You won’t find a better gift for a Star Wars geek than a bar of soap in the shape of Han Solo as he was encased in Carbonite in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. Whether it will ever be used for washing is another question entirely. $6.50 from Luxury Lane Soap.
An Awesomely entertaining dystopian short from RSA‘s Carl Erik Rinsch featuring robots, a “unicorn”, guns, and a car chase through a russian city. Oh my. This certainly looks a lot like something Neill Blomkamp (District 9) could have produced. Check it out!
For the past few months I’ve referred to my iPod touch as an “iPad Nano”. Sure, it’s not exactly the pinnacle of human wit, but it keeps me gently amused. Now it appears Apple wants to spoil that fun.
There are now reports that Apple is planning a smaller version of the iPad for an early 2011 release. Just as the iPad fills a gap (be it real or marketing imagination) between the MacBook and the iPhone/iPod, it appears Apple now wants to plug an even smaller gap.
The reports are that the new device will be between 5 and 7 inches diagonally, costing less than $400, and be aimed at users who will mainly be reading content and not typing very much.
The source of the reports is DigiTimes, a Taipei-based site and daily newspaper which specializes in the Asian electrical manufacturing market. It quotes “upstream component sources”, which probably means somebody at a screen-manufacturer has had an enquiry from Apple.
How sensible this idea is depends how you look at it. If you think of it in terms of the iPad compared to the iPhone, it seems to combine the worst of both worlds: you lose the attractive screen size of the iPad but don’t get the easy portability of the iPhone.
However, if you think of it as primarily a rival to the Amazon Kindle, then it looks like a more attractive prospect. While the market for e-Readers is still open to question, you’re effectively taking everything the standard Kindle has to offer and, for a $100 or so extra, throwing in a color screen, full web access, and a media player!
To compete with that, Amazon would either have to add extra features (which are unlikely to match the usability of those offered by Apple) or, more likely, slash the Kindle’s price. At the least, it would probably have to fall below the supposed psychological $199 barrier for mainstream adoption of entertainment devices.
Still, one thing puzzles me about these proposals. With the supposed technical genius of Apple, surely it can’t be long before they just make one portable product with an added sensor on the back that lets you shrink or enlarge the entire device with a pinch gesture?
By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
By now, everyone and their mother has heard of nanotechnology and how it is either going to save us or obliterate us in a sea of gray goo. ย What exactly IS it, though? ย Well like microbiology, the field is too vast to describe effectively beyond “things happening on the nano-scale,” but this latest advance may give you a better idea.
As you may remember from our article on cancer a while back, tumor cells are essentially cells that never stop growing. ย This isn’t really a disease like the cold or food poisoning, which can be caught or contracted from some source, but instead a disease of the body’s own regulatory systems. ย As such, the immune system has a terrible time sorting healthy and sick cells from one another.
One potential solution is a technique called RNAi. ย Also known as RNA interference, ย RNAi consists of short regions of RNA (DNA’s more ancient brother) that can target and turn off specific genes. ย All of the genes in a cancer cell, for instance, rely on messenger RNAs (mRNAs) to take genetic information and convert it into tangible components like enzymes, sugars, and lipids. ย If certain genes’ mRNAs could be destroyed before they had a chance to do their job, then those genes would be effectively “silenced” and no longer have any effect. ย This is precisely what RNAi fragments do: they bind to specific mRNAs and signal the cell to destroy them. ย If we can turn off the genes that allow the cell to survive and take in nutrients, we can effectively “starve” the tumor.
Some of you may have already heard of RNAi because it is used all the time in the laboratory. ย Unfortunately, it is much harder to administer RNAi fragments (called siRNAs) to a large animal like a human. ย Even if those fragments were effective at silencing, how would they find and enter the right cells?
This is where nanotech comes in!
The California Institute of Technology has created special nanoparticles (seen as the black dots above) that can recognize and and bind to markers found only on the exterior of a cancerous cell. ย They also have the cargo space to carry small RNA fragments and can deliver them to the interior of the offending cell. ย This improves the effectiveness of RNA interference by many orders of magnitude.
While Gizmodo has seen fit to call CIT’s particles “nanobots,” they would probably better be described as “smart nanoparticles.” ย Naming aside, they may be an instrumental tool for designing the next generation of cancer drugs. ย Existing drugs can also be loaded into nanoparticles for enhanced, specialized delivery. ย That’s right: like any good tech…they’re backwardsย compatible!
If you would like to know the nitty-gritty about CIT’s experiment, you can read their publication in Nature. ย Otherwise, post a comment or question below and we can discuss the topic further! ย I’m also available on Twitter if you prefer a “nanoblog” format!
Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.
Rotifers: Tiny animals that survive against all odds, known for not having sex for around 80 million years. In the following video, award-winning Cambridge researcher Alan Tunnacliffe drains 90% of the water in their microscopic bodies, heat some of them to the boiling point and then freezes them in liquid nitrogen, to later observe that they still thrive!
In the field of athletics, there’s a few legendary records which stand the test of time, most notably Bob Beamon’s world record of long jump, which remained unbroken for 23 years. But in the field of video games, that’s outdone by the record of Scott Safran who has been the world record holder on Asteroids since 1982.
Until this week that is.
While it’s yet to be officially confirmed by Twin Galaxies, the closest gaming equivalent to Guinness World Records, an Oregon man named John McAllister has just topped Safran’s score.
Safran scored 41,336,440 in a two and a half day session beginning on November 13 1982. He quickly disappeared from the public eye and it wasn’t until 1998, when Twin Galaxies tried to hunt him down to celebrate Asteroids being re-released, that the gaming world discovered he had died in 1989.
There have been few serious attempts to beat the score over the years, mainly because doing so is as much a feat of physical endurance as gaming skill. Even if the player holds up, some elements are out of their control: one attempt in 2004 ended when the game machine broke down.
Wired reports that McAllister stayed awake from Saturday until late Monday evening to beat the record. As there’s no pause button on an arcade console, any food or bathroom breaks he took had to be earned by racking up bonus lives and hoping to make it back to the machine before his unmanned ships crashed and burned for the last time. He finally took the ultimate gaming honor with a score of 41,338,740.
This being the 21st century, the entire attempt was broadcast online via webcam. Archive of the gameplay is still available, and frankly, anyone who watches the entire thing probably deserves to also be in the record books.
Have you ever imagined what would happen if an 8-Bit army, composed of characters and objects from old classics such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, invaded New York City? Probably not, but Patrick Jean from OneMoreProd certainly did, and here is the result in this wonderful animation called “PIXELS.” Enjoy!
[Via Gizmodo]
This picture shows what hydrogen atoms might look like if we could see them.
The chart above shows the appearance of a single hydrogen atom in a few of its lowest excited states. In each of those states, the electron is found in a different orbital, some of which have unfamiliar shapes. But even the term “shape” is a little funny for something that you can’t hold in your hand. These are actually probability density plots, which show the likelihood of observing the electron in any one position at a given time– and more correctly, 2D projections of 3D probability densities.
So even the humble hydrogen atom can be a bit complex. Fortunately, we have advanced technology that can help us cut though the quantum mechanical haze: Cookies!
What we can see (and taste) are cookies made to resemble the shapes of the hydrogen atoms in the chart. The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made these cookies and will show you how you can make them, too!
Have you ever had the urge to play rock, paper, scissors, but you couldn’t because you had no opponent? Steve Hoefer built a glove that will play with you! It senses your movements, selects its item, and displays it at the same time your hand does. Not only does the glove play against you, but it will also learn how to beat you! Read about the glove’s development at Hoefer’s site.
[via Laughing Squid]
Tags: rock-paper-scissors