Velociraptor On Zebra

Sex and drug parties in S’pore chalets?

2012-01-26T02:40:00.001-08:00

"I don't do drugs, so I would go home when the rest got too 'high' and became violent or started taking their clothes off," said [1] John

In such chalet parties, teens as young as 14-In such chalet parties, teens as young as 14-years-old get intoxicated with a mix of pills and alcohol and engage …

While it is usual to see teenagers in Singapore gathering in chalets for barbecues or birthday celebrations, some of their peers get together only to engage in sex and drug parties.

Once intoxicated after a cocktail of alcohol and illegal drugs, some of these teens, which include girls as young as 14, engage in sexual intimacy -- from heavy petting to intercourse.

It is understood that such chalets stays are organised by some members of gangs in Singapore, and that they are getting more common.

An 18-year-old former gangster who wanted to be known as John told The New Paper, "We would tell our parents that we were going for a barbecue, but we didn't even take any charcoal or chicken wings with us."

While he had attended such sex-and-drug orgies twice, John — who left the gang last year after he was arrested for theft — claimed that he has not taken part in such vices.

"I don't do drugs, so I would go home when the rest got too 'high' and became violent or started taking their clothes off," said John, adding that most of the gang members at these parties were in their teens.

Speaking in a mixture of Mandarin and Hokkien, John described the girls who take part in the parties as either "lor kway" (Hokkien for streetwalker) or some of them "ah dai" (fools).

The former are girls considered to have loose morals, while "ah dai" refers to newbies who attend the chalet parties without knowing that drugs and sex are involved.

As they were under the influence of drugs such as ketamine and "ice", some of the teens have no recollection of their experiences the night before.

The parties would usually have more males than females, said former gangsters. Such situations occasionally lead to several men sharing one woman and can even result in gang rape.

When morning comes, they pack their bags and check out of their unit. The guys may go through the same routine a few months later with new girls, or "fresh meat" as they are called.

A 28-year-old former gang member turned social worker, who wanted to be known as Peter, said he has not seen such a gang rape before, but he has heard of four or five such incidents among his former circle of friends.

"It is not just happening in chalets...such activities can also take place in pub shophouses or in the homes of the gang members," he added.

However, John pointed out that not all chalet outings organised by his gangster friends involved sex and drugs.

Parents to be blamed?

Meanwhile, social workers said they have counseled those who have engaged in such vices as part of their gang activities.

Those involved may not necessarily come from broken or low-income families, a common stereotype in the past, they said. But they noted that such teens usually suffer from an emotional emptiness at home.

"Some parents give too little affection and neglect their children because they are busy, while others give too much attention because they are authoritative," said Faith Png, 39, a social worker with YouthReach.

"Both will drive their children to seek freedom and love outside of the family and sometimes, the children befriend gangsters."

Executive director of Singapore Children's Society Alfred Tan, 50, blamed the media's portrayal of casual sex and easy access to pornography as resulting in the country's youth to become more promiscuous than in the past.

"This is a worrying trend as there may be peer pressure to have sex. Instead of being harsh to their children, parents should get to know their friends," he told TNP.

On the other hand, chalet operators said that they have not come across sex-and-drug-parties on their premises.

Manager of Goldkist Beach Resort at East Coast Park Vikas Gupta, 22, said that the management has not encountered any such incidents thus far.

Steven Tang, director of Costa Sands Resort — which has two outlets in Pasir Ris and one in Sentosa — echoed the same thing, adding that it has always been its practice to increase security presence during peak hours.

"It has always been our practice to step up our security presence during our peak periods, such as the June school holidays, to deal with the additional visitors," he said.

The frequency of security patrols in GoldKist Beach Resort will also increase by 50 percent during peak periods, said Vikas.

It is illegal to have sex with children under the age of 16. If the victims are between 12 and 14 years old, it is considered statutory rape and offenders can be jailed up to 20 years and fined or caned.

If the victim is above 14 but below 16, offenders can be jailed up to five years and fined $10,000 for carnal connection. The maximum penalty for rape is 20 years' jail with possible caning.

Udacity and the future of online universities

2012-01-25T01:43:00.001-08:00

The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway.

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well.

Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.

But I have to say I’m a little sad that it’s happening away from, rather than being part of, Stanford. If any world-class university would embrace this idea, one would hope it would be the one at the heart of Silicon Valley. And surely Udacity would only benefit if it was part of Stanford and carried the Stanford brand name. Instead, Thrun is abandoning Stanford and creating Udacity on its own. (And I’m no great fan of the name, either.)

Stanford was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new physical campus in New York City — but it isn’t willing, it seems, to help Thrun build a free virtual campus which could reach the whole world. That’s a dereliction of its educational duty. But where Stanford has failed, surely some other elite university will step in. Thrun is taking a bold step here. Let’s hope he soon gets the support, if not of Stanford, then of some other college. Like Harvard, or Yale, or Oxford, or Cambridge. They’re exclusive places now. But they don’t have to be, in the future.

How to grow your own fresh air

2012-01-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.

With its air-filtering plants and sustainable architecture, Kamal Meattle’s office park in New Delhi is a model of green business. Meattle himself is a longtime activist for cleaning up India’s air.

This video was issued by TED under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence, from http://www.ted.com

Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi’s air. My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. We’ve also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards.

The three plants are Areca palm (also known as Butterfly Palm), Mother-in-Law’s Tongue (also known asSnake Plant ) and Money plant (also known as Pothos). The botanical names are in front of you. Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. The second plant is Mother-in-law’s Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. The third plant is Money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals.

With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one’s blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it’s available on the government of India website.

Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20% by using these plants. And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15%, because you need less fresh air. We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants.

Why is this important? It is also important for the environment, because the world’s energy requirements are expected to grow by 30% in the next decade. 40% of the world’s energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60% of the world’s population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” said Mahatma Gandhi.

Australian tries to sell stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia on eBay

2012-01-22T23:04:00.001-08:00

An ad on eBay for the Costa Concordia cruise ship will be pulled.

"FOR sale, one cruise ship - slight damage to right-hand hull, mainly cosmetic."

This was the description that an Aussie used in his "joke" bid to sell the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship on eBay, which has been pulled from the website.

With a starting price of $1, the seller warned of “some water damage to interior” of the ship and said the carpets may need to be replaced. It also stated the ship had one “careful owner” and must be collected by the buyer.

An eBay spokesperson said the ad, for which bidding reached $1008.88 with six days to go, was taken down as it was not appropriate for the website.

“EBay does not permit listings that attempt to profit from human tragedy or suffering," the spokesperson said.

"As a result, we are immediately removing this listing from eBay.com.au.”

There was a warning on the listing stating it was “obviously a fake and should not be taken seriously”.

The disclaimer is perhaps in response to this question posted on the site:

“I notice that you haven't given the option for insurance with shipping. I've heard of a cruise ship accident in the news recently and it's got me a bit worried. Are there no circumstances under which you would insure the ship while shipping?”

To which the seller responded: “Ahh noo speek englishhh”.

There were a flood of questions about the ship, including one that asked whether the rock he heard the captain tripped on before falling into the lifeboat would be included. According to the seller, yes.

Popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com shut down; founder, others indicted on piracy charges

2012-01-19T21:59:00.001-08:00

One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.

A federal indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted in the US on leased servers in Ashburn, Virginia, which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other employees were arrested in New Zealand on Thursday at the request of US officials.
The four, two of whom are New Zealand residents, are among seven people facing online piracy charges in the US.

