From Discover:
Some birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle. This ability is a massive boon for migrating birds, keeping frequent flyers on the straight and narrow. But this incredible sense is closely tied to a more mu
It appears Google and China have reached a détente.
The world’s largest search engine and the world’s most populous country traded barbs and threats this spring when Google said it might leave the country over the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. That fight cooled to a simmer over the last few months. Today, Google announced on its official blog that China has renewed its content provider license, further defusing the tension between the two.
Google has been waiting to hear back from Chinese authorities about its ICP license since the company filed for its renewal last week. The company’s license must be reviewed annually. Its renewal will allow the search giant to continue operating its China-based site, Google.cn. If Google had been unable to renew its license, it could have meant the end of the company’s operations in China [PC World].
To reach this uneasy truce with China, Google had to back down from the principled anti-censorship stand it took in March, when it began automatically redirecting Google.cn users to the company’s unfiltered Hong Kong-based site. Now, if you visit Google.cn, you should see a link to the Hong Kong site, but visitors won’t be automatically redirected.
“Basically, this was a smart move on the part of the Chinese government to kind of defuse the situation so that the Google search engine will still be available in China,” said Paul Denlinger, an Internet consultant for startups. He said that the friction between Google and China won’t disappear but will temporarily dissipate [AP].
Google is presently the second most popular search engine in the country, behind Chinese competitor Baidu.
Related Content:
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
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80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
Image: Flickr/ pamhule
can u help me please , my barber chair is not going up on its own. when we lift up manually and let it go, it goes back down, we tried putting oil in it and now its leaking, can you suggest away for us to repair the chair... thank you..
thank you for your assistance.
need help in selecting suitable starters for 10 to 20 hp 2 speed motors working at 208 volts used for Make up air unit supplying 22500/11000 CFM for 20 hp and 14750/5900cfm for 15hp and 115500/4600 cfm for 10 HP motors.
Thanks in advance
Straightness is perishable in bars. Straightness is often lost during handling operations, loading and unloading.
Correct handling preserves straightness. Straightness is critical for holding position and tolerances on today's highly engineered medical, aerospace, automotive an
A Bourdon type Pressure Gauge is calibrated at ambient temperature with accuracy limit of ±1%FSD. What will be the maximum process temperature at which this Gauge can be used (without any cooling device) so that the calibrated accuracy can be maintained ?
On Sunday, July 18th, The Morbid Anatomy Library--along with our esteemed neighbors Proteus Gowanus, the Reanimation Library and Cabinet Magazine--will be having a book sale featuring books and overstock from our respective collections! The event is free and open to the public; Full details follow:
Morbid Anatomy Library, Proteus Gowanus, Reanimation Library and Cabinet Booksale
Date: Sunday, July 18, 2010
Time: 12–3 pm
Location: corner of Union and Nevins streets, Brooklyn (directions here)A book sale featuring books and overstock from the collections of the Morbid Anatomy Library, Proteus Gowanus, the Reanimation Library, and Cabinet Magazine. Perhaps there will also be lemonade...
Hope very much to see you there!
Image: "The human body and the library as sources of knowledge", frontispiece of Tabulae Anatomicae, Early 18th cent., Johann Adam Kulmus; found via the National Library of Medicine's "Images from the History of Medicine;" Larger version found on Bibliodyssey's Flickr set. Featured on this recent post.
If you aren't lucky enough to live by one of the five official Microsoft stores (the only locations we've heard have Kinect on display), 13 different Macy's stores will be hosting Kinect demos on July 15th. We wish we had a full list of locations for you. Sadly, we don't. [ChipChick] More »
Microsoft - Monopolies and Oligopolies - Business - Allegedly Unethical Firms - Economic
Remember Touchgrind, the skateboarding simulation for iPhone and iPad? Well, it seems God likes to play it to. But to Him, the entire world is his iPhone. Let's hope He doesn't drop it. More »
iPhone - Handhelds - Smartphones - App Store - Apple
Any time I post my political thoughts on this blog, inevitably someone in the comments or on Twitter will accuse me of being a far-left nut. I typically ignore people like that, because it’s clear to me that they are not capable of understanding what I’ve actually written, and in their mind, and in these hyperpartisan times, anyone who isn’t a far-right neocon must perforce be some sort of commie or socialist.
