I, Q and X in my hotmail contacts list are frozen so I can't access addresses there.
How do you fix this? Should I just wait? Report says it is a server error. The title of some notes is "Runtime Error".
To get details I am to create a <customErrors> "tag?", but where, in tool bar space?
In today's Remainders, the future! The soldiers of tomorrow get a new battery for their exoskeletons; a 2012 Olympic Stadium built from recycled weapons; a discovery showing that a big brain can indicate a great gamer, and more.
Hulk For Hours
The HULC exoskeleton is supposed to make you strong like the Hulk. Or strong like a creature with an exoskeleton. Whichever. We were fortunate enough to try the HULC out a few months ago, so we were pretty excited to hear that a new fuel-cell battery from Protonex gives HULC-wearers super strength for up to three hours. The battery, currently under development, will only be available to soldiers, so we consumers will have to remain content with our puny muscles, at least for the time being. [Engadget]
Let Icons Be Icons
On his blog "Ignore the Code," Lukas Mathis wrote a post that took a closer look at something we interact with every day: icons. Some of it is "no duh"-level stuff—if an icon is too detailed, it is confusing; if an icon isn't detailed enough, it is confusing—but he illustrates his points nicely throughout. "The trick," he says, "is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning." The exception is application icons. For those, the more detail there is the better. There's nothing too profound about Mathis's icon-gazing, but it's nice to stop and consider what makes us click the way we do. [Ignore the Code]
Gamers' Bulge
It's not quite as exciting as discovering that playing video games makes your brain bigger—though I wouldn't doubt that some such study exists—but scientists have at least shown the opposite to be true: video game performance can be predicted by measuring a certain part of the brain. The part of the brain in question is the striatum, a section also linked to developing strategies and refining motor skills. Kirk Erickson, a University of Pittsburgh professor who led the study, explained, "This is the first time that we've been able to take a real-world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates." What this means for you is that when your friend is asking how you keep pummeling him in Smash Bros you can reply, with science backing you up, "sorry bro, bigger brain." [Gun Play
A lot of new buildings going up these days include recycled materials, but the stadium being built in London for the 2012 Olympics is special among them. Why? Because it's going to be made partially from recycled guns and knives. In 2009 alone, London Metropolitan Police ended up with 58 tons of guns, knives, and keys, all of which are now being melted down for use in the stadium. In a similar but decidedly less cool project, the used bullets from the police force's firing range will be recycled into jewelry and photo frames. I told you it was less cool. [Fast Company]
Socket weld procedure
Watch as this bad boy—the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger that destroyed a drone in January 2009—obliterates bomb after bomb during a test at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It just takes a few seconds, and boom.
Not exactly Star Wars material, but this will save a lot of lives in the future—and destroy others too, I'm sure. [Danger Room]
Posted by David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com
Mankind has been thinking about extraterrestrial life every since we developed a cerebral cortex and could “think” about anything. Discovering evidence of life anywhere else, life of any kind, is the “Holy Grail” of astrophysicists and astrobiologists. We’re all pretty sure we aren’t going to find another civilization in our solar system, but what about microbial life.
What are the chances that microbial life has developed somewhere else in our solar system?
The chances are, honestly, pretty good. There are a couple of places I could talk about off the top of my head that would be a good candidate for microbial life (often referred to as “critters”) to have developed… but I want to talk about one very special place today.
Europa.
Image: Europa as seen by Galileo spacecraft NASA/JPL
What makes Europa so special and exciting? Liquid water, for one thing. Science is reasonably sure that the majority of life they locate will be carbon-based (there’s a good reason for that, trust me), and dependent on liquid water to survive (there’s another good reason for that). Looking on Mars for traces of fossilized life is exciting… but what about digging under the ice crust of Europa to the ocean of liquid water believed to exist? Do you think we’ll find any critters there?
I bet we do.
Look at Earth for a moment. Life is everywhere here, and I do mean everywhere. It lives in solid rock, digesting minerals for energy. It lives in ice. It lives in salt mines. It lives on the floor of the ocean.
Whoa. Back up… the floor of the ocean? Cold, no sunlight, horrible pressure… that floor of the ocean? You betcha. And not just critters, there. Complex organisms, going about their daily lives perfectly happy in an environment very close to what we believe will be found under the ice of Europa.
There is another place on Earth where it looks like conditions are very close to Europa: Lake Vostok in Antarctica. Have you read about that? It’s amazing… this lake has been frozen over, away from outside influence, for about a million years.
Lake Vostok NASA/JPL Goddard RADARSAT image
There’s liquid water under that ice sheet, away from sunlight and environmental influences. Current projects are underway to find a method of getting to the Lake Vostok environment and studying it without contaminating it. And kids, whatever method works for Lake Vostok will work for Europa.
So, is there other life in the universe? Oh, yeah, I’d say that’s probably a given. Is there other life in our solar system? You know what? I think there is.
What do you think?
If you’re out shopping today and happen to pass your friendly neighborhood newsstand, then may I suggest you pick up a copy of the winter special issue of Discover Magazine? The theme is "Extreme Universe", with articles about the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and lots more.
Of course, included in that "lots more " is, well, me. I wrote the introductory essay to the issue, and also have a list of my favorite good and bad science moments in movies. The Hive Overmind Discover Magazine has a gallery up, too, with pictures and my descriptions of the movies.