Fifteen people, including children, were present when police raided the Auckland property of Megaupload's 37-year-old founder, Kim Dotcom (also known as Kim Schmitz), a German national and New Zealand resident, about 6.45am (0445 AEDT).
Schmitz and two other men were arrested at the property.
Two shotguns were also recovered.
The other three arrested were Megaupload chief marketing officer Finn Batato, chief technical officer and co-founder Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk. Batato and Ortmann are German, while van der Kolk is a Dutch national who holds New Zealand residency.
Police executed 10 search warrants at houses and businesses across Auckland, seizing more than $NZ10 million ($A7.77 million) from financial institutions, and assets, including luxury cars worth $NZ6 million ($A4.66 million) and expensive art works.
In a press conference on Friday, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald said it was 'likely' the men had also breached New Zealand copyright laws, although police had no intention of laying charges in the country.
The men face copyright infringement charges in the US which carry sentences of up to 20 years.
The four men were due to appear on Friday afternoon in North Shore District Court, where an application for them to be extradited to the US will be heard.
The other three sought in relation to the Megaupload piracy charges were still at large and not thought to be in New Zealand.
More than 20 search warrants were executed in the US and eight other countries on Friday.
Officials seized about $NZ50 million ($A38.83 million) in assets, as well as 18 domain names associated with Megaupload.
Two corporations, Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited, are included in the FBI's indictment.
Before Megaupload was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were 'grotesquely overblown'.
'The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch,' the statement said.
The indictment may have prompted a response from the loose affiliation of hackers known as Anonymous, which claimed credit for attacking the Justice Department's website.
The site was inaccessible on Thursday evening.
'The Department of Justice web server hosting justice.gov is currently experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service,' the agency said in a statement.
'The department is working to ensure the website is available while we investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.'
A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement on Thursday that the group's site had been hacked, but it appeared to be working later on Thursday evening.
'The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech,' the spokesman said.
'We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals.'
Megaupload was unique not only because of its enormous size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy.
Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.
The company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO.
He was not named in the indictment and declined to comment through a representative.
According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the internet.
Current estimates by companies that monitor web traffic place it in the top 100.
The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money-laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing, and turned a blind eye to requests from copyright holders to remove copyright-protected files.
More at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57362152-261/fbi-charges-megaupload-operators-with-piracy-crimes/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/indictment-charges-megaupload-site-with-piracy.html?_r=1
http://www.neowin.net/news/megaupload-charged-with-piracy-shut-down?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
http://techland.time.com/2012/01/19/feds-shut-down-megaupload-com-file-sharing-website/

Team Fortress 2 cosplay

2012-01-14T18:04:00.001-08:00

Zombie ants: When ants become walking dead

2012-01-14T17:56:00.001-08:00

A parasitized ant. Image credit: David P. Hughes.

An ingeniously deadly fungus hijacks the bodies of ants for food and reproduction.

It’s like something out of a horror movie. A parasitic fungus infiltrates the body of a tropical carpenter ant, feeding on it and manipulating its body. The fungus forces the dying ant to the forest understory, an environment more conducive to its growth. The invasion of this fungal body-snatcher culminates with it sprouting a spore-laden fruiting body from the dead ant’s head.

An account of this deadly assault on tropical carpenter ants (Camponotus leonardi) by a parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) is described in the May 9, 2011 issue of the open access journal BMC Ecology.

Similar incidents of fungi parasitizing insects occur in other parts of the world. This particular case of zombie ants plays out in the forests of Thailand.

It’s a pretty gruesome affair, so if you find movies like The Thing and Night of the Living Dead too scary, now’s a good time to stop reading!

The paper’s lead author, Dr. David Hughes of Penn State University, described the ant-fungus interaction in a press release.

The fungus attacks the ants on two fronts. Firstly by using the ant as a walking food source, and secondly by damaging muscle and the ant’s central nervous system, resulting in zombie walking and the death bite, which place the ant in the cool damp understory. Together these provide the perfect environment for fungal growth and reproduction. This behavior of infected ants is essentially an extended phenotype of the fungus (fungal behaviour through the ant’s body) as non-infected ants never behave in this way.

A dead carpenter ant attached to a leaf in the understory of a forest in Thailand. Before killing the ant, the fungus growing in the ant changed its behavior, causing it to bite into the leaf vein. Image Credit: David Hughes, Penn State University.

Tropical carpenter ants spend most of their time high in the forest canopy. When they venture down to the jungle understory, they follow well-defined trails. It’s during this time that ants could get infected by fungal spores that land on their outer body.

The fungus can only complete its life cycle through the ant. Spores germinate, and the fungus penetrates the ant’s body. It proceeds to infect the entire animal, affecting its central nervous system. You can tell when a carpenter ant has been infected: instead of marching purposefully down a trail, an infected worker ant walks about haphazardly, displaying erratic behavior. Sporadic convulsions set in, causing the infected ant to fall from the canopy to the moist, cool, leafy forest understory, ideal conditions for the fungus to continue its growth.

A carpenter ant attached to a leaf. The ant has been dead for two to three days, and the fungus's fruiting body filled with spores sticks out of its head. Image Credit: David Hughes, Penn State University.

Infected ants on the forest understory are driven by the fungus to select leaves of saplings that are about 25 centimeters (10 inches) above the soil surface. Then, a curious thing happens when the sun shines at its highest intensity of the day, at solar noon when it reaches the highest point in the sky. The fungus commands the ant to sink its mandibles into the leaf’s main vein, on the underside of the leaf. A possible reason for this action is to attach the ant to a stable environment suitable for the fungus’s subsequent development. But this synchronization with solar noon is a mystery, and it will be the subject of follow-up research.

Scientists call this stage, when the ant bites deep into the leaf vein, the “death grip,” because the ant is now locked to the leaf, providing a secure attachment for the fungus growing inside it. At this point, the ant is close to death, usually surviving for another 6 hours following its death grip. Its head is filled with fungal cells growing between muscle fibers, as well as around the brain and postpharyngeal gland^[1]. Following the death grip, the ant’s mandible muscles atrophy, leaving its jaws locked into the leaf long after it’s dead.

This image from the scientific paper shows a micrograph of an infected ant's head. It's the state of the ant's head when it bit down on the leaf, while it was still alive. Small grey blobs filling the head and mandible are the fungus. "PPG" is the postpharyngeal gland, "B" is the brain, "Mu" are muscles, and "Cu" is the cuticle (outer body of the ant). The small image in the lower left shows a close-up of what muscle would look like in a healthy ant. The small image in the lower right shows a close-up of the infected ant's muscle, right after it bit down on the leaf. The blobs between the muscle fibers are fungal cells.

About two to three days after the death grip, a fruiting body emerges from the dead ant’s head. It holds spores, which are released into the air, ready to be picked up by another tropical carpenter ant victim. Eventually, the ant’s remains fall to the ground. Scientists studying the understory where zombie ants are found attached under leaves have also found the remains of dead ants scattered on the ground – graveyards for past victims of the Ophiocordyceps fungus.

A paper in the journal BMC Ecology, published on May 9, 2011, describes the parasitism by a fungus on the tropical carpenter ant in Thailand. It’s a macabre description of how the ant is invaded by the fungus, which takes over its body, commands it to perform actions to ensure the survival and growth of the fungus, then uses its dead body to grow a stalk with spores that are ejected into the surrounding area, ready to infect other passing ants.

A tropical carpenter ant killed by a parasitic fungus in Thailand. The ant had bitten into the leaf in a "death grip," and a fungal fruiting body

philislothical

2012-01-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

New drug may keep you sober no matter how much you've had to drink

2012-01-11T17:16:00.000-08:00

Chinese tree extract has long been used as a hangover cure. Now it is being turned into a 'sobriety pill' that could cure alcoholism.Imagine a pill that could instantly sober you up no matter how much you've had to drink, or a hangover cure that worked minutes after swallowing it. Hardened drinkers rejoice: researchers are about to begin human trials on an "alcohol antidote" that may soon offer a cure to alcoholism, reports New Scientist. The drug is a chemical called dihydromyricetin, or DHM, and is derived from a Chinese variety of the oriental raisin tree, which has been used for at least 500 years in China as an effective hangover cure. So far the extract has only been tested on boozing rats, but with promising results.

Kanzi, The Bonobo Ape That Lights Fires and Cooks Food

2012-01-02T19:09:00.001-08:00

Kanzi, a captive bonobo ape, has taught himself how to light a fire and cook food over it (video). Kanzi lives at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where he is studied by researcher Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Cop speeding through an intersection kills two people proceeds to arrest the relatives and rewarded with paid vacation

2011-12-21T22:50:00.001-08:00

“What gets me is we already know the outcome,” complained Anna Rodriguez, one of Hiler’s friends, to a local reporter. “The officer will go on paid suspension. Then they will say he didn’t do anything wrong. And that will be the end of it.”

First prize every single game on steam!

2011-12-19T20:32:00.001-08:00

Nobody likes getting a lump of coal for Christmas, even though being naughty can have its perks. But almost everyone we know likes getting free things, and if you collect enough coal, you can trade it in for free gifts, or use it as a lottery piece to potentially win every single game on Steam. Wait, what? That's right, Steam is awarding one lucky person every single game it has as a grand prize in this year's Epic Holiday Giveaway.

Let's back up a moment. Steam's annual Holiday Sale is going on right now, which means deep discounts on a variety of games. There are new deals posted every day through January 1st, such as 75 percent off Metro 2033 ($4.99) and 11 other titles, as well as various package deals. We're having trouble checking them all out because apparently Steam's getting hammered pretty hard right now.