In reality, my own thinking on political and social issues is more subtle. I am in many ways an individual libertarian (I think people should have far more personal freedom than they do in this country), a social liberal (I think one of the many roles of government is to help those who cannot help themselves, and to do what individuals and corporations cannot do or cannot be trusted to do), and a governmental conservative (in the actual sense of the old party; I want a government that is big enough to do what it needs to do and no bigger).
I also understand that ideas sometimes have boundaries in practice.
Freedoms are tricky things. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. The old adage saying "Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" is wrong and dumb; in fact the act of swinging your fist at all is a threat.
I want a government that’ll help when it’s needed, but won’t when it’s not, because I know that a lot of people will take advantage of a government that is set up to help them.
I know our economy should have the freedom it needs to grow. But I also know it needs to be regulated because people are greedy, and people with nearly unlimited power and resources will sometimes spectacularly abuse them to the detriment of the country and the planet.
I loathe the idea of killing, but I know that there are bad guys out there, and we need a strong military to keep them at bay.
I hate paying taxes. But I love our highway system, clean water, and space exploration.
I think that people have the right to defend themselves, their family, their property… and that’s why they have the right to bear arms. But I also know that many people aren’t wise enough and emotionally stable enough to own a gun, and that’s why I don’t think everyone has the right to bear every arm.
I think that everyone has the right to speak their mind. But I think many loud voices right now belong to hateful, mean, bigoted, small-minded hypocrites who will say anything to get themselves noticed or to push their agenda. I also know they all have the right, the freedom to say the terrible things they do. But I have the right, and we have the duty, to counter their speech with my own voice.
So what do we do?
We need to teach people to think. To understand that there are balances in life, nuances, corollaries to decisions.
When I watch TV news, read political opinions online, and listen to our politicians, what I hear are low resolution ideas, chunky things that this way or that way, no in-between, with big thick impenetrable borders around each part.
But when I look around I see things being rich, diverse, subtle, poetic, minuscule, vast. I don’t subscribe to any particular ism, but look over the issues as they come, dig into my personal values and unholster my critical thinking, and come to each conclusion one at a time — though based on previous experience. Conclusions are not independent of one another.
The world I see is gloriously complex. It’s layered, with subtleties interacting with other subtleties, forcing decisions to be more difficult for me to make but more important once made, making the path more treacherous for me to walk but more satisfying to me once the journey is underway, making the view more of a struggle for me to understand but more awe-inspiring and world-changing once I do understand it.
The world I see is not black and white. No amount of shouting, no amount of name-calling, no amount of insults, no amount of spin, lies, distortion, sniping, negativity, or propaganda will change that.
Here’s how they see things:
Here’s how things really are:
The decision is yours. Which world do you want to live in?
Image credit: T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF
From Coolest Gadgets:
"Oh my gosh, what happened to your bike? It's wrapped around a pole! How did you even do that?" "Actually, it is my new bike lock. It is designed to wrap around the pole." Seriously, I have seen bikes that were hit by cars that sort of look like the inv
From ESA Top News:
At the end of June, ESA's six astronaut candidates were thrown out of a helicopter, left to drift at sea and abandoned under the hot Mediterranean sun - but luckily they were well-trained and under supervision. Astronauts have to be prepared for almost everyt
From Yahoo! News: Science News:
The first of two relief wells being drilled to stop the Gulf oil gusher could be done by the end of the month, BP officials say, but if that doesn't succeed, one backup being considered is transferring the crude to non-producing underwater wells that
How do you challenge the manufacturer's recommended parts list when there is no history and no FEMA studies to support the recommendations? The recommended parts list adds thousands of dollars to the purchase for equipment, yet I need to support without part shortage interruptions once the equipme
From SPACE.com:
Rapidly spinning stars that pulse over time could be used as the universes's most accurate clocks, thanks to a new discovery that helps explain how they rotate. Astronomers have long hoped to use these stars, called pulsars, as time-keepers but slight irregularit
Hi can anyone tell how to calculate the cross sectional area of a bus bar please.
