Opera 10.5 for Mac's out. It's different from most browsers—the way it searches text in every tab from the address bar, for instance—but it's ridiculously fast and worth a spin. Besides, can you have too many browsers?? [Opera]
I like my Swiss knife, but I like the Guppie better. Any multi-tool that makes me look like a Real Man, ready to go back to the Jurassic and kill a dinosaur, is a winner.
Made by Columbia River Knife & Tools, the Guppie includes an adjustable wrench, screw driver with multiple magnetic heads, menacing knife, LED flashlight, and a beer bottle opener—it can open other bottles and jars, but I am a Real Man. According to designers Launce Barber and Tom Stokes, the design is made so everything is ready to use in the shorter time possible, right out of the pocket.
For absolute Real Man effect, hang it from your belt using the built-in carabiner, and allow your butt crack to show a bit over your pants.[ReadWriteWeb]
Miami's Mid-Beach is just as beautiful as South Beach, just more laid back
Visitors who are new to Miami often don’t understand the distinction between Miami, Miami Beach and South Beach. The community of Miami Beach is located on a barrier island separated from the mainland by Biscayne Bay, while the City of Miami fronts Biscayne Bay on the mainland side. Further confusing the issue, on the Atlantic side of the barrier island, Miami Beach (the community) is divided into South Beach, Mid-Beach, and North Beach, arbitrary divisions that define neighborhoods.
Of these three, South Beach is unquestionably the most famous. Although there is some disagreement about its exact boundaries, locals generally agree that South Beach begins at the southern tip of the island and continues north to 17th Street. This is where celebrities, captains of industry, and the obscenely rich congregate, so it is not surprising that its crystal white beaches are filled with long-legged beauties in skimpy bikinis and weightlifters with rippling six-packs.
Idyllic and far from crowded, Mid-Beach is a much better options for families
While every visitor to Miami Beach should walk the promenade at least once, if only to enjoy the eye candy, when it’s time to actually hit the beach some are intimidated by all those bodies beautiful. For these folks, Mid-Beach is a perfect alternative. Stretching for miles north of 17th Street, Mid-Beach is just as gorgeous as it’s more famous sibling to the south but is uncrowded and laid back. All the amenities are close at hand: chaise lounges, beach umbrellas and towel huts line the beach, while famous resorts like the Fontainbleu are just steps away, providing great dining and entertainment choices after a day at the beach.
North Beach is even less crowded, but offers few amenities and is far from the action at South and Mid-Beaches.
Photo credit: Barbara Weibel
Article by Barbara Weibel of Hole In The Donut Travels
Super-spec'd premium phones like the Droid and Nexus One are only part of Google's long term plan for Android. What we have here is a glimpse of Android's other future: Free. Android handsets are the new flip-phones! Sort of!
Today's Motorola Devour launch at Best Buy Mobile brought some extra goodies, including an awkwardly priced Droid, which seems to render its new stablemate kind of unbuyable, and this little surprise: A Droid Eris, which is Verizon's version of the Sprint Hero, priced for free on contract. Not a single dollar! (Except for the 60 of them you'll have to pay out for two years, but who's counting that money, right? Right.)
Point is, budget Android phones are a verifiable thing right now, and even if they're sometimes loaded with out of date version of Google's OS or terrible custom interfaces, they are categorically better than virtually any feature phone. And as data plans become more ubiquitous and (dear god please) cheaper, always-connected, internet savvy smartphones will graduate from the massive trend to the status quo.* And Android, without any licensing fees for carriers or handset manufacturers, will play a huge part in this.
*Welcome, everyone, to the least glamorous kind of futurism!
Once again, laziness pays off. When microbiologist Lars Peter Nielsen and his team were studying marine sediments, they got a little sloppy about cleaning their beakers. But after letting samples sit around in the lab for a few weeks, they began to see weird chemical patterns in them that you just wouldn’t expect. As they saw changes in the surface of the mud quickly trigger other changes down below, the scientists came upon a startling idea: that the bacteria in the top layer and those deep down were somehow electrically linked. Their paper appears this week in Nature.
Specifically, Nielsen saw that hydrogen sulfide buried below the sediment’s surface (the stuff that makes it smell bad) was oxidizing and changing color. One problem, though: That shouldn’t be happening. Below the sediment surface there is plenty of hydrogen sulfide and carbon for bacteria to consume via oxidation, or removing electrons [Scientific American]. But the reaction can’t be sustained without access to dissolved oxygen, which carries away electrons produced by the reaction, and in these samples the oxygen was all up at the sediment’s surface. So the researchers hypothesize that the buried bacteria form a conductive chain to ferry the electrons up to the surface.
At first the team tried alternative explanations, but none seemed to fit. The distance was so great, and the response time so quick, that usual methods of chemical transport — molecular diffusion, or a slow drift from high to low concentration — couldn’t explain it [Wired.com]. For him, only the electrical linkage could explain a connection between bacteria separated by as much as a half inch (if you compare distance to body size, that half inch for a bacterium feels like what 12 miles would feel like to us humans).
