Jun 8, 2009

Human Beings

If we really are the masters of the universe, why is it that our species is the only one that is required to use toilet paper?

Long Term Memory

Scientists report successful tests of a new memory device that could allow terabytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes) of data to be stored without corruption for a billion years or more. The team claimed that it is possible to build storage devices capable of carrying 1TB of information per square inch, making it more effective than current techniques. The data will also be almost incorruptible.

The device is an iron nano-particle that measures 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair, enclosed in a hollow carbon nano-tube. The iron can be shuttled back and forth within the tube as a way to store data. Conventional Flash memory usually fails after three to five years.

Solar Sun Glasses


Remember the blonde joke about the solar panel glasses? Well, this takes the joke to a whole new level. “Self-Energy Converting Sunglasses.” Lenses of the glasses have dye solar cells, collecting energy and making it able to power your small devices through the power jack at the back of the frame.

The dye solar cell is described by the designers as, “cheap organic dye used with nano technology and providing cheap but high energy efficiency.” The lens turns sunlight rays, into electrical energy to power portable devices.

Stomach Rumbling

As food, liquid and gas move through your digestive tract, your stomach muscles and intestines contract and cause rumbling noises, borborygmi is the scientific name. (The word borborygmus (singular form) is an onomatopoeia (words that imitate the sound that they describe.)

Everyone’s stomach makes noise during digestion, but if you have extra-loud rumbles, a teaspoon of olive oil or a cup of herbal tea with lemon may help ease them.

Speak to Me

IBM has developed a computer application called Watson that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup, hosted by Alex Trebek, sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek, but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

The company has not yet published any research papers describing how its system will tackle Jeopardy!-style questions. IBM's end goal is a system that it can sell to its corporate customers who need to make large quantities of information more accessible.

Viagra Developer

Robert Furchgott, a Nobel prize-winning pharmacologist whose work with the gas nitric oxide helped develop the anti-impotency drug Viagra, has died at the age of 92. How interesting nitric oxide is a free radical and Viagra makes radicals free. Hmmm.

Quotable

If God hadn’t intended us to be happy, he wouldn’t have made it so easy for us to smile.

Live Search

I'll bet you think Microsoft owns it. Wrong. LiveSearch.com domain name belongs to Tyler Tullock of Bothell, Wash., who says he has rejected several offers for the site. Tullock took control of the domain name about 13 years ago, when he was running an internet-marketing company, LocalSeek Advertising. He used Livesearch.com and other domains to advertise his services, which included a relocation business.

Microsoft introduced Live Search in 2006, hosting the search engine on Live.com, a domain that it does own .

Tullock runs a chain of seven music schools in the Seattle area, and parks Google (NSDQ: GOOG) ads on LiveSearch.com. “It makes me plenty of money sending all that Microsoft business to Google,” he says, but won’t disclose how much the site brings in. Maybe that's why Microsoft is thinking of changing the name and is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market.

Quotable

To worry about your age is silly. Every time you are a year older so is everyone else.

Bigger Ads on the Net

27 publishers with a reach of about 109 million unique visitors per month have agreed to try one of three new online ad formats sometime before July. The publishers are all members of the online publishers association.

* The Fixed Panel, which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
* The XXL Box, which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
* The Pushdown, which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

The formats they've agreed on all have one trait in common: they are much bigger and more attention-grabbing than the banner, which is despised by publishers, advertisers, and readers alike. The reason banner ads are despised is because they are too damn intrusive and, contrary to public opinion, bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to ads.

Death with Dignity

66-year-old Linda Fleming was diagnosed with terminal cancer and feared her last days would be filled with pain and ever-stronger doses of medication that would erode her mind. She had late-stage pancreatic cancer and wanted to be clear-headed at death, so she became the first person to kill herself under Washington State's new assisted suicide law, known as "death with dignity."

"I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death," Fleming said in a statement released Friday. "The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death. And I knew I would have to increase them."

With family members, her physician and her dog at her side, Fleming took a deadly dose of prescription barbiturates and died Thursday night at her home.

Manneken Pis


A state in eastern Mexico will erect a statue to a small boy suspected as being the first patient of swine flu, to be modeled on the famous Belgian Manneken Pis statue of a child urinating.

Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez appeared in media across the world after the health ministry confirmed that he had contracted, and overcome, the virus at the start of the epidemic's outbreak.

Hernandez's role in putting his poor village of La Gloria on the map merited recognition in the shape of a small statue. "La Gloria is now an important tourist destination. Next week we'll inaugurate a statue of the child Edgar Hernandez that resembles the Manneken Pis in Brussels, Belgium, for having carried out a similar exploit," the mayor said.

The story is that the young Belgian child stood on the walls of the city to urinate and discovered enemy troops approaching. He warned the town's people, who eventually defeated the enemy.

Jun 1, 2009

Smart Birds

Researchers have found that rooks, a member of the crow family, are capable of using and making tools, modifying them to make them work and using two tools in a sequence. The rooks quickly learned to drop a stone to collapse a platform and acquire a piece of food, and subsequently showed the ability to choose the right size and shape of stone without any training.

Not only could they use stones to solve the task, but they were flexible in their tool choice, using and modifying sticks to achieve the same goal. When the correct tool was out of reach, they used another tool to get it, demonstrating the ability to use tools sequentially. They also bent a straight piece of wire to make the hook to reach the food.

Quotable

Some men defy old age. They still believe that they as good as they never were.