I’ll be a judge again this year for the National Academies Communication Award, a $20,000 prize for excellence in reporting on science. The prize is awarded in four categories:
The nominations are now open. More information can be found here.
Once, in a discussion, someone suggested to put Uri Geller, the parapsychologist, into a black hole, and let him escape by his own means.
Matt Visser, in Lorentzian Wormholes, says that even if you happened to find a Einstein Podolsky Rosen Bridge,you should avoid to jump into it to play "starg
I have a 322 megabyte PDF file of some of my previous work, including doctoral dissertations, patents and research reports, and seek a simple and inexpensive way to make it freely available on the web, being the author alone.
Either, some free websites accept texts, but of limited length (1
This isn't a review. It's not even breaking news. It's just a reminder that someone somewhere is doing something awesome.
I've been fascinated by the "Adspecs" since I first heard of them a few years ago. The glasses have oil-filled lenses which, when adjusted with the attached syringes, allow anyone to dial in their own prescription just by looking at a chart. (I've tried to show how the lens work in the video above.)
This story originally started with a question: Hey, did that project ever actually get off the ground?
I'm happy to report that it has—to the tune of 30,000 pairs of Adspecs already in the field around the world, distributed through a variety of aid organizations.
For the last few weeks, I've been speaking to the Centre for Vision in the Develop World's Owen Reading about where the project is going. It doesn't hurt he's a Gizmodo reader. (Hi, Owen!) He explained why the Adspecs are such a good solution for developing economies.
"They require very little training to dispense, can be dispensed by an organisation's volunteers in the field, they only need to be delivered once and can make a difference for years afterwards, and are inherently safer (and less valuable on the black market) than items such as prescription medications."
The Adspecs aren't perfect. The sample pair I was given were an older design with a cranky hinge. It popped right apart when I put them on my huge head. It's nothing a little superglue can't fix, but thankfully a stronger design is already being distributed in the field. Adspecs are undergoing constant iterative improvement.
One of those improvements is price: The current version of the Adspecs still cost nearly $20 a pop to produce—a bargain considering they come with a self-administered eye exam built right in, but not as close to the $1-a-pair goal set by the project's founder and director, Josh Silver.
It's the sort of mixture of charity and innovation that makes my heart leap, an opportunity to use the mass production and design capabilities of the developed world to provide a life-changing solution to those who need it—without making those who receive aid dependent on someone else for continued support.
This won't be the last you'll see of the Adspecs here on Gizmodo, especially if you've got a notion to donate to the project or their distribution partners.
Among all the widgets-of-the-day, the tablets and phones and mail-order furniture, it's easy to forget how technology can make such a profound difference in people's lives. So let's not forget.
Background music by a band I suspect most of you will really enjoy, The Depreciation Guild, a Brooklyn-based band that combine an NES with really lovely shoegaze guitar. In fact, here's their latest single embedded below.
Our colegas at Gizmodo Brazil got themselves a nice little get: A previously unseen Motorola Android prototype, which was apparently shown to employees of the company last week. So, what is this thing?
Giz.br editor Pedro accurately describes it as a sort of keyboardless version of the Backflip we saw at CES. The front styling is a bit more garish than the Backflip's, but the size, general aesthetic, Android build (1.5) and software skin (Motoblur) all fit the Backflip/CLIQ mold. UPDATE: And given the familiar rear styling, we may have a (code)name: The Zeppelin. It's apparently hitting Brazilian streets within a month—still no word on a US release.
The more pressing question is whether or not we'll ever see this phone. Motorola's now pumping Motoblur'd handsets out through two—count 'em—major US carriers, and as a presumed budget piece, it'd fit nicely in either Verizon or AT&T's product lines, if they'd have it. But stateside, we've got nothing—that the first pics of this prototype device showed up in one of its potential markets, as opposed to its place of manufacture, and that this market is nowhere near the US, means Motorola's latest may never pass through immigration. Or maybe it will! My breath, it is bated.
Full gallery and (Portuguese) writeup at [Giz Brazil]
Your mom's probably rented a DVD from Redbox—those hulking vending machines lurking outside of grocery stories, lending out DVDs for a buck a day. Walmart's not thrilled with them, and now blocking new release purchases in bulk.
Part of the reason Redbox is able to offer rentals for cheap of the latest movies is that it works outside of the studio system when studios who won't sell it discs to distribute for same-day release. According to Adams Media Research, it buys about 40 percent of its movies from big box retailers. So, Walmart and Target have reacted by cutting the number of new releases you can buy at a time to just five copies. They care because kiosk rentals could be worth over a billion dollars this year—why should they subsidize their profits?
What's that mean for Redbox? They might have to deal directly with the studios—who they're currently suing for better access to movies—and all you have to do is look at how they're manhandling Netflix to see what they think about cheap rentals screwing with profitable release windows. [BusinessWeek, Image via Valerie Everett/Flickr]
The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.
