A Fox News source has confirmed the January 26th Apple event reported recently by the Financial Times, claiming the "big" event will "focus on the mobility space." [FoxNews via MacRumors]
A lone wolf named Brutus is helping U.S. Geological Survey scientists study Arctic wolf migrations in remote regions of Canada. These migrations can traverse hundreds of miles in 24-hour winter darkness at temperatures that reach 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
There’s no way humans can physically follow the wolves under these brutal conditions, so Brutus is sporting a GPS collar that beams his coordinates back to a satellite every 12 hours. As it turns out, the wolves are covering a lot of ground, as can be seen in the map above. Now, the fjords visible in the summer image above have frozen and can be crossed on foot. In one trip, the wolf and his pack traveled 80 miles from Ellesmere Island to Axel Heiberg Island and back in just 84 hours. Just through November 30, Brutus has traveled 1,683 miles [Wired.com].
The tracking is part of the Northwest Territories’ Central Arctic Wolf Project and the project is chronicled by researchers Dave Mech and Dean Cluff on the International Wolf Center blog.
David Mech admitted that despite studying the wolves for 25 years, he had no clue what they did each winter after he left. Now he knows the wolves are traveling in packs, most likely to hunt enough food to survive to the spring. The members of the pack – 11 adults and an unknown number of pups that can now travel with the pack – hunt muskoxen and Arctic hares, which flourish on Axel [Heiberg Island]. “That would be the only reason to travel so far,” writes Mech. He and Cluff receive reports every four days, emailed to their computers from the Argos satellite of the collar’s twice-daily location check [Toronto Star].
Next the researchers hope to answer how a pack of this size is able to kill enough prey under the cover of 24-hour darkness to stay alive. Making the leap from pens and notebooks to GPS and satellites should help.
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Image: USGS
Russia's Federal Space Agency may try to deflect Apophis, the 880-megaton asteroid that can bring hell to Earth (for comparison, the total power of the entire deployed US nuclear arsenal is around 1,400 Megatons). There's only one problem.
The possibility of Apophis hitting our home planet problem is extremely remote. When it passed by in 2004, the probability was 2.7%. The next flyby will happen in 2029. Predictions say that there will be no possibility of impact at that time. In 2036, the latest simulations models point out that the probability will 1 in 250,000. Extremely low, but still higher than the odds of being hit by lightning. Furthermore, NASA says that Apophis is not large enough to create a global catastrophe.
Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian's Federal Space Agency, disagrees. He says that a "scientist recently told him" that Apophis may hit Earth in 2032. If that happens, there's a big chance of it hitting Russia, as most of the south of the country is right on the path of impact risk. The mission, according to Perminov, would not use nuclear weapons, just the laws of physics.
I don't know who is right here, but I have mixed feelings. On one side, if the Russians make any mistakes, they may cause a cosmic clusterfuck. On the other, I'm happy that someone is doing something about this. While there is no official announcement about what the project would be, it's nice to see that someone considering building an space interceptor. [Space, Nuclear Stockpile, Wikipedia]
That's not an actual quote of course, but the scene here looks so contrived that it seems plausible. The scary thing is that the Cybersquad is protecting our data with old Dells, Windows XP and "intimidating" Matrix screensavers.
Plus, that 37-inch Westinghouse sitting right on top of the keyboard is a good indicator that the Feds have extremely poor eyesight—so who knows what kind of mistakes are being made. [i.igmur via reddit]
For the past few years, I have been getting migraine headaches about every two weeks that last from a couple of hours to typically 36 hours. The throbbing pain always occurs on the right side of my head in the frontal and occipital regions. When the pain is severe, it causes stomach pain and nause
This is the Creative Nomad Jukebox from the year 2000. It may have been shaped like a CD player to mentally ease technophobes, but it actually had a 6GB hard drive on board. And boy did we love it.
That's not to say that this thing was great—because it wasn't; not by today's standards. It had only a USB 1.1 connection, so uploading all 6GB worth of music took hours and hours. Imagine filling up a 1TB hard drive over a USB 2 connection today, if that gives you any idea of how long the process was. Oh, and it cost $420.