Coinciding with the Holiday Sale is Steam's Epic Holiday Giveaway. Every day through January 1st, Steam will list a set of six objectives on its Great Gift Pile page. For each one you complete, you'll either get a free gift or a lump of coal, the latter of which you can trade in (seven pieces of coal can be traded in for a gift from Steam's Great Gift Pile) or save up and use as an entry into Steam's giveaway (each lump of coal gets you one entry). It's hokey, but the discounts and giveaways are not. Check this out:

Grand Prize (1 winner): Every single game on Steam
First Prize (50 winners): Top 10 items on wishlist
Second Prixe (100 winners): Top 5 items on wishlist
Third Prize (1,000 winners): Valve Complete Pack

The Grand Prize is insane and is sure to brighten someone's holiday, possibly yours.

North Korea's Kim Jong-il dead at 69

2011-12-18T21:14:00.001-08:00

Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea, has died at the age of 69 after suffering a heart attack, North Korean state media has announced.

SMRT says sorry for 'income opportunity' alert

2011-12-16T22:11:00.001-08:00

In the midst of the madness from the massive disruption on the North-South line on Thursday evening, train and taxi operator SMRT did not seem to some passengers to be above taking advantage of the situation.

Target Gets Robbed via Facebook Promotion

2011-12-14T19:21:00.001-08:00

In yet another example of “promotions gone wrong”, Target just got robbed by it’s Facebook fans and a bunch of thieves opportunists.

Target had a promotion via its Facebook page for a coupon which gave a customer a $10 gift card for spending $50. The coupon could be printed only via coupon printing software and you could only print it a certain number of times, yet the coupons did not have unique barcodes. (Kinkos anyone?) It was a great deal for Christmas shoppers or even grocery shoppers (via a Super Target) but a bunch of people figured out how to game the system and abuse the promotion.

I became aware of it through SlickDeals, a forum for bargain hunters. As people used and experimented with this coupon, they found that they were able to purchase gift cards and get the corresponding free $10 gift card from the promotion even though the coupon stated that gift card purchases were ineligible. Also, seeing as the coupons were not unique, any photocopier skirted the whole printing limitations from the coupon printing software.

As you can see via this 37 page thread with almost 1500 posts, people found that they could effectively rob Target legally (At least I think its legal. I’m not an attorney.) What they found they could do was this:

They would buy a $50 Target gift card, use the coupon and get a $10 Target gift card free. They would then purchase another $50 Target gift card using the FIRST $50 Target gift card to pay for the SECOND Target gift card, use another coupon and get another $10 Target gift card. (Initial purchase: $50. Profit: $20. etc.) Rinse and repeat. (Since you’re not actually purchasing anything, you’ll always have your initial $50 in the form of a gift card and, since you’re using the gift card to buy more gift cards, each transaction just nets you $10.)

There are a number of people who claim to have netted as much as $5,000 in free Target gift cards off their initial $50 investment. This promotion started November 30, 2011 and ended December 3, 2011.

What was surely as a result of the “resounding success” of the first coupon (probably solely judged by redemption quantity), Target decided to bring back this promotion 4 days later (December 7, 2011 through December 10, 2011). I’m sure someone at the corporate office was so impressed by the results, they wanted to start giving people raises and handing out trophies to stores for having the most “loyal” fans in their area.

By re-starting the promotion, you can see via this second thread which is 51 pages longwith over 2000 posts, they effectively green lighted all of the original people who abused the promotion to do it again and also allowed those who missed out on the first opportunity to rob Target to join in the looting. This was a concerted effort by people who conspired to abuse this program on a national level. (Gotta love the internet!)

The thread is addicting to read. It’s like watching a train wreck reality show. It’s hard to believe that someone somewhere connected to Target isn’t watching this. In fact, based on statements made by the Slickdeals moderators, Target was aware (however minimally) of the thread since they asked SlickDeals not to post a PDF or image of the coupon. I’m sure they wanted the web traffic to their website versus to SlickDeals.

The dedication, time and effort invested by some of these people is impressive. I’m also astounded by the apparent lack of training or caring shown by the Target employees who allowed this coupon abuse as well as the failure of store management to recognize that it was happening in the first place. This failure and lack of training is obvious due to the inconsistency of success these people report experiencing. When you have to start disguising yourself, visiting multiple cashiers and you get rejected but still keep trying, an intelligent person would know that they are, at the very least, doing something wrong, even if their conscience hadn’t already told them that earlier.

Oh, and to put further emphasis on the failure of this promotion, many of the looterspeople, once they had collected as many free gift cards as they desired (or the promotion ended), then took all those free $10 gift cards and proceeded to buy Visa and Amex gift cards with them, thus negating them from even having to spend the free money theystole got from Target at Target. I’m other retailers appreciate Target’s monetary infusion into the economy and into their store’s Christmas bottom line. (Hey, I got a bunch of free Target gift cards, let’s go spend them at Wal-Mart!)

In my opinion, this tops the absurdity of the “Kindle Fire Deal That Wasn’t Supposed To Be” post I wrote a few weeks ago, and is another reason why social media promotions must be monitored and measured carefully. Just looking in your computer and seeing how many coupons were redeemed, at least in this case, isn’t an indicator of how effective the campaign was. It was an indicator of how screwed over Target got.

Tattoo fail for her humorous win for us

2011-12-01T01:21:00.001-08:00

Tattoo artist Ryan Fitzgerald from Dayton, OH was hit with a $100,000 lawsuit last week by his ex-girlfriend Rossie Brovent. She claims that her boyfriend was supposed to tattoo a scene from Narnia on her back but instead tattooed an image of a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.
Apparently, Ryan found out that Rossie had cheated with a long-time friend of his, but instead of confronting her about it he acted like everything was normal and hatched a plan for revenge. Originally, Rossie tried to have Ryan charged with assault, but the ingenious tattoo artist had covered his bases by plying Rossie with wine and tequila shots and getting her to sign a consent form that stated the design was “at the artist’s discretion.”
No word from Rossie on whether the illicit night of passion with Ryan’s friend was worth it. Moral of the story? Never cheat on a tattoo artist.

PDF Converter Pro 10 07 (With Pacth)

2011-11-30T18:03:00.001-08:00

PDF Converter Pro 10 07 (With Pacth) Torrent

Does not convert .epub or .mobi so is almost useless for ebook conversion

PDF Converter Pro 10.07

PDF Converter Pro 10.07| 48 MB

PDF Converter Pro can Quickly convert 149 file formats to pdf File Format. Including Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), Microsoft Excel (XLS, XLSX), Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Microsoft Visio (VSD), Microsoft Works (WDB, WPS, DOCX, XLSX), AutoCAD (DWG, DXF, DWF), CorelDraw (CDR), Corel Presentations (SHW), WordPerfect (WP5, WP6, WPD, WPF), WordStar (WS), DocuWorks (XDW), QuattroPro (WB1, WB2, WQ1), Rich Text Format (RTF),
Text Format (Txt), Hyper Text Markup Language (Htm, Html), Windows Bitmap (BMP), JPEG Compressed Image (JPG, JPEG, JP2) etc File Formats to PDF Formats. PDF Converter Pro is a multilingual software, including English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese and Very user-friendly interface and easy to use. Very quick in read speed and no quality is lost!

PDF Converter Pro Support 149 File Formats:
Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), Microsoft Excel (XLS, XLSX), Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Microsoft Visio (VSD), Microsoft Works (WDB, WPS, DOCX, XLSX), AutoCAD (DWG, DXF, DWF), CorelDraw (CDR), Corel Presentations (SHW), WordPerfect (WP5, WP6, WPD, WPF), WordStar (WS), DocuWorks (XDW), QuattroPro (WB1, WB2, WQ1), Rich Text Format (RTF), Text Format (Txt), Hyper Text Markup Language (Htm, Html), Windows Bitmap (BMP), JPEG Compressed Image (JPG, JPEG, JP2) etc 149 File Formats.

PDF Converter Pro Keywords:
DOC to PDF, DOCX to PDF, XLS to PDF, XLSX to PDF, PPT to PDF, PPTX to PDF, VSD to PDF, WDB to PDF, WPS to PDF, DOCX to PDF, XLSX to PDF, DWG to PDF, DXF to PDF, DWF to PDF, CDR to PDF, SHW to PDF, WP5 to PDF, WP6 to PDF, WPD to PDF, WPF to PDF, WS to PDF, XDW to PDF, WB1 to PDF, WB2 to PDF, WQ1 to PDF, RTF to PDF, Txt to PDF, Htm to PDF, Html to PDF, BMP to PDF, JPG to PDF, JPEG to PDF, JP2 to PDF, GIF to PDF, DCX to PDF, TIFF to PDF, TIF to PDF, PNG to PDF, PCX to PDF, PDF to PDF, PRT to PDF etc 149 File Formats.