Reuters quotes the president:
“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”
Well, maybe pork could spice things up in the bedroom, but plenty of other foods have previously been rumored to be aphrodisiacs, like oysters, bananas, figs, strawberries, raspberries, sweet basil, and garlic. It also helps to remember that President Fernandez made this remark while addressing bigwigs from the pig farming industry, and that the country is trying to get beef-happy Argentinians to eat more pork.
Speaking of pigs, there’s related news from Europe. A new law approved by the upper house of the Dutch parliament bans human sex with animals, which until now was legal in the Netherlands, providing the animal was unharmed. The new law also prohibits the production or distribution of animal pornography, dealing a body blow to–ahem–animal lovers around the world.
Reuters reports:
Given the illicit nature of the product, precise figures on animal pornography video sales are difficult to find, but the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, in a 2007 survey, found that distributors in the Netherlands were responsible for some 80 percent of bestiality videos worldwide.
So, no more crazy horse-lady-man-tortoise videos anymore. Which could potentially be a blow to frustrated Chinese migrant workers who, the Chinese government worries, aren’t getting enough action. Guangdong province, whose export industries are powered by millions of migrant workers from across China, is home to many men who have left their wives behind–and 36 percent of those married men, according to a new China Daily survey, are sexually repressed.
The provincial government is now anxious that these men could be out and about, indulging in unsafe sex. Meanwhile, women may also be corrupted, China Daily reported, and could be turning to the internet for release–going as far as “participating in the online sex industry, such as chatting to men online while nude.”
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DISCOVER: The Science of Great Sex at 80
Image: iStockphoto
As I’m writing, blogging, and more, there’s a guy who patiently stands by me through everything. He doesn’t mind listening as I endlessly discuss the trials and tribulations of a postdoc while he tirelessly works to prepare for his. It doesn’t upset him that my perspective occasionally ruffles the feathers of others in his field–including those friendly with his awesome advisor John Willis. He doesn’t even complain about how late he needs to come collect me from the airport constantly. Instead, he helps me get the details right whenever I have a question, brings me along on cross country road trips to the field, and has a kind word no matter what the DNA sequence looks like on any given day. And he always supports my crazy ideas with boundless encouragement and enthusiasm.
So today I want to congratulate my wonderful, brilliant fiancé David Lowry, who just received his Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics and genomics at Duke. (Photo left was taken just before his final seminar talk). David’s a damn good field and lab biologist who’s taught me everything I know about speciation, adaptation, Mimulus–and so much more. His research on understanding ecotype formation amazes me and I’m so excited to see where it goes next!
And directly to David: You continue to inspire me every day and I love you.
What’s better than a gorgeously stunning image of a massive cluster surrounded by delicate, wispy nebulosity?
Well, nothing, really. Unless you can use it for SCIENCE!
[Click to gigantisize.]
Purty, ain’t it? That’s NGC 3603, a very large star-forming region in our own Milky Way Galaxy, lying about 20,000 light years away. It can only be seen from the southern hemisphere, which is why the European Southern Observatory folks got this image using the ginormous Very Large Telescope, an 8-meter behemoth in Chile (and actually, Ginormous Telescope would be a cool name).
Not too long ago — no more than a million years, give or take — a lot of the stars forming the central cluster there were born. There are so many that they appear to overlap, but that’s an illusion due to the blurring of the image from the Earth’s atmosphere (and the nature of light itself only allows us to make star images so small).
Lost in that crowd is a star designated NGC 3603 A1, and it is the most massive star to ever have its mass directly measured. It’s actually a binary star, two monsters locked in a gravitational dance, orbiting each other once every 3.77 days — which right away tells you this is a special pair, possessing enough gravity to toss themselves around that rapidly.
Using simple laws of physics discovered by Kepler back in the 1600s, we can measure the masses of each star in the duo. The heftier of the two is a whopping 116 times the mass of the Sun — which is close to the upper limit of what a star can get to without tearing itself apart. The more massive a star, the more luminous it is, and the surface can get so hot that any material there gets blown off… so that sets a lid on how big a star can get. Details vary depending on a lot of factors, but really 116 times the mass of the Sun is about as big as you’ll ever get for a star in our galaxy.
The other star in the binary is no slouch, tipping the scales at 89 solar masses. If it were just sitting out there all by itself it would rate as a phenomenal star, too. But its partner still wins the prize.
And how do I know those stars were born no more than a million years ago? Because massive stars don’t live long, and any beasts like these two live short lives indeed. It won’t be long before they detonate as supernovae, lighting up with a violence and fury that will make each outshine the rest of the stars in our entire galaxy combined!