How is this even possible? Researchers recently discovered that some bacteria have so-called nanowires, hair-like extensions on the cells’ surface that can conduct electricity. Nielsen and his colleagues speculate that these nanowires are responsible for conducting the electrons [The Scientist]. However, those tiny wires don’t explain how the connection bridges such great distances (in bacterial terms). Researchers outside the study told The Scientist that pyrite grains embedded in the mud could aid conductivity, or that some yet to be discovered mechanism is responsible.
The discovery has raised comparisons to the biological networks that wire the forest in the 3D blockbuster Avatar, and Nielsen admits it’s pretty cool. “One of my colleagues saw this, and immediately sent me a message: ‘You’ve discovered the secret of Avatar! Go see it!’ The similarities are quite striking” [Wired.com].
Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Their Game Is Mud
Image: Nils Risgaard-Petersen
Ahead of a March 2 event and TiVo HDs suddenly going extinct, two listings for a TiVo Premiere HD and Premiere XL HD have popped up in Best Buy's system.
The Premiere XL is THX certified and records up to 150 hours of HD content. It's $500. The regular Premiere records a third as much, 45 hours of HD content, and it's $300. They're expected to land at Best Buy on March 27. Of course, prices and dates and recording capacities we expect we'll be by far the least interesting aspect of these things. We hope. [Engadget]
Attention, classic JRPG fans! You can now grab both Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II from the iTunes App Store for $9 apiece, complete with touch-friendly controls and bonus dungeons.
The original Final Fantasy includes the five bonus dungeons, The Soul of Chaos pack and The Labyrinth of Time, added to later editions of the game. While Final Fantasy II contains the five bonus dungeons added with the Soul of Rebirth and Arcane Labyrinth pack.
[Kotaku]
If this leak is true (and it's boring enough to be true), then it means webOS 1.4 should be hitting soon (like we thought).
Nothing on here is stuff we didn't already know, including video capture, Flash 10 support for the Pre, improved speeds and a bunch of small fixes and upgrades. [Precentral via Everything Pre via Engadget]
Microsoft is going to withdraw their complain against Cryptome, after shutting them down yesterday. Cryptome published Microsoft's no-longer-secret guide to help governments to uncover your online secrets. Host Network Solutions says the site will be back online later today. [ReadWriteWeb]
I'm a klutz. I admit it. But if I had an Underfull table cloth, I'd never accidentally knock over a glass of wine again. No sir. With Underfull I'd purposefully knock over a glass of wine, to make ART.
Underfull comes from designer Kristine Bjaadal, who's presumably as uncoordinated as I am. It looks like a plain white table cloth with a simple damask pattern until someone (me) spills a colored liquid on it. That's when the magic happens:
See? I didn't upend my Merlot because of my naturally aggressive gesticulations and/or drunken wobblings. I did it because this dining table needed more butterflies.
It's still in concept mode for now, but it sounds as though Bjaadal is serious about getting it into production. If and when she does, expect to see more patterns than just butterflies, and me in the checkout line with ten or twelve Underfulls in my cart. [Kristine Bjaadal via Design Milk]
How can you measure a static charge?
what should be the minimum MVA rating of generator transformer. generator out put 18 MW,11kv & national grid of 33 kv.
These concept headphones feature a build-in camera, projector and wireless device so you can live-stream your life to the internet. But I'm more interested in the sheepskin on the cans. Comfy!
On the one hand, it's cool to see a POV camera stuck onto something other than glasses. These actually look wearable! But I don't know why the hell there's a projector on there. I guess when you don't have to worry about actually making a device, just a concept, it doesn't hurt to throw the kitchen sink at it, no matter how impractical it may be. [Yanko Design]
Keith's note: There was one bizarre series of events today in the Senate hearing on NASA's budget that I found to be very odd - and a little troubling. I am referring to the series of questions that Sen. Vitter (R-LA) asked of Charlie Bolden with regard to Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver. The questions focused on who made the decision to cancel Constellation and whether Lori Garver was at the heart of this. He also seemed to suggest that Lori was pushing to oust Bolden and usurp his job - something he said that he "would not support".
Within a few moments it was clear that Vitter had been programmed by his staff with some sort of magic fairy dust and that he was going to pursue a line of questioning that focused on Garver and repeated use of the word "radical" and not on anything of substance related to the budget. Clearly, Vitter's staff were using him as a proxy in a search for a cabal, smoking gun, or a scheming mastermind behind the Obama space policy. Typical Washington blood sport.
This is not new: there is a small subculture of space policy wannabes out there who seem to be convinced that Lori Garver has sold her soul in the pursuit of some sort of plan to destroy human space flight and replace it with ... well, they do not agree on that part. The silly thing about all of this is the illogic of someone like Lori ever being inclined to want to "kill" human spaceflight. Quite the contrary.