How To Install
1. Install Application
2. Run & Apply Patch
3. Enjoy!
Thx AoRe Team for crack version 10.06

what appears to be two wounded pelicans fighting over carrion

2011-11-29T02:55:00.001-08:00

Watch a first kiss between virgins

Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender of Justice by Night

2011-11-24T17:03:00.001-08:00

He was an ace fiber-optics executive by day. And a gun-toting, cop-impersonating defender of justice by night.
Photo: Sian Kennedy

U.S. District Court Judge John Mendez didn’t know what to make of the man standing in his courtroom for sentencing on September 7, 2010. Dave Sanders was a successful corporate sales executive—a widower who was raising his three young children in a suburb outside Sacramento, California. His shoes gleamed from the energetic polishing he’d given them that morning, and his buzz cut gave him the appearance of an earnest, middle-aged Boy Scout. But now the 43-year-old had confessed to operating a bizarre paramilitary vigilante squad that targeted people involved in Ponzi schemes. His team included a 365-pound US postal worker and a woman who looked like a PlayboyPlaymate; it was equal parts SWAT team and three-ring circus, and it had landed Sanders here, in a Sacramento courthouse, facing up to 11 years in prison.

Teen says 'It's your fault I burgled you' in letter to robbery victims

2011-11-23T16:38:00.001-08:00

This is how a 16-year-old's "apology" letter began after he robbed a family home.

The UK teen was forced to write to his victims in Leeds, but showed no remorse (or "remores") and wrote them a list of reasons why the whole debacle was their fault, The Sun reports.

Picture: Courtesy of Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme

Electronics Books Collection

2011-11-22T19:59:00.001-08:00

The Ultimate Electronics Books Collection
Language: English | PDF | Books Collection | 90 Ebooks| 1.52 GB

List on read more:
ACHA, E. (2002). Power Electronic Control in Electrical Systems.pdf
AGRAWAL, G. P. (2001). Applications of Nonlinear Fiber Optics.pdf
AGRAWAL, G. P. (2001). Nonlinear Fiber Optics (3rd ed.).pdf
AGRAWAL, K. C. (2001). Industrial Power Engineering and Applications Handbook.pdf
AKANSU, A. N. (2001). Multiresoluton Signal Decomposition – Transf.pdf
ANDERSON, H. (2003). Newnes PC Troubleshooting Pocket Book (2nd ed.).pdf
ARNOLD, K. (2001). Embedded Controller Hardware Design.pdf
BALL, S. R. (2001). Analog Interfacing to Embedded Microprocessors – Real World Design.pdf
BALL, S. R. (2002). Embedded Microprocessor Systems – Real World Design (3rd ed.).pdf
BANKMAN, I. N. (2000). Handbook of Medical Imaging Processing and Analysis.pdf
BECKER, P. C. (1997). Erbium-Dope Fiber Amplifiers – Fundamentals and Technology.pdf
BIGELOW, S. J. (2001). Understanding Telephone Electronics (4th ed.).pdf
BIRD, J. (2001). Electrical Circuit Theory and Technology (2nd ed.).pdf
booklist.txt
BOVIK, A. (2000). Handbook of Image and Video Processing.pdf
BOWICK, C. (1997). RF Circuit Design.pdf
BRICE, R. (2003). Newnes Guide to Digital TV (2nd ed.).pdf
BROWN, G. (2001). Radio and Electronics Cookbook.pdf
BROWN, M. (1990). Practical Switching Power Supply Design.pdf
BROWN, M. (2001). Power Supply Cookbook (2nd ed.).pdf
BUCHANAN, W. (2000). Computer Busses – Design and Application.pdf
CARR, J. J. (2001). Antenna Toolkit (2nd ed.).pdf
CARR, J. J. (2002). RF Components and Circuits.pdf
CEVOLI, P. (2002). Embedded FreeBSD Cookbook.pdf
CIRSTEA, M. N. (2002). Neural and Fuzzy Logic Control of Drives and Power Systemsl.pdf
CLEIN, D. (1999). CMOS IC Layout – Concepts, Methodologies, and Tools.pdf
CRISP, J. (2001). Introduction to Fiber Optics (2nd ed.).pdf
CROMPTON, T. R. (2000). Battery Reference Book (3rd ed.).pdf
DA SILVA, E. (2001). High Frequency and Microwave Engineering.pdf
DECOURSEY, W. J. (2003). Statistics and Probability for Engineering With m!cr0S0ft© Excel.pdf
DECUSATIS, C. (2001). Fiber Optic Data Communication – Technological Trends and Advances.pdf
DECUSATIS, C. (2002). Handbook of Fiber Optic Data Communication (2nd ed.).pdf
DHAMEJA, S. (2001). Electric Vehicle Battery Systems.pdf
DHIR, A. (2004). The Digital Consumer Technology Handbook.pdf
DUARTE, F. J. (1995). Tunable Lasers Handbook.pdf
DUNCAN, B. (1996). High Performance Audio Power Amplifiers.pdf
DUTTA, A. K. (2002). WDM Technologies – Active Optical Components.pdf
DYE, N. (2000). Radio Frequency Transistors – Principles and Practical Applicat.pdf
EISENREICH, D. (2003). Designing Embedded Internet Devices.pdf
ELLIOT, B. (2002). Fiber Optic Cabling (2nd ed.).pdf
ELLIOTT, D. F. (1987) Handbook of Digital Signal Processing – Engineering Applications.pdf
ELLIS, G. (2002). Observers in Control Systems – A Practical Guide.pdf
FENG, G. (1999). Adaptive Control Systems.pdf
FISCHER-CRIPPS, A. C. (2002). Newnes Interfacing Companion.pdf
GANSSLE, J. G. (1999). The Art of Designing Embedded Systems.pdf
GIBSON J.D. Multimedia_Communications.pdf
Godara, Lal Chand – CRC Handbook of Antennas in Wireless Communications [2002].pdf
GRAF, R. F. (1999). Modern Dictionary of Electronics (7th ed.).pdf
HEATHCOTE, M. J. (1998). The J & P Transformer Book (12th ed.).pdf
HICKMAN, I. (1999). Analog Circuits Cookbook (2nd ed.).pdf
HICKMAN, I. (2002). Practical Radio-Frequency Handbook (3rd ed.).pdf
JACK, K. (2001). Video Demystified – A Handbook for the Digital Engineer (3rd ed.).pdf
JACK, K. (2002). Dictionary of Video and Television Technology.pdf
JENNINGS, D. (1995). Introduction to Medical Electronics Applications.pdf
KAMINOW, I. P. (1997). Optical Fiber Telecommunications III-A.pdf
KAMINOW, I. P. (1997). Optical Fiber Telecommunications III-B.pdf
KAMINOW, I. P. (2001). Optical Fiber Telecommunications IV-A.pdf
KAMINOW, I. P. (2001). Optical Fiber Telecommunications IV-B.pdf
KASHYAP, R. (1999). Fiber Bragg Gratings.pdf
KESTER, W. (2003). Mixed-Signal and DSP Design Techniques.pdf
KITCHEN, R. (2001). RF and Microwave Radiation Safety Handbook (2nd ed.).pdf
KOLAWOLE, M. O. (2002). Radar Systems, Peak Detection and Tracking.pdf
KUFFEL, E. (2000). High Voltage Engineering – Fundamentals (2nd ed.).pdf
LAUGHTON, M. A. (2002). Electrical Engineer’s Reference Book (16th ed.).pdf
LEE, N.-C. (2001) Reflow Soldering Processes and Troubleshootin.pdf
LEVEN, A. (2000). Telecommunications Circuits and Technology.pdf
LIPOVSKI, G. J. (1999). Introduction to Microcontrollers – Architecture.pdf
LIPOVSKI, G. J. (1999). Single- and Multi-Chip Microcontroller Interfacing.pdf
MALLAT, S. (1999). A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing (2nd ed.).pdf
MANCINI, R. (2002). Op Amps for Everyone.pdf
MANDYAM, G. (2002). Third-Generation CDMA Systems for Enhanced Data Services.pdf
MARKVART, T. Practical Handbook of Photovoltaics – Fundamentals and Applications.pdf
MAXFIELD, C. (2002). Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (2nd ed.).pdf
MAZDA, F. (1997). Power Electronics Handbook (3rd ed.).pdf
MCMILLAN, A. (1998). Electrical Installations in Hazardous Areas.pdf
MIDDLETON, W. M. (2001). Reference Data for Engineers – 9th ed.pdf
NASSAR, C. (2000) Telecommunications Demystified.pdf
NIXON, M. S. (2002) Feature Extraction and Image Processing.pdf
PARR, E. A. (2003) Programmable Controllers – An Engineer’s Guide (3rd ed.).pdf
PEASE, R. A. (1991) Troubleshooting Analog Circuits .pdf
RASHID, M. H. (2001) Power Electronics Handbook.pdf
REZNIK, L. (1997) Fuzzy Controllers.pdf
RIBBENS, W. B. (1997) Understanding Automotive Electronics (5th ed.).pdf
SCHEIBER, S. F. (2001) Building a Successful Board-Test Strategy (2nd ed.).pdf
SCHMITT, R. (2002) Electromagnetics Explained .pdf
SEKKAT, Z. (2002). Photoreactive Organic Thin Films.pdf
SELF, D. (2002). Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook (3rd ed.).pdf
SINCLAIR, I. R. (1998). Audio and Hi-Fi Handbook (3rd ed.).pdf
SINCLAIR, I. R. (2001). Sensors and Transducers (3rd ed.).pdf
SINGHAL, S. C. (2002). High Temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cells – Funda.pdf
SMITH, S. W. (2003) Digital Signal Processing – A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists.pdf
STRAUSS, R. (1998). SMT Soldering Handbook – Surface Mount Technology (2nd ed.).pdf
TERASHIMA, N. (2001). Intelligent Communication Systems.pdf
TERRELL, D. L. (1996). Op Amps – Design, Application, and Troubleshooting (2nd ed.).pdf
THEODORIDIS, S. (2002). Pattern Recognition (2nd ed.).pdf
TINDER, R. F. (2000). Engineering Digital Design (2nd ed.).pdf
TOOLEY, M. (2002). Newnes Data Communications Pocket Book (4th ed.).pdf
TRICKER, R. (2000). CE Conformity Marking and New Approach Directives.pdf
TRUNDLE, E. (2001). Newnes Guide to Television and Video Technology (3rd ed.).pdf
VAN SICKLE, T. (2001). Programming Microcontrollers in C (2nd ed.).pdf
VARTERESIAN, J. (2002). Fabricating Printed Circuit Boards.pdf
WANHAMMER, L. (1999). DSP Integrated Circuits.pdf
WARNE, D. F. (2000). Newnes Electrical Engineer’s Handbook.pdf
WILLIAMS, J. (1991). Analog Circuit Design – Art, Science, and Personalities.pdf
WILLIAMS, J. (1998). The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design.pdf
WILLIAMS, T. (2001). EMC for Product Designers (3rd ed.).pdf
WINDER, S. (2002). Analog and Digital Filter Design (2nd ed.).pdf
WINDER, S. (2002). Newnes Radio and RF Engineering Pocket Book (3rd ed.).pdf
YU, F. T. S. (2001). Introduction to Information Optics.pdf
[/center]
Download
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3298864124/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part1.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3298864404/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part2.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3299605474/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part3.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3299605574/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part4.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3299605734/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part5.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3299618114/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part6.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/3299605694/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part7.rar
Or
http://www.fileserve.com/file/zVG3At4/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part1.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/6tEVgBd/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part2.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/QfETNtY/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part3.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/teute9y/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part4.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/menjY2C/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part5.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/Ap9xct8/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part6.rar
http://www.fileserve.com/file/NgPp9NA/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part7.rar
Or
http://www.filejungle.com/f/TNAYWz/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part1.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/Xnj8Hm/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part2.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/ZAPX9z/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part3.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/DH7QJa/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part4.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/v7AqpB/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part5.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/7mgZFG/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part6.rar
http://www.filejungle.com/f/betFHZ/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part7.rar
Or
http://filepost.com/files/3a6936f4/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part1.rar
http://filepost.com/files/9fcd465m/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part2.rar
http://filepost.com/files/f3c1c5e4/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part3.rar
http://filepost.com/files/27df8139/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part4.rar
http://filepost.com/files/m3cc1451/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part5.rar
http://filepost.com/files/cbeb72a9/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part6.rar
http://filepost.com/files/e44c2fb8/Collection.of.Books.Ultimate.Electronics.part7.rar