I was surprised how hard it was to make the list, given a) I’ve seen almost every science fiction movie ever made, and 2) you’d think examples would abound. But finding specific scenes turned out to be tough, also given the criterion that it has to be in a movie lots of people have actually seen; calling out the lava flow sequence in "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet" (1965) won’t get you terribly far. But I think I did OK.
Got a favorite bad or good scene in a movie? Discuss.
For the first time, CNRS and CEA researchers have developed a transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse.
The QIP (International Workshop on Quantum Information Processing) is a major meeting point for quantum theorists. Renato Renner, an assistant professor of theoretical physics at ETH Zurich and co-organizer of this year's convention, explains why we will be contemplating application programs over the next few days even though we are still a far cry from a universally operational quantum computer.
MRC-funded scientists led by Dr Josef Kittler (UCL Neuroscience) have identified how nano-sized motors in nerve cells help to regulate the balance of communication in the brain.
A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, in Germany, led by the Spanish physicist Ruben Fernandez-Busnadiego, has managed to obtain 3D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons.
Die kalifornische Nanostart-Beteiligung Nanosys, Inc. hat einen Kooperationsvertrag mit LG Innotek (LGIT), einem zur koreanischen LG Gruppe gehoerenden fuehrenden Hersteller von Elektronikkomponenten unterzeichnet.
Science education in Singapore will receive a boost with new partnerships forged between the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), the world's first bioengineering and nanotechnology research institute, and four partner schools to develop future scientists and technopreneurs.
Pioneering research combining plant breeding and high-intensity x-rays is being used by scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to explore the possibility of developing wheat which could be used to make potentially life-saving mineral enriched flour.
Fujitsu and the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR)'s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) announced today an R+D partnership to jointly develop advanced applications technologies for the next generation of scientific computing known as petascale computing.
IBM researchers today announced they have demonstrated a world record in areal data density on linear magnetic tape - a significant update to one of the computer industry's most resilient, reliable and affordable data storage technologies.
PI (Physik Instrumente) will introduce the new P-736 high-speed microscope slide Z-scanner piezo stage at this year's BIOS / Photonics West show.
It always helps to have good timing. And no one seems to understand that better than the tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata, which grows in Western United States and flowers at night [The New York Times]. Normally, the tobacco plant is pollinated by hawkmoths that visits its flowers every night. But when these hawkmoths leave eggs behind that develop into leaf-chomping caterpillars, the plant’s self-defense snaps into place and switches to flowering in the day. That attracts a different pollinator, the hummingbird.
Ecologist Danny Kessler noticed this change when he was trying to get a picture of the plant being pollinated for a study. He saw that the plant was not just flowering in the day but also that they had changed their flowers to make them more attractive to hummingbirds: they emitted less of a chemical that attracts moths; they had less sugar in the nectar, which is the way hummingbirds prefer it; and they were more tube-shaped, making them friendly to a hummingbird’s long, thin beak [ScienceNOW Daily News].
Kessler and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute, including ecologist Ian Baldwin, wondered if this change of flowering time and pollinator had anything to with being eaten by caterpillars. They decided to check it out. He [Kessler] put caterpillars on plants that had not been attacked and found that after 8 days, 35% of their flowers opened in the morning–compared with 11% on unmolested plants. Plants responded the same way when Kessler wounded the leaves and put caterpillar spit on them [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Their results were published in Current Biology.
The researchers said the plant’s responses show it remains hyper-alert for voracious caterpillars, while other scientists note that these alterations suggest that plants can adapt their flowers to suit changing conditions. It also makes us think differently, say the researchers, about how to deal with pests that attack plants. Instead of just spraying bug-spray, they point out that there may be other ways to deal with the problem–making a plant less attractive to the mothers of the predators, for example [ScienceNOW Daily News].
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DISCOVER: Talking Plants
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80beats: Orchid Lures in Hornets With the Smell of Bee Fear
80beats: Non-Slip Cells on Flower Petals Help Bees Get a Grip
80beats: Tobacco Plants Control Pollinators by Dosing Their Nectar With Nicotine
Image: Danny Kessler
The announcement that Asus was getting into the eBook reader game was a bit of a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. Now that new hands-on pics have hit Flickr, it looks like our initial enthusiasm was founded.
What's most alluring about the DR-950 is still the thinness—just .35-inches despite the 9-inch, 1024×768 display.
It's also one of the first mass market black and white eBook reader's I've seen that doesn't use e-ink. Instead, Asus is using the unfortunately named SiPix Microcup electronic paper, which purports to be more a more energy efficient alternative.
Other specs include 2-4GB of storage, an SD card slot, Wi-Fi and HDSPA, a USB port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Pricing and timing are still up in the air.
Honestly, there are a lot of these hitting the market these days, but given that pioneering Asus did in the early netbook days, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they're bringing something exciting. It certainly looks that way so far. [Asus UK Flickr via Engadget]
Hi ,to build the equipment (like tanks,silos , drums and ...)I'm looking for the best handbook that's explain the step by step building process likes( materials take off=quantity surface plates ,coursing off building,rolling the plates ,fit up the plates,weights the plates , welding the plates , non
