack of choice. I have decided that should this software meet expectations, I will attempt to bring it to market. The actual selling of the software (marketing, site design, price setting, licensing, etc.) is understandable enough, but unfortunately, computer scientists here are taught to design systems and program, not to sell, which leaves me in the dark as to what legal courses I have to take to begin selling the software. How does a new software developer gain the ability to legally sell software that they have created?

Submission + - Cancer Vaccine That Mimics Lymph Node (sciencedaily.com) 1

Submitted by SubComdTaco
SubComdTaco writes: Harvard is reporting on their approach towards a implantable cancer vaccine. To anyone familiar with how the immune system works, this appears to be a synthetic lymph node, a bit of intriguing biomimicry.wikipedia biomimicry

From the article:
"ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) â½Ââ A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists recently reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The new approach, pioneered by bioengineers and immunologists at Harvard University, uses plastic disks impregnated with tumor-specific antigens and implanted under the skin to reprogram the mammalian immune system to attack tumors. The new paper describes the use of such implants to eradicate melanoma tumors in mice."

Submission + - Home Router for high speed connection?

Submitted by soulprivate
soulprivate writes: My cable company recently has begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT. It reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled.
Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone knows one? or what are your experiences at home?
Privacy

Submission + - India to have automatic communications monitoring (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "India plans to set up a centralized system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country, a minister has told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. Indian laws allow the interception and monitoring of communications under certain conditions, including to counter terrorism. A pilot of the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) is to be started by June next year, subject to clearances by other government agencies."

Comment Gate Control Theory of Pain Blocking (Score 1) 167

by SubComdTaco (#29985868) Attached to: Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves

Would be interesting to hear how this observed mechanism compares to the Gate Control Theory of Pain Control, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_control_theory_of_pain

If this is the same mechanism, then treatment modalities from acupuncture to TENS to etc. might be better evaluated and explained.

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