But you know what? It actually a pretty decent player for the year 2000. The 6GB is adequate even now (the lowest iPod Nano today has 8GB), and that 8GB of 5-minute skip protection was good enough for continuous music most of the time, except when you were off-roading or running away from cougars.
Hell, because it was so early in the MP3 player era, it even had extraneous features that were eventually ditched for cost cutting reasons because only a small portion of people used it. There was the stereo line input for recording, dual stereo output for 4-point surround sound as well as WAV and WMA support. Creative did do a good job with firmware support after the thing was released, actually adding functionality to the player when they could have just released a new hardware revision.
So yes, the Creative Nomad Jukebox was heavy, and lost in every way to any Android, Windows Mobile or Apple smartphone today in both price and feature set, but it was pretty damn good in the year 2000. [Product Page (Price dropped to $300 by 2001)]
Decades: where we revisit gadgets we loved from the start of the decade and see how they compare to what we use today.
mPhase Technologies, Inc. today announced that its consumer products division, mPower Technologies Inc., will unveil the mPower Emergency Illuminator at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
It's the ultimate goal in the treatment of cancer: tailoring a person's therapy based on his or her genetic makeup. While a lofty goal, scientists are steadily moving forward, rapidly exploiting new technologies. Researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center report a significant advance in this field of research using a new chip that looks for hundreds of mutations in dozen of genes.
Am Leibniz-Institut fuer Festkoerper- und Werkstoffforschung Dresden (IFW) wird ab 1.1.2010 eine von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) gefoerderte Emmy Noether-Nachwuchsgruppe eingerichtet. Mit dem auf 5 Jahre angelegten Projekt sollen die Wechselwirkungen der Elektronen erforscht und simuliert werden, die bei physikalischen Phaenomenen wie Supraleitung oder Magnetismus eine wichtige Rolle spielen.
mPhase Technologies, Inc. has retained the Investor Relations Group to serve as its national investor relations agency.
Dr Thierry Bontoux has stepped down from his position of Deputy Director of the LCN in charge of Business. His decision will be effective from the 31st of December 2009 and he will then focus on his new venture, TBx-Consulting.
Luna Innovations Incorporated has acquired certain intellectual property assets of Tego Biosciences, its main competitor in developing medicines based on carbon nanomaterials.
Investors and corporate licensees from Fortune 1000 companies will meet once again in Arlington, Texas for the eighth annual WBTshowcase (WBT2010), the world's largest forum offering a prescreened, pre-prepped collection of undiscovered companies and intellectual property emanating from top universities, labs and research institutions from across the country.
Atomic Force F+E and Asylum Research, the technology leader in scanning probe/atomic force microscopy (AFM/SPM) announce the first European AFM in Biology Class to be held February 23-25, 2010 at Atomic Force Corporate office in Mannheim, Germany.
Emerald BioStructures (formerly deCODE biostructures) announced today a publication in the December 27, 2009 advance online issue of Nature Biotechnology, detailing the application of structure-based drug design (SBDD) to engineer new allosteric small molecule modulators of the enzyme phosphodiesterase-4 (PDE4), with reduced side effects
Arrowhead Research Corporation today announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Tego Biosciences, has completed a definitive asset purchase agreement for the sale of its non-cash intellectual property to Luna Innovations, Inc., a developer and manufacturer of new-generation products that include pharmaceutical nanomedicines.
Denis Wirtz, Johns Hopkins University professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Engineering in Oncology Center, has been named the Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering.
The Supervisory Council of RUSNANO has approved the corporation?s participation in a project aimed at establishing the production of state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, the first in the country.
Researchers from the University of Hong Kong and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a study in the current issue of Cell Transplantation that explores ways to successfully keep stem cells 'forever young' during implantation by slowing their growth, differentiation and proliferation.
Transforming lead into gold is an impossible feat, but a similar type of 'alchemy' is not only possible, but cost-effective too. Three Penn State researchers have shown that certain combinations of elemental atoms have electronic signatures that mimic the electronic signatures of other elements.