Helpful Mouse Fetuses Naturally Send Stem Cells to Mom to Fix Her Damaged Heart

2011-11-22T16:14:00.001-08:00

Cardiomyocytes damaged by a heart attack

What’s the News: Scientists are devoting countless research hours to treatments based on embryonic stem cells, differentiating these blank-slate cells from embryos into brain cells, light-sensing retinal cells, blood cells, and more to replace damaged or destroyed tissues in the body. Now, a new study in mice shows such that nature has arrived at just such a solution, too: When a pregnant mouse has a heart attack, her fetus donates some of its stem cells to help rebuild the damaged heart tissue.

How the Heck:

The researchers started with two lines of mice: normal mice and mice genetically engineered to express green fluorescent protein (GFP), which glows a distinctive green when exposed to blue light, in their cells. They mated normal female mice with GFP-producing male mice. This meant that half the resulting fetuses had the GFP gene, too, making their cells glow, too. Twelve days later—a little less than two-thirds of the way through a normal mouse pregnancy—the researchers gave half the pregnant mice heart attacks.

When the scientists examined the female mice’s heart tissue two weeks after the heart attacks, they found lots of glowing green tissue—cells that came from the fetus—in the mom’s heart. Mice who had heart attacks had eight times as many cells from the fetus in their hearts as mice who hadn’t had a heart attack did, meaning the high volume of fetal cells was a response to the heart attack.

What’s more, the embryo’s stem cells had differentiated into various types of heart tissue, including cardiomyocytes, the rhythmically contracting muscle cells that produce a heartbeat.

What’s the Context:

Doctors have observed that women who experience weakness of the heart during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth have better recovery rates than any other group of heart failure patients. This study suggests that fetal stem cells may help human mothers, as well as mice, recover from heart damage. It may also explain another curious clinical observation: The hearts of two women who suffered from severe heart weakness were later found to contain cells derived from the cells of a male fetus years after they gave birth to their sons.

The same thing seems to hold true for other organs. When pregnant women have damage in other organs, including the brain, lung, and liver, earlier studies have shown, fetal cells show up there, too.

The Future Holds: Since fetal stem cells can be readily isolated from the placenta, the researchers point out, they could provide a plentiful source of stem cells for treating heart damage.

Reference: Rina J. Kara et al. “Fetal Cells Traffic to Injured Maternal Myocardium and Undergo Cardiac Differentiation.”Circulation Research, published online November 14, 2011. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.111.249037

Chocolate Swirl Cookies

2011-11-20T22:38:00.001-08:00

These biscuits are two layer of cookie dough, one of them chocolate, rolled and sliced into biscuits. To make two same sized, even sheets of cookie dough, I use the wax paper envelope trick, rolling the dough between folded wax paper to create a rectangular even shape.

Ingredients
500 gms Cake Flour
1 Large Egg
150 gms Butter
16 gms Coco Powder
1 1/2 Tablespoon Water
Wax paper

Preparation
1. Cut the butter into pieces, and put into a mixture. Blend till soft.
2. Add the flour, egg and mix, add the water a little at a time, while mixing.
3. Don't over mix the dough, you just want it evenly mixed, if you over work the dough, the finished biscuits will be hard.
4. Split the mix into two equal portions, take one half out, and leave one half in the mixer.
5. Add the coco-powder to the mixer half and mix just until the coco powder is spread through the dough.
6. Take a piece of wax paper (about 12 inches by 24 inches, 30cms x 60 cms), fold it in half along the longest side, then fold over the edges 2 inches (5cms) on each open edge to form an envelope as shown below. Make up 4 of these envelopes, you will need two for chocolate dough and two for regular dough. The size needs to be correct for the quantities of the ingredients - it will give you the correct thickness dough.

7. Cut the chocolate dough in half, and place half inside the envelope, folding the edges back.
8. Turn the envelope so the folds face downwards and roll the mixture to the edges and corners and make it flat and even.
9. Cut the white dough in half, place half inside a different wax paper envelope. Fold the edges of this one back, place the envelope fold-side-down and roll this one, also to be even and rectangular.
10. When you open the envelope, peel off the paper from one side, now close it again, flip the envelope over and peel it off the other side. Do this for both white and chocolate doughs.
11. Open the envelopes, lay the chocolate dough onto the white dough, if you life it with the wax paper it is easier. At this point you should have a layer of wax paper at the bottom, then a layer of white cookie dough, then a layer of chocolate cookie dough.
12. Now it needs to be rolled like a swiss roll. Lift the edge of the wax paper and roll the dough. As you do, peel back the wax paper. (You don't want the wax paper in the roll!).
13. Once you've got a sausage of dough, wrap it in the wax paper, twists the ends to form a wax-paper wrapped sausage and place them in the freezer for 1 hour. This is to make it hard enough to slice.
14. Cut the biscuits into 1 cms thick cross sections (1/3rd of an inch), place on a greased baking sheet (or better still a non-stick silicone baking sheet) and bake in the middle of a medium oven, at 180 degrees Celsius for 12-15 minutes.

