Aug 09
Hey nerds, get some fresh air this weekend: there’s gonna be hunks of burning rock falling from the sky.
Image courtesy of Roberto Porto
Source: Wired
Aug 09
Bet you wouldn’t have guessed that the answer to more efficient storage might exist in a Chubby Checker song. Yep, by doing the twist, scientists are thinking it’ll be possible to store up to 20 times more data in the same space, which could lead to much smaller (or vastly more spacious) hard drives for consumers. The work revolves around twisted magnetic fields known as skyrmions, which can retain their structure even when packed very densely. In the latest development, Kristen von Bergmann and her team at the University of Hamburg have figured out how to deliberately write and erase skyrmions, which is a first for the scientific community. The method relies on a scanning tunneling microscope, which applies spin polarization to a current of electrons that are stored on a magnetic surface. The technology is nowhere near ready for consumer use — it’s currently around 60 percent reliable, and requires an ambient temperature that’s on par with liquid helium — but it’s worth keeping an eye on as development progresses. After all, few scientific breakthroughs pair so nicely with classics of the dance floor.
Filed under: Storage, Science, Alt
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Nature
Aug 08
Google shows off Project Loon balloon-distributed internet tests over California
Posted in: Today's Chili
While Google’s Project Loon moonshot project first broke cover, the pilot for its internet via high-flying helium balloon service launched in New Zealand, but a post by the team today is about research flights in the US. There’s no mention of plans to try offering the service on domestic latitudes, but the tests are allowing Google to tweak its power systems, design and radios. The one specifically mentioned involves stratospheric flights over Fresno, investigating the effect of the city’s radio interference on Project Loon’s transmissions. We’re not sure how much closer this puts us to popping up an antenna outside to get our broadband connection bounced from a balloon flying at about 60,000 feet, but more pics and details are available at the link below.
Filed under: Internet, Alt, Google
Source: Project Loon (Google+)
Aug 08
Family of Henrietta Lacks finally gets rights to her cells, 62 years after they were taken
Posted in: Today's Chili
While 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks laid in a hospital bed, dying of cervical cancer, doctors took two samples of the tumor cells growing inside her. 62 years later, those cells are still growing and have served as the foundation for countless experiments, including vaccine development and drug safety trials. Problem is, Henrietta Lacks had no idea this had happened, and neither did her family until 1973, when a scientist called to ask for blood samples from her children as part of a genetic experiment. For the last 40 years not much has changed, researchers have continued to cultivate millions, if not billions or trillions, Mrs. Lacks’ cells, while her family has sought information, a portion of the proceeds and, most importantly, control over her genetic legacy. Now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has returned control of the cell line to her descendants, including granddaughter Jeri Lack Whye.
The primary impetus was the family’s privacy. One scientist managed to generate a rather full report of personal information about Lacks and her family after just a few minutes with some of her endlessly reproducing cells. This prompted the NIH to work out an agreement with her family that gives them partial control over the cell line. When companies request access to the genome, which is stored on NIH servers, the family will be consulted and asked for their consent before the data is delivered. There will be no financial compensation for the decades of profit made by medical institutions off their genetic heritage, but at least they’ll have some say in whether just who can go poking around in the family genes.
Photo courtesy of The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
Via: The Verge
Source: Reuters, New York Times
Aug 08
With potential oceans flowing below its icy surface, NASA thinks Jupiter’s Europa moon is promising candidate to harbor organic life. As such, the space agency and its JPL laboratory are looking to send a lander there within a decade, and have detailed what it wants it to explore in a new paper. Key goals include measuring the organic content of surface and near-surface chemistry, exploring mineralogy, measuring the thickness and salinity of the oceans and ice, imaging surface formations and looking at microscopic ice and non-ice grains. Researchers also looked at potential landing sites, and were torn between a more interesting, active site like “Thera Macula” and a more stable location with ancient geology. NASA’s Juno mission, launched in August 2011, is expected to help settle such issues when it probes Europa from orbit starting in 2016. Though it’d be hard to top Curiosity’s setdown, a Europa landing could be even more dramatic, considering the moon is over 10 times farther away than Mars and never gets above minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit.