According to a member of tw.apple.pro, this photo comes from "deep inside the throat"—that's after a Google Translate. It's a 1.2inch x 1.2inch screen. And it's not hard to imagine it as the next iPod Shuffle. More »
IPod - Apple iPod - Shopping - Consumer Electronics - Digital Portable Players
Animals must wage a never-ending war against parasites, constantly evolving new ways of resisting these threats. Resistance comes in many forms, including genes that allow their owners to shrug off infections. But one species of fly has developed a far more radical solution – it has formed a partnership with a bacterium that lives in its body and defends it against a parasitic worm. So successful is this microscopic bodyguard that it’s spreading like wildfire across America’s besieged flies.
The fly Drosophila neotestacea is plagued by a nematode worm called Howardula. Around a quarter of adults are infected and they don’t fare well. The worm produces thousands of young in the body of its hapless host, and the little worms make their way into the outside world via the fly’s ovaries. Not only does this severely slash the fly’s lifespan, it also always sterilises her. But according to John Jaenike from the University of Rochester, the fly is fighting back.
In the lab, he showed that worm-infected flies retained their fertility if they were also infected with a bacterium called Spiroplasma (below). The same was true in the wild – females carrying the bacteria and the worm were more than 10 times more fertile than those that just bore the worm. In some way, Spiroplasma hampers the growth of Howardula, halving the size of female worms who shared a fly with them.
Spiroplasma itself commonly infects insects and this is the first time it has been cast in the role of protector. In some cases, it can be a trouble-maker. Because it is passed down from mother to daughter, it sometimes kills the males of the species it inhabits, skewing the sexes in a population-threatening way. If it’s doing the same in the fly, it’s clear that the benefits it provides are outweighing these drawbacks, for the bacterium is clearly spreading throughout the American population.
Jaenike couldn’t find any traces of Spiroplasma in specimens of D.neotestacea that were collected in the 1980s and stores in museums. Among these museum specimens, virtually all of those that also harboured Howardula worms were clearly sterile, so back then, the fly hadn’t found a way to resist the worm. In the eastern states, it’s clear that Spiroplasma went from infecting less than 15% of flies in the 1980s to around 80% in some states today.
This now-beneficial bacterium is on the march. While it’s very common in the east, it’s virtually absent in the west even though Howardula infects flies at similar rates throughout all of North America. As females carrying the protective Spiroplasma give birth to similarly infected daughters, so the range of the bacterium slowly creeps westwards. And all of this was done in 2008. By now, Spiroplasma may well have made its west coast breakthrough.
Spiroplasma seems to have been a long-term partner for the fly, long before it became more common and long before Howardula came onto the scene. There are a couple different strains of the bacterium but both of them provide resistance against the worm, which suggests that Spiroplasma itself hasn’t adapted to the rising threat of Howardula. It seems the spread of Spiroplasma has been fuelled by the recent rise of Howardula in North America. That imposed a strong evolutionary pressure upon the flies to evolve some sort of defence, and they ended up doing so by increasing the frequency of their defensive bacterium at a breakneck pace.
For now, it’s not clear what the partnership between fly and bacterium was like before this point. However, it seems that D.neotestacea has responded to the emerging threat of a parasitic worm by shifting to a bacterial defence, using a hitchhiker that had been living in its bodies for many years previously.
Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1188235
More handy bacteria:
From New Scientist - Online News:
The discovery of an antibody that binds to certain brain receptors could reduce the side effects of a common stroke drug and buy additional time in which to use it. The preferred treatment for ischaemic stroke, in which a blood clot cuts off the
