Flash Game: 25 Boxes

In this game, you can put your peripheral vision to the test. Search for numbers, letters, or symbols, and using your mouse, point at the box where they fit. The game consist of 20 levels. Level 12 to 20 are a bit harder because the input boxes are turned or mirrored. To get a good score, you have to be fast and make no errors. For every error that you make, you will lose 1000 points. If you don’t manage to find the correct boxes before the time bar has dissapeared, you will get 0 points.

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Saturday Morning Humor: How to get Free Linux Tech Support

Need some free and quick tech support for your Linux-based operating system? Then just follow these hilarious words of wisdom sampled from an old IRC conversation I stumbled upon this morning.

< dm > I discovered that you’d never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.

< dm > For example, I didn’t know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I’d be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me.

< dm > Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.

< dm > brings a tear to my eye… :’) so true..

< dm > So if you’re starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with “Linux is gay because it can’t do XXX like Windows can”. You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.

[Via Bash.org]

Slime design: learning lessons from mold networks

Slime mold may be a pain in the home, but it turns out it can teach us how to build more effective wireless networks.

Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan have just published the results of a study into how the mold spread. The testing was based on the idea that nature would find the most efficient way to design a network. Previous studies suggested the slime could find the quickest route through a maze.

To put the idea to a further test, the researchers used a wet surface with oat flakes placed in positions which corresponded to cities in Japan. They then placed the mold, Physarum polycephalum, in the position representing Tokyo. They also used light, which inhibits the growth of the mold, to simulate the effects of natural barriers to Japan’s railway network such as mountains.

The slime didn’t let them down. (Which is a sentence you don’t often get to write.) It spread out and created connections between the flakes which almost precisely mirrored the Japanese rail network. Analysis showed that the slime’s result had a slightly shorter total length but was also slightly less efficient.

One big drawback with the slime’s network was that its design meant a broken connection (equivalent to a faulty section of railway) was three times more likely to leave a station completely unreachable. It may be that the slime considers the risk of losing part of the organism is worthwhile for the greater good, an approach that doesn’t work so well when you have angry passengers to deal with.

What made the study particularly useful was the collection of data about how the slime network grew, something that’s difficult with an established rail network without hindsight.

The slime began by spreading out rapidly to cover the maximum surface area, in other words maximizing its chances of discovering a food source. Once it discovered food (the “stations”), it switched its focus to creating pathways between each site to speed up the process of transferring the sustenance.

The researchers have now developed a mathematical model based on the slime’s growth which they believe could be used for developing real-world networks such as those for wireless communication.

Breaking News: Giant Neutrophil Bullies Little Bacteria! [#video]

By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

You can read about science all you like, but until you see it in live action you never grasp the little moments that fill you with wonder.  Here is such a moment for me…

This past semester my professor showed us the following video of a neutrophil (a kind of white blood cell) chasing after a Staphylococcus aureus bacterium.  Keep in mind that there is no “intelligence” going on here, the cells can only move in response to millions of independent environmental stimuli:

For those of you interested, here’s what’s happening:

First of all, the class I was taking was graduate cellular structure and function, which overviews all of the major components of the cell and how they generally function.  The day my instructor showed us the video we were reviewing the cytoskeleton, literally “the skeleton of the cell.”

Each time the neutrophil (the bigger cell) moves, it physically stretches its membrane out in the direction it wants to go while pulling on its membrane at the opposite end, accomplished by growing and shrinking various parts of its cytoskeleton.  This video is fantastic because you can actually see the membrane push forward before the contents of the cell (organelles, storage vacuoles, and phagosomes) slosh forward to fill in the new space.

The bacterial cell moves a little differently.  S. aureus has a fairly rigid cell wall, so expanding out parts of its membrane like little “false feet” (pseudopodia) is not a viable way to move.  Instead, it likely uses flagella, long whip-like tails.  While it’s hard to direct a cell in a specific direction with flagella (which only spin in one of two directions), they are quite effective at going “anywhere but here” as you can see in the video.

Regardless of the method by which the cells move, they both respond to environmental signals.  In their outer membranes, each cell has numerous receptors that are constantly “tasting” the environment for “good” (attractors) and “bad” (repellers) particles.  When the bacteria “tastes” the macrophage’s normal secretions or touches it physically, it responds by swimming away.  These signalling systems may seem primitive, but they make such a chase as you see above possible on a micro level.

If you can’t tell, cell motility is what I’m currently studying in the laboratory.  Feel free to check out my blog or my Twitter feed, links are in my signature above!

Will You Pay for Your News?

Whether or not this has been a long time in coming, the time has come – the New York Times has announced that it will be charging for “frequent” access to its website. Visitors will be able to view a certain number of articles each month for free, after which they can pay a flat fee for unlimited access; this change is slated to occur in January 2011.

The goal here is apparently “to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers.” Of course, they haven’t decided the specifics yet, like how much you can get for free and how much you’ll have to pay when that runs out. This is a step that other large media outlets have been dancing around for a while now, ever since the “death of print media” seemed to be lurking just around the corner, and NYT needs to get this exactly right, or they’re really going to be in a mess.

You may recall that a few years ago NYT charged for online content, and it didn’t work so well; they nixed that in the hopes that advertising dollars through high readership would make up the difference, but that model hasn’t performed to their expectations. Of course, the Wall Street Journal still charges for unlimited access; whether that has hurt them or not, I couldn’t say.

Putting aside the issue of whether bloggers are to blame for professional journalism’s financial woes, considering how things simply are, how many people really are willing to pay for their news? Is the trusted brand of New York Times or Wall Street Journal worth a subscription fee? Do you think you’d be in the group of “frequent” readers who would max out your allotted free access?  What would you be willing to pay? Or would you just prefer to get your news from whatever outlets are left that don’t charge?

[Image Source: Flickr (CC)]