Complete National Geographic on 6 DVD-ROMs - 2010 Updated Edition $29.95

2011-11-17T16:23:00.001-08:00

Special National Geographic Customer Price (limited time only): $29.95

What a woman’s brain looks like on sex

2011-11-17T16:21:00.001-08:00

What does a woman’s brain look like while she’s having an orgasm?

Apparently, its like a multi-layered, multicoloured abstract or neon sign that flashes on and off. Or so an animated video of a woman’s brain as she reaches orgasm using brain scan images reveals.

VIDEO: Watch a woman’s brain as she approaches, reaches and recovers from an orgasm.

It’s all part of research to understand how the brain and sexuality work, said Barry Komisaruk, a psychology professor at Rutgers University who presented the video at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington.

Nan Wise

“Her first post-graduate work at Rutgers University was in the field of neuroscience which she says is her "first love." While earning an M.S.W. in Social Work, she continued to read and study independently in neuroscience, a discipline which heavily influences her work, especially the creation of the Desire Curve. Then in 2007 she was invited by Dr. Barry Komisaruk and Dr. Beverly Whipple (co-authors of The Science of Orgasm) to be a co-investigator on their prestigious fMRI brain scan studies on orgasm and pain.”

Asked to choose between bacon and sex, 43 per cent of Canadians would choose...bacon!

2011-11-15T15:34:00.001-08:00

According to a recent national survey, Canadians are passionate about bacon. When asked to choose between bacon and sex, more than four in 10 (43%) chose bacon! Maple Leaf commissioned this Angus Reid For the Love of Bacon survey to mark the launch of their newest product innovation, Maple LeafReclosable Bacon.

Dont have to choose no more thanks to bacon lube!

Jesus Riding a velociraptor!

2011-11-14T22:14:00.001-08:00

Walking on water is so passé. Jesus knows riding a raptor is where it's at.
~ Professionally printed silkscreen
~ High-quality, 100% cotton tee.
~ Available in multiple colors
~ Ships within 2 business days
~ Designed and printed in the USA

Only$6.00 Or 10 For $50

Obese Monkeys Lose Weight On Drug That Attacks Blood Supply of Fat Cells

2011-11-12T13:08:00.001-08:00

An anti-obesity drug that homes in on and destroys blood vessels that support fat reduced the weight of obese rhesus monkeys by 11 percent in one month. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center)

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) — Obese rhesus monkeys lost on average 11 percent of their body weight after four weeks of treatment with an experimental drug that selectively destroys the blood supply of fat tissue, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports in Science Translational Medicine.

Body mass index (BMI) and abdominal circumference (waistline) also were reduced, while all three measures were unchanged in untreated control monkeys. Imaging studies also showed a substantial decrease in body fat among treated animals.

"Development of this compound for human use would provide a non-surgical way to actually reduce accumulated white fat, in contrast to current weight-loss drugs that attempt to control appetite or prevent absorption of dietary fat," said co-senior author Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson's David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers.

Previous attempts to treat obesity have predominantly focused on drugs aimed at suppressing appetite or increasing metabolism, the researchers noted, but these efforts have been hampered by their toxic side-effects. The MD Anderson group designed a new drug, which includes a homing agent that binds to a protein on the surface of fat-supporting blood vessels and a synthetic peptide that triggers cell death. Their blood supply gone, fat cells are reabsorbed and metabolized.

"Obesity is a major risk factor for developing cancer, roughly the equivalent of tobacco use, and both are potentially reversible" said co-senior author Wadih Arap, M.D., Ph.D., also professor in the Koch Center. "Obese cancer patients do worse in surgery, with radiation or on chemotherapy -- worse by any measure."

Monkeys are spontaneously obese In earlier preclinical research, obese mice lost about 30 percent of their body weight with the drug, now called Adipotide. The drug acts on white adipose tissue, the scientific name for the unhealthy type of fat that accumulates under the skin and around the abdomen, and is a disease and mortality predictor.

"Most drugs against obesity fail in transition between rodents and primates," Pasqualini said. "All rodent models of obesity are faulty because their metabolism and central nervous system control of appetite and satiety are very different from primates, including humans. We're greatly encouraged to see substantial weight loss in a primate model of obesity that closely matches the human condition."

The rhesus monkeys in the current study were "spontaneously" obese, said study first author Kirstin Barnhart, D.V.M, Ph.D., a veterinary clinical pathologist at MD Anderson's Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research in Bastrop, Texas. No specific actions were taken to make them overweight; they became so by overeating the same foods provided to other monkeys in the colony and avoiding physical activity.

The wider problems of obesity This primate model also shares other physiological features associated with human obesity, such as metabolic syndrome, characterized by an increased resistance to insulin, which can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Adipotide-treated monkeys showed marked improvements in insulin resistance -- using about 50 percent less insulin after treatment.

Arap, Pasqualini and colleagues are preparing for a clinical trial in which obese prostate cancer patients would receive daily injections of Adipotide for 28 consecutive days. "The question is, will their prostate cancer become better if we can reduce their body weight and the associated health risks," Arap said.

Some prostate cancer treatments, such as hormone therapy, cause weight gain. Greater weight can lead to arthritis, which in turn causes inactivity that leads to more weight gain, a cascade effect of co-morbidities, Arap said. Fat cells also secrete growth hormones that cancer cells thrive upon.

Overall and abdominal body fat levels drop, with reversible renal side effects Weight, BMI and abdominal circumference all continued to drop for three weeks after treatment ended before slowly beginning to reverse during the fourth week of the follow-up period.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) was used to gauge abdominal body fat, thought to be the most dangerous area for humans to gain weight in terms of raising disease risk. Treated monkeys' abdominal fat levels fell by 27 percent during the study. Fat levels increased slightly in the control group.

Lean monkeys did not lose weight in a separate study to test for potential effects of the drug in non-obese animals, indicating that the drug's effect may be selective for obese subjects.

Monkeys in the studies remained bright and alert throughout, interacting with caretakers and demonstrating no signs of nausea or food avoidance. This is a potentially important finding since unpleasant side-effects have limited the use of approved drugs that reduce fat absorption in the intestines.

The principal side effects were noted in the kidneys. "The renal effect was dose-dependent, predictable and reversible," Barnhart noted.

Second drug developed via vascular ZIP codes This study is the second drug developed using a vascular mapping technique created by the Arap-Pasqualini lab. Blood vessels, they found, are more than a uniform and ubiquitous "pipeline" that serves the circulatory system, but differ depending on the organ or tissue that they support.

They have developed a way of screening peptides -- small bits of proteins -- to identify those that bind to specific vascular cells among the many possible "ZIP codes" present in a human vascular map. For blood vessels that support fat cells, the target protein is prohibitin, which they found in unusual abundance on the blood vessel cell surface.

"The same delivery system used in mice and monkeys was recently validated in human white fat, as reported recently by our group," Arap said.

An earlier drug, which uses a different molecular address to target the blood supply of prostate cancer, has been evaluated in a first-in-man clinical trial, just completed at MD Anderson. MD Anderson and some of its researchers, including Arap and Pasqualini, have equity positions in drug-development companies Alvos Therapeutics and Ablaris Therapeutics, which are subjected to certain restrictions under institutional policy. MD Anderson manages and monitors the terms of these arrangements in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policy.

This research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, AngelWorks, the Gillson-Longenbaugh Foundation, the Kleberg Foundation, the Marcus Foundation and the Prostate Cancer Foundation. 11/9/11

Zynga worlds most evil company taking it to another new level

2011-11-10T13:45:00.001-08:00

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, after generously giving shares to top talent in the company, last year began demanding that certain employees surrender some shares or be fired. Shayndi Raice has the story on Digits.

SAN FRANCISCO—Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Mark Pincus often gave shares rather than high salaries to his top talent as he built his online-game start-up.

But as Zynga grew into a multibillion-dollar company with hot games like "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars," Mr. Pincus appears to have developed giver's remorse.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, at a company event last month, asked certain employees to surrender some restricted shares or face dismissal.

Early last year, as Mr. Pincus began preparing to take Zynga public, he and several other executives decided the company had doled out too many stock rights to certain people in its early days, say people familiar with the matter. The executives chose an unusual solution: They began demanding that certain employees surrender some shares or be fired.

Those shares matter as Zynga approaches an initial public offering, expected this year, that could value it at close to $20 billion and make holders of large blocks of stock wealthy.