Not only that, but pretty much every star you see in that cluster is of the massive and luminous classes astronomers call O and B stars, bruisers with enough oomph to explode as supernovae. How many stars do you see in that cluster? Dozens? So think about that: each one of those will become a titanic supernova, wreaking havoc across dozens of light years, sending out blasts of light to outshine galaxies, and throwing out octillions of tons of gas.
Eventually that gas, laced with heavier elements created in the nuclear forge of the supernova blast wave itself, will slam into, merge with, and seed the surrounding gas in the nebula. Compressed beyond its ability to sustain itself, the gas will collapse and form more stars. Some of these may be massive ones which will again repeat the cycle, and some will have lower mass, be fainter, cooler. They may form planets from those heavy elements. It will be a rocky birth, given the environment, but the vagaries of orbital dynamics dictate that eventually those systems will leave the nebula and move out on their own in the Milky Way. And a billion years from now, two, four billion, who knows what creatures may roam the surfaces of any of those worlds.
And will they see more stellar factories dotting the galaxies starscape, and wonder what their own looked like, all those eons ago?
How the hollow camshaft is more efficient than regular one?What are its features? How does it operate? What are the problems involved in that?
Maybe you're a good photographer, but you're horrible with Photoshop. Maybe you're great at Photoshop, but you're a horrible photographer. Don't worry, both camps can excel at this week's Shooting Challenge: Polar Panoramas. I promise.
Make a polar panorama (or a planet made from a panoramic photograph)—which involves shooting a panorama, then bringing those shots into Photoshop. After about 5 minutes of work, with the help of the Polar Coordinates filter, you'll have something resembling our lead photo.
Photojojo has a superb step by step tutorial online, as does Instructables. The basic point to keep in mind is this: frame your base photograph so that the top and bottom 25% are fairly devoid of detail (sky and ground, for instance). Also, while we normally ask submissions to avoid post processing wherever possible, this week is obviously a little bit different. So go nuts to make your final shot look great (within ethical reason—no adding fake buildings or whatever).
1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px wide image AND 2560x1600 sized in email. More details on these below.
Send your best entries by Sunday, February 7th at 6PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Polar Panorama" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg (800px) and FirstnameLastnameWALLPAPER.jpg (2560px) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email.
If there's one thing I love more than my vinyl toy collection, it's merchandise from my favorite mobile OS. Designer Andrew Bell convinced Google to lend him their mascot, resulting in 12 blind-boxed variations. Oh, how I love a blind-box!
They're available in cases of 16, though presumably once they get picked up by stores they'll start being sold individually, thus the perpetual crusade to collect every single one will start, and you'll spend all your spare time searching eBay for pre-opened boxes to complete your collection. It's a slippery slope, believe me. [Dyzplastic via Recombu]
There’s been lots of gloating, arguing, and tossing around of cliches like “game-changing” in the wake of a new study on abstinence education and its potential to reduce sexual activity in teens. But the study isn’t exactly what the political forces trumpeting its arrival would like you to believe.
The study appears in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. In its introduction, study leader John B. Jemmott III concludes that “Theory-based abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement.”
So what’s actually in the study? Between 2001 and 2004, Jemmott’s team studied 662 African-American middle schoolers in the northeastern United States, who were each paid $20 a session to attend sex-education classes. The kids were randomly assigned to one of several different programs: One program emphasized only abstinence, one both safe sex and abstinence, one just safe sex, and the last was a control group that simply taught healthy living—eating well, exercise, and the like.
According to the study, which relied on self-reported surveys, about half of the kids in the safe-sex only class began having sex over the next two years, compared to a third for the students in the abstinence-focused program and 42 percent of those in the combination program. But while abstinence-only backers jumped for joy at the results, the journal ran an accompanying editorial cautioning that public policy should not be based on the results of a single study and that policy makers should not “selectively use scientific literature to formulate a policy that meets preconceived ideologies” [The New York Times]. That speaks directly to the posture of Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, who said the study “just verifies what we’ve known intuitively all along.”
Jemmott’s study will now rightfully enter the debate as the first to show that abstinence programs could work in some situations. But there are other reasons to question how much his results mean for the country at large (other than the previous studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of abstinence-only education). He says the team chose to study only African-American students, and at such a young age (about 12 on average), because “African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others,” and starting young could allow for intervention. Researchers will have to duplicate the study with other demographic groups and time spans to sort out this question further.
In addition, the abstinence-only program that Jemmott’s team devised wasn’t exactly the “wait until your married” approach that many social conservatives would like to see taught to kids. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms [The Washington Post].
Among those critical of the Jemmott study was Heather Boonstra of the Guttmacher Institute, which released data showing that after a decade-long decline, America’s teen-pregnancy rate rose 3 percent in 2006. Ms. Boonstra is among those who believe some of that uptick may be due to the reliance on abstinence-only programs [Christian Science Monitor]. Once again, though, correlation doesn’t imply causation. So although the trend reversal coincides in time with President Bush’s emphasis on funding abstinence programs, we can’t say for sure that’s the main cause.