Via: The Register
Source: NASA (paper)
Aug 08
Bruce Wayne may be on permanent vacation with Selina Kyle, but that hasn’t stopped Batman from topping YouTube’s list of most popular superheroes. Based on views and amount of content, the Dark Knight is number one, racking up 3 billion pairs of eyes on 71,000 hours of video. That’s 213 trillion hours you spent watching the antics of a flying rodent with daddy issues — or roughly 42,000 views per hour of footage. More surprising than that though, is who came in second place. It wasn’t Spider-Man (seventh with 340 million views of 7,400 hours of video) or Tony Stark (fourth with 1.7 billion views of 20,000 hours of video). If you heard thunder, you heard right. Thor has 2.1 billion views and 66,000 hours of video, but only around 32,000 views per hour of tape. What does it all mean? Mjolnir’s owner is around 33 percent less popular (views per hour) than Gotham’s First Son — and he’s a god. Ouch.
That Bats has a pair of killer video games benefiting from repeat walkthrough viewings probably helps, but we imagine clips like what’re after the break do the actual heavy lifting. If you want to see if your favorite made the cut, hit YouTube’s blog from the source link below.
[Image credit: Tony Sak]
Source: YouTube Trends blog
Aug 07
IBM Research reveals new silicon chip foundation inspired by the human brain (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili
The brain is an incredibly complicated thing, so much so that scientists have spent years trying to decipher its inner workings. IBM is one such institution attempting to crack the code of the human mind. In collaboration with DARPA’s SyNAPSE program, it developed a “neurosynaptic computing chip” back in 2011 designed to simulate some of the brain’s functions and successfully simulated 530 billion neurons last year thanks to the world’s second fastest supercomputer. Today, the company unveiled an important next step in this quest with a new software ecosystem made to program silicon chips that would closely emulate the brain’s low power and compact volume.
Some of the discoveries in the new ecosystem include a multi-threaded software simulator, a neuron model that supports wide-ranging neural computations, and programs made out of “corelets,” building blocks that represent neurosynaptic network blueprints. It’s quite a lot to grasp to be sure, so we’ve embedded a video after the break of IBM explaining the possible applications of its research. As for the scientifically-minded amongst you, feel free to peruse the press release for more details on IBM’s latest breakthrough in cognitive computing.
Filed under: Alt
Aug 07
Joaquin Phoenix finds real love with artificial intelligence in Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili
When sci fi narratives explore artificial intelligence approaching a human level of sentience, they tend to focus on the negative (Skynet, anyone?). Not so with Spike Jonze’s new movie Her, a melancholy examination of what it means to be human in an increasingly inhuman world. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as a social recluse who finds a friend in his smartphone’s Siri-inspired assistant, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). The relationship blossoms in a way that manages to be both heartfelt and deeply unsettling, and Jonze’s take on a sort of technological animism feels pretty culturally resonant. Her is set for a November release, and you can watch the trailer after the break.
Via: io9
Source: Annapurna Pictures
Aug 07
/blink: 1994 – 2013
Posted in: Today's Chili
As much as we’d thought that blinking text had already gone the way of our first Angelfire fanpage, it’s only now that the much-loathed HTML tag has met its maker. Firefox 23 has officially axed support for the tag, joining the ranks of Chrome, Safari and Opera in a group of would-be assassins. Like many bad decisions, blinking was conceived after a long night of drinking, with Netscape’s founding engineer Lou Montulli lamenting the limitations of Lynx in a bar. While Lynx couldn’t run a huge majority of HTML extensions that he and his team were spit-balling, it transpired that blinking text would, and the rest is a history that we’d rather put behind us. It’s just a shame that Mozilla can’t erase our youthful indiscretion so easily.
Via: PCWorld
Source: Mozilla
Aug 05
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory likes to dip its feet in cutting edge consumer hardware from time to time, as evidenced by its trial use of the Leap Motion to remotely control a Mars rover. Well, you can’t get much more cutting edge than virtual reality, which is why the team was so intrigued by the Oculus Rift when they first saw it at PAX last year. They signed up for a dev kit as soon as they could, cobbled the Rift together with a stereoscopic 360-degree panorama of Mars obtained from Curiosity, strapped on the VR goggles and found themselves magically transported to the Red planet.
According to our interview with Human Interfaces Engineer Victor Luo, they then added terrain imagery captured from satellites so users could actually “walk” on Mars’ rocky surface using an Xbox controller — “with up to 25 centimeters per pixel.” “However, we thought it’d be great if we could literally ‘walk’ on the terrain,” said Luo. With that in mind, they contacted the people behind the Virtuix Omni treadmill. It so happens they were in the area for E3, so they brought the contraption up to JPL headquarters, hooked it up, and sure enough, they were able to “wander around” the surface of Mars with their own two feet. Join us after the break for more on our interview with Luo, plus a video clip of the aforementioned virtual Mars tour.
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