Zynga's demand for the return of shares could expose the company to employment litigation—and, were the practice to catch on and spread, would erode a central pillar of Silicon Valley culture, in which start-ups with limited cash and a risk of failure dangle the possibility of stock riches in order to lure talent.

Built into that arrangement is the chance that founders will later wish they hadn't given away so much stock, and also that some very early employees will end up with bigger windfalls than latecomers who contribute more to the company. Many in Silicon Valley cite an early-hired Google Inc. cook whose stock was worth $20 million after the firm's 2004 IPO.

Zynga attempted to avoid such pitfalls. In meetings last year, Zynga executives said they didn't want a "Google chef" situation, said a person with knowledge of the discussions.

The result was a list compiled by top Zynga executives of employees whose job performance might not justify their large grants of restricted shares, which are shares that are doled out free but don't immediately "vest" and become saleable. Some employees Zynga reviewed had total grants worth tens of millions of dollars. Demands to return stock, however, applied only to portions of not-yet-vested share grants.

One list that Mr. Pincus kept, said people familiar with it, was known as his MIA list, for executives who did so little he considered them "missing in action."

Zynga declined to make Mr. Pincus available for an interview.

Andrew Trader, one of the first people Mr. Pincus brought in when he decided to found Zynga in 2007, eventually ended up on a broader list of people the CEO felt might have too much restricted stock, according to a person with knowledge of the list.

Mr. Trader—whose early duties, paradoxically, had included handing out shares to employees—left in March 2010, leaving behind some unvested shares but receiving a settlement, said people familiar with his situation. Mr. Trader didn't respond to requests for comment.

A person knowledgeable about another early hire's case said that during the first half of 2010, Mr. Pincus told this employee he had too many unvested shares and had to return a portion of them or Mr. Pincus would fire him. If so, he would lose all of the unvested stock.

Two female room-mates 'tied up teenager and cut him 300 times during two-day satanic sex torture marathon'

2011-11-10T13:27:00.001-08:00

Two female room-mates have been arrested after a teenager told police that he had been tortured at knife-point during a two-day satanic sex marathon.

The 18-year-old victim told police officers in Milwaukee that he was tied up with duct tape and rope by the pair and cut more than 300 times.

The teenager had met Rebecca Chandler, 22, and Raven Larabee, 20, online and had taken a bus from Phoenix, Arizona, to meet the pair at the apartment they shared.

Under investigation: Room-mates Rebecca Chandler, left, and Raven Larrabee, 20, have been arrested after a teenage boy told police he had been tortured during a satanic sex marathon

But it appears that things may have gotten far more out of hand than he planned.

After leaving the flat on Sunday night he called the police from the street.

Officers were able to find the apartment where he had been simply by following the trail of blood.

He had a gruesome catalogue of injuries, including slash and puncture wounds on his neck, legs, arm and back.

It is not clear what had tempted the boy to the girls' apartment but it is believed he may have been lured by the promise of sex.

Discovered: Odd books including 'The Werewolf's Guide to Life' were found in the pair's apartment

According to a search warrant obtained by The Smoking Gun website, when police officers arrived at the apartment, Ms Chandler said: 'I think you are looking for me.'

The warrant claims that Ms Chandler told officers that the cutting between the pair and the teen started out as consensual but 'got out of hand'.

It also says that she tried to put most of the blame on her 20-year-old room-mate.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, police also saw 'a large amount of blood on the floor and on bedding' .

They also found books including 'The Werewolf’s Guide to Life' 'The Necromantic Ritual Rule Book' and 'Intro to Sigilborne Spirits'.

The women, who have not been charged, are being held in custody on suspicion of reckless injury.

Polish newspaper claims 'Pedobear' is 2010 Vancouver Olympic mascot

2011-11-10T02:24:00.001-08:00

A Polish newspaper mistakenly identified "Pedobear", a notorious internet meme, as one of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The Gazeta Olsztynska published an image showing the bear alongside genuine Olympic mascots Quatchi, Sumi, Miga and Mukmuk to illustrate a feature about the Games.

It appears that the newspaper lifted the picture from Google Images, unaware that it had been created as a prank by Michael Barrick, a Canadian artist and graphic designer.

Pedobear, who is on the far right of the picture, was originally devised by members of the anarchic 4chan message board as a way of mocking users who expressed a sexual interest in young people.

Since then a tasteless internet trend – or meme – has emerged in which users insert the bear into other photos in a contest to create the most inappropriate composite image.

On his blog yesterday Mr Barrick wrote that online amusement about the newspaper's error had sparked a surge of interest in his artwork, and hinted that the financial burden of the Games on Canadian taxpayers was the motivation for his mischievous creation.

He wrote: "There seems to be a Tweet about this coming up every minute or two. The day before this started I was amused by the 27,000 hits I got in January. Yesterday alone I got 120,000 (with about one third coming from Poland) and today is looking like it will top that by at least double."

He added: "Maybe I'll just keep the money to help cover the price gouging, raised taxes, disappearing arts funding, and all the other "benefits" we Vancouverites are getting from the games that are kicking me in the back pocket."

The four genuine mascots of the Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics were inspired by traditional native creatures.

Western black rhino declared extinct

2011-11-09T23:43:00.001-08:00

No wild black rhinos remain in West Africa, according to the latest global assessment of threatened species.

The Red List, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has declared the subspecies extinct.

A subspecies of white rhino in central Africa is also listed as possibly extinct, the organisation says.

The annual update of the Red List now records more threatened species than ever before.

The IUCN reports that despite conservation efforts, 25% of the world's mammals are at risk of extinction. As part of its latest work it has reassessed several rhinoceros groups.

Poaching vulnerability

As well as declaring the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) extinct, it records the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), a subspecies in central Africa, as being on the brink of extinction.

The last Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) outside Java is also believed to have disappeared.

Overall numbers of black and white rhinos have been rising, but some subspecies have been particularly vulnerable to poaching by criminal gangs who want to trade the animals' valuable horns.

Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, told BBC News: "They had the misfortune of occurring in places where we simply weren't able to get the necessary security in place.

"You've got to imagine an animal walking around with a gold horn; that's what you're looking at, that's the value and that's why you need incredibly high security."

Another focus for this year's list is Madagascar and its reptiles. The report found that 40% of terrestrial reptiles are threatened. But it also says that new areas have been designated for conservation.

Przewalski's horse has benefited from a breeding programme

That will help protect endangered species including Tarzan's chameleon (Calumma tarzan) and the limbless skink (Paracontias fasika).

Among the success stories identified in the latest annual update is the reintroduction of the Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus). Listed extinct in the wild in 1996, it was brought back after a captive breeding programme and the wild population is now thought to exceed 300.

Among the partner organisations involved in compiling the research for the list is the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

ZSL's Dr Monika Boehm said: "This Red List update very much shows us a mixed picture of what's happening to the world's species. There's some good news and some bad news.

"Unfortunately, the overall trend is still a decline in biodiversity. We still haven't achieved our conservation potential."

Angry birds is the new snake

2011-11-09T18:48:00.001-08:00

"The 50 million individuals who have downloaded 'Angry Birds' play roughly 200 million minutes of the game a day, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year, more than ten times the 100 million hours spent creating Wikipedia over the entire life span of the online encyclopedia. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Charles L. Mauro performs a cognitive teardown of the user experience of Angry Birds and concludes that the game is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user's mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology. The birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased ... For example, why are tiny bananas suddenly strewn about in some play sequences and not in others? Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? Why is the game's play space showing a cross section of underground rocks and dirt? One can spend a lot of time processing these little clues, consciously or subconsciously. 'Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games,' writes Mauro. 'You go Birds! Your success certainly makes others Angry and envious.'"

One-molecule nanocar takes a test drive

2011-11-09T18:41:00.001-08:00

Just a couple of months after nanoengineers at Tufts University developed an 18-atom single-molecule electric motor, researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have gone one better: They’ve made a car, and again using just a single molecule.

To create the vehicle, Tibor Kudernac and colleagues crafted a molecule with a long body and four “paddle” (wheel) features attached at each corner. The molecule was created with a bottom-up process, where each part of the molecule is gently slotted together. By applying tiny amounts of electricity with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to the finished vehicle, the wheels are forced to make a quarter turn. The wheels naturally take another quarter turn to restore equilibrium — and then the STM starts the process all over again.

The end result is very slow forward movement — six nanometers per 10 electric pulses — and the nanocar can only be controlled in a high-vacuum, near-absolute-zero temperatures as ambient energy results in the car moving around on its own. It is an electric vehicle made from just a (very tiny) handful of atoms, though — and yes, it could be used to carry tiny loads of cargo. According to one of the team members, Karl-Heinz Earnst, the next step is to “put some cars at the back and pull them along,” just like a train.