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Image: iStockphoto
I'd probably never use an electric blanket—I've just heard too many horror stories that include elements like burn marks and houses transformed to ash. But a water cooled/heated mattress? That sounds downright brilliant.
The ChiliBed is similar to all the memory foam mattresses you've seen advertised lately, but inside its core, water is either heated or cooled while it passes through coils, generating a massive temperature flux that should emanate naturally from your sleep surface.
But the real reason this product felt so remarkable? The claimed temperature range is impressively (and maybe even dangerously?) wide, accommodating those of you who'd like to sleep in environments spanning from 48-118 degrees F—and each member of the bed (assuming you're just sleeping with one other person) can have their own temperature controls.
Technically, I find the ChiliBed to be quite clever. Practically, well, neither temperature extreme sounds particularly healthy.
Still, bundled with the right level of research, it'd be neat if the ChiliBed could adjust temperatures in sync with your sleeping patterns, helping you rest or, heck, just sweat/shiver off some of your excess weight. [ChiliBed]
Talk about keeping up with technology. The Pope recently urged his priests to go forth and blog and to use social networking sites to keep up with their flock, but a priest in Poland has already taken it one step further. He now fingerprints his flock.
The priest, who lives in Southern Poland has taken to fingerprinting school children to check if they have been attending mass regularly. If they’ve checked in the requisite 200 times over three years, then the kids are spared exams prior to their confirmations. The kids love the idea.
Reuters interviewed one young churchgoer:
“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina. Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.
While the fingerprinting idea seems to have gone down well with the kids, it must make some adults nervous that someone out there (possibly in the Vatican?) has access to a huge database of tiny fingerprints.
Related Posts:
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DISCOVER: How to Teach Science to the Pope
80beats: Vatican to E.T.: Hello, Brother
80beats:During Africa Visit, Pope Knocks Condoms for HIV Prevention
Discoblog: Holy Crops! Pope Backs Genetically Modified Foods
Discoblog: Vatican Science: Pope Blames Male Infertility on…the Pill
Image: iStockphoto
I have found follwing steels on net for some purpose but not able to get its
composion in 2-3 steel ebooks i have, also on net. Any one can plz preovide their
composition, where they r used .Grades are-
1.SCMn3A
2.GCD50
3.SMn443
4.SM45C
Thanx in
Normally hyper-intelligent robots terrify me, but this little guy has officially won me over. It uses Lego Mindstorms parts, a Lego programmable robotics kit and—of all things—a Nokia N95 mobile phone to unlock the mysteries of Rubik.
It's by no means the first Rubik's Cube solver we've seen, but it's definitely the first I've encountered that runs on phone. The ARM-packing Nokia N95 rests above the cube, scanning it with its camera as it solves. Double bonus points for working with a 4x4x4 Cube instead of the standard 3x3x3.
According to one intrepid YouTube commenter, the trial above took 15 minutes and 109 moves, which is more than my personal best of "a few months" and "I lost track." I just hope that when we're all assigned a robot overlord, mine is as neat as this one. [Make via Geekosystem]
The latest and greatest Nehalem-based Xeon Mac Pros are the fastest Apple computers you can buy. Unfortunately, they seem to have a serious problem when processing audio, a task that sucks 20% of its power while making the processors overheat.
According to Ars Technica, the problem—which happens with Early 2009 and Late 2009 models—doesn't only happen while playing iTunes' music or Quicktime videos, but also whenever you have USB or FireWire audio devices connected and working. Users have been reporting about it in support boards, but Apple has ignored the problem so far.
The company argues that the extra heat—which includes increases of 86ºF (30ºC)—is normal. The performance hit ranges from 15% to 20%. That is not normal at all, and users are understandably up in arms. Hopefully, Apple will start paying attention now. And hopefully, the problem won't happen with the incoming Core i7-980X Mac Pros, which are rumored to be announced on March 16. [Ars Technica and Hardmac]
What variables are used for continuous monitoring in a system of variable cooling load?
One of the most mind-blowing things I learned about while writing my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life was the incredibly diversity of microbes that call our bodies home. These microbes outnumber our cells by about ten to one, and collectively they have thousands times more genes than found in the human genome. E. coli may be the most familiar of these lodgers, but it is just small player in an inconceivably complex ecosystem on which our health depends.
So I was very excited to interview Rob Knight of the University of Colorado, a biologist who’s been co-authoring a string of stunning papers recently on the thousands of species that live on our skin, in our mouths, in our guts, and elsewhere on or in our bodies. Our conversation is now available on the latest “Meet the Scientist” podcast. We talk about how microbes help each other thrive in our bodies, the way bacteria in our guts release neurotransmitters, how microbes may regulate your weight, and much more. Check it out.