Let me say this. I have known Lori for more than 20 years. If you have read NASA Watch you will know that in the past I have not hesitated to criticize her when I saw fit. But let me tell you, for anyone with a shred of knowledge about Lori and her background to suggest that she is against human space travel - of any kind is ludicrous. Not only did she head the National Space Society, an organization devoted to human space flight, but she spent 6 months of her life training to get a seat on a Soyuz flight as "AstroMom" and even had surgery to meet the medical qualifications. It just doesn't compute.
If you want to throw rocks and dabble in second rate Da Vinci code cabal mongering, then go look into the inner workings of OSTP and OMB. That is where these policies were developed and delivered to NASA - not the other way around.
As such, I have to wonder what those staffers sitting silently behind Vitter were thinking when they poured this nonsense into his head. Clearly they know how things work here in Washington. But instead of trying to have a serious discussion about the programmatic merits or detriments of the policy, Vitter went off on a wild goose chase - and hit a brick wall.
Funny thing: Sen. Vitter never uttered the word "Michoud" as far as I could tell.
Senator's attack on NASA deputy chief Lori Garver backfires , Orlando Sentinel
"Several sources on the Hill, in industry and inside the Obama administration blame rocket maker ATK, the developer of the Ares I rocket first stage, for putting Vitter up to the attack. Sources say that complaints have been sent to ATK and so far there has been no response. In the meantime, members of the Senate and the House said they were going to refrain from any further personal attacks as they move against the White House's proposed 2011 budget for the space agency."
My niece, Lindsey, is weird.
Shocker, I know, given her DNA. But there you go. And to prove my point, here’s what she’s doing: she’s growing a mustache, kinda, for charity. She works for a group called 826, which promotes reading and writing for local kids. Lindsey’s in Boston, and for the month of February she’s somehow going to increase her lip warmer to help get money for the program. You can read more about this program on the 826 main site, at Boston.com, and the Boston Phoenix.
So yes, I’m using my great and terrible powers of blogging to help a family member. But y’see, I already have a mustache. This is all I can do. My logic is infallible. And, of course, I’m all about promoting the hirsute of happiness.
73% of Android users are men, compared to the rest of smartphone platforms, which skew only slightly manward. But really, we should have expected this. (And not in a sexist way!)
The statistic comes from AdMob's January Mobile Metrics report, which is littered with fascinating little nuggets. Like, did you have any idea 65% of iPod Touch users are younger than 17? (For the iPhone, that's 13%, and for webOS, just 2%.) Or that free app downloads across all platforms outnumber paid downloads by nearly 10 to 1? Or that Android users are the stingiest, with only 21% of users purchasing apps on a monthly basis, as compared to the iPhone's 50%? Well now you do! So let's get back to the lady business.
The first impulse for a lot of people will be to make a dig against Android for being too nerdy to appeal to women—an implicit dig against women for not being nerdy or technical enough to appreciate Android, or something. Though there's something to be said for Android's geek-centric rep, that's not the main issue here.
The Droid, as far as Android phones go, is hugely popular—it's far and away the platform's breakaway hit, and represents a large proportion of its mobile web traffic. As such, it could skew any survey like this to the point that Android users stats are almost fully inline with Droid user stats. And the Doird was marketed like this: 
The iPhone is a toy, and this is lame. Also: The iPhone is a chick, and this is lame.
It's been obvious for a while that the DROID DUDE HELL YEAH DROID marketing strategy worked. Now we just know who it worked on. [ReadWriteWeb]
A bacterium on its own can't reach very far. And when stacked on the sea floor in a large colony, it may have access to either oxygen (top of the pile) or food (bottom of the pile).
So for the entire colony to thrive, the bottom and top layers must be choreographed in chemical reactions occurring across great expanses, allowing electrons from food consumption in the basement to react to oxygen from the rooftop.
A new study just published in Nature set to isolate the way bacteria pull of this stunt. The first guess, molecular diffusion, was found to be too slow for as dynamically as these colonies reacted in various testing. Now? It's believed the bacteria use interconnected nanowires, sharing electrons across expanses 20,000 times their individual size—though to be fair, there's no direct evidence proving the existence of said wires.
The implications for you, gadget lover? The possibility of one day using a really gross battery. [Nature via PopSci][Nanowire Image]
Episode 36 CardioArc
This podcast an interview with Lisa Hasen from Cardiarc. Discussing a new type of cardiac gamma camera.
Cardiarc website
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I generally do not get all that excited about new alternative energy announcements, but this shows some real promise:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/24/MNIO1C6M96.DTL
The company web site is http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/
Worth looking at...
This is not
With all the intrigue around China hacking Google and Google hacking back, it's easy to overlook the real-world consequences of what further escalation might lead to. Specifically: Chinese researchers and scientists could see the plug pulled on their work process.
A full 84% of Chinese scientists said that blocked access to Google would "somewhat or significantly" hamper their research, in a recent survey by Nature News. While there are alternative search engines like Baidu, none are nearly as effective at searching English-language sites or research papers as Google. Google Scholar, in particular, is an invaluable resource for tracking down academic papers.
It's an apt analogy from the unnamed scientist quoted above: research without Google really is like life without electricity. You can go on without it, but you can't thrive. You can't even compete. [Wired]