And what do you put in the cars? Pharmaceuticals, generally. The idea is that — one day, when near-freezing vacuums aren’t required — you could drive anti-cancer drugs to a tumor. The most significant part of this discovery, though, are the wheels — which are ultimately tiny motors. If we’re ever going to live in a world where nanobots are at our beck and call, we need tiny motors with infinitesimal power requirements — and that’s exactly what this tiny car is.

Mapping a World of Human Activity

2011-11-09T18:39:00.001-08:00

"A Cartography of the Anthropocene maps the various ways that global humanity connects and is interdependent. From the article: 'Using data gathered from US government agencies, anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes has created a collection of maps that illustrate the various circulatory systems that connect humanity: cities, roads, railways, power lines, pipelines, cable Internet, airlines, and shipping lanes. The maps are remarkable cartographic documents of our current age, but also serve deeper research and educational purposes.'"

more pictures here http://globaia.org/en/anthropocene/

Rugby player who had stroke woke up gay and became hairdresser

2011-11-09T17:45:00.001-08:00

Chris Birch retrained as a hairdresser and now lives with his partner Photo: Wales News Service / Splash News

7:29AM GMT 09 Nov 2011

Chris Birch, 26, suffered a stroke during during a freak training accident when he attempted a back flip and broke his neck.

But folllowing his recovery he quit his bank job to become a hairdresser, grew to hate sport, called off his engagement and started dating a man.

"I was gay when I woke up and I still am," he said. "It sounds strange but when I came round I immediately felt different. I wasn't interested in women any more.

"I had never been attracted to a man before - I'd never even had any gay friends. But I didn't care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings."

Prior to the accident, Mr Birch was planning on settling down with his girlfriend and spent weekends playing sport and drinking with his mates.

Mr Birch, of Ystrad Mynach, South Wales, said: "Suddenly I hated every thing about my old life. I didn't get on with my friends, I hated sport and found my job boring.

"I started to take more pride in my appearance, bleached my hair and started working out. I went from a 19st skinhead, to a 11st preened man.

People I used to know barely recognised me and with my new look I became even more confident."

He retrained as a hairdresser and now lives with his partner Jack Powell, 19, above the salon he works in.

Two years ago it was reported that Alan Brown, from Malvern, Worcestershire, woke from a stroke to find he was able to paint and draw in incredible detail, despite no previous evidence of the skill.

The father of three said the experience must have 'flicked a switch' in the creative part of his brain.

And Mr Birch certainly has no regrets about his transformation. 'I'm nothing like the old Chris now but I wouldn't change a thing,' he said.

"I think I'm happier than ever, so I don't regret the accident.

Stroke Association spokesman Joe Korner said: "During recovery the brain makes new neural connections which can trigger things people weren't aware of, such as accent, language or perhaps a different sexuality."

Khan Academy Gets $5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a Physical School

2011-11-06T17:13:00.001-08:00

Khan Academy announced on 04. Nov, 2011 that it has raised $5 million from the O’Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O’Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program’s learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program.

The $5 million marks the latest in funding for the non-profit, which has received over $2 million in grants from the Gates Foundation and from Google.

Part of the lure of the Sal Khan narrative is this idea that he is single-handedly educating the world through his self-made YouTube videos. No doubt, you can point to page and video views to make a case about his impact.

Khan has long kept full control over the “instruction”, or rather the video creation — all the content has been created by him. That changed last month, as I reported here, when Khan Academy struck a partnership with SmartHistory, bringing on that organization’s Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker as art history instructors. The money from the O’Sullivan Foundation will be used in part to expand the Khan Academy further, to at least 5 full-time-equivalent teachers.

The O’Sullivan Foundation grant will also be used to build what’s described as “a crowd-sourced content management and curation system.” Details are sketchy on exactly what this entails, but the press release compares it to Wikipedia, saying it’s a “similar outlet for dedicated professionals to develop quality instructional content.” The system will also enable others to tap into some of the tools and analytics that Khan Academy is developing.

Khan Academy intern David Hu offered some great insight this week into what these analytics look like. In a blog post entitled, “How Khan Academy Is Using Machine Learning to Assess Student Mastery,” Hu detailed the efforts underway at Khan Academy to rethink how its model for student proficiency works. Currently, it relies on a “streak” — that is, students must get a certain number of questions right in a row in order to move on. Hu proposes an alternate approach to ascertaining whether or not a student has gained proficiency (defined as a 94% or greater likelihood of correctly answering the next question asked involving that skill) using a logical regression model. Hu hypothesizes that with this new proficiency model, learning outcomes should increase, in part by moving students off of problems that they’re good at more quickly.

With its current level of funding, no doubt Khan Academy has been able to attract some real super-star engineering talent to its team — a team that has remained fairly small. There are, I think, under 20 employees, including the recent SmartHistory additions. But it’s worth noting that while the engineering brainpower is sizable here, the number of teachers (past or present) on board is small.

“Teachers don’t scale,” I remember Sal Khan saying to me when I interviewed him last year. What can scale, he argues, is the infrastructure for content delivery. And that means you just need a handful of good lecturers’ record their lessons; the Internet will take care of the rest.

But online instruction clearly isn’t enough, and as “blended learning” becomes the latest buzzword — that is, a blend of offline and computer-mediated/online instruction — Khan Academy is now eyeing building its own school. The money from the O’Sullivan Foundation will go towards developing a “testbed for physical programs and K-12 curricula,” including an actual physical Khan Academy school. This will begin in June 2012 as a series of summer camps.

“The school of the future will not resemble the school of today,” Khan says. “In the past, the assembly-line, lecture-homework-exam model existed because that’s what was possible in the no-tech and low-tech classrooms of their day.” His team now have $5 million to take that lecture-homework-exam model into the high-tech classroom… or something.

Science strikes again! Let's rip up space and see what's underneath. What could go wrong?

2011-11-03T22:57:00.001-07:00

"Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."

The World’s Largest Family: 181 Live in 100-Room House

2011-11-03T22:54:00.001-07:00

Meet the world’s largest family, who presides in Baktwang, India, and lives in a four-story house with 100 rooms.

The head of the family is Ziona Chana, a construction worker, and the 181 members of his family include: him, 39 wives, 94 children, 14 daughters-in-law and 33 grandchildren.

Ziona’s youngest child is five years old and the 67-year-old family head insists that he is blessed.

“I consider myself a lucky man to be the husband of 39 women and head of the world’s largest family,” he told the media.

There is a hierarchy of command reminiscent of military training at the family’s 100-room, four-story home.

First wife, Zathiangi, 71, organizes all the others when it comes to household chores. All of the wives in the family have to take turns sleeping in Ziona’s double bed, which has proven to be an extremely fertile sleeping place.

Ziona belongs to and is the leader of the Christian Chana sect, which includes some 4,000 followers and permits polygamy. His marriages seem to be almost noble, as many of his wives were formerly poor and orphaned village women.

Apart from the gargantuan task of doing the laundry, can you imagine mealtime at this household?

Scrat, the fictional saber-toothed squirrel from the Ice Age films, may not be so fictional after all.

2011-11-03T22:16:00.001-07:00

Credit: Illustration by Jorge Gonzalez/© Guillermo Rougier

Scrat, the fictional saber-toothed squirrel from the Ice Age films, may not be so fictional after all.

"Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely used to pierce its insect prey. The creature, pieced together from skull fragments unearthed in Argentina and dubbed Cronopio dentiacutus, was not ancestral to us or any living mammal. Instead, it belonged to an extinct group called dryolestoids, a cadre of fuzzy mammals that scurried about in the shadow of long-necked dinosaurs."

Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely used to pierce its insect prey. The creature, pieced together from skull fragments unearthed in Argentina and dubbed Cronopio dentiacutus, was not ancestral to us or any living mammal. Instead, researchers report online today in Nature, it belonged to an extinct group called dryolestoids, a cadre of fuzzy mammals that scurried about in the shadow of long-necked dinosaurs, as in the artist's impression above. The new discovery extends the known record of the dryolestoid mammals in South America back 60 million years from what was previously known. There were no acorns around at the time though, so Cronopio—like Scrat—would have had to do without them.

board games actually worth buying?

2011-11-03T19:23:00.001-07:00

Large Format Games (3+ hours / Extremely complex Rulesets)

Disclaimer: DO NOT START WITH THESE GAMES

[32] Battlestar Galactica (Fantasy Flight)
[33] Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Fantasy Flight)
[34] Arkham Horror (Fantasy Flight)
[35] Twilight Struggle - Wargame (GMT)
[36] Merchants & Marauders (Z-Man)
[37] 1830 / 18xx : (GMT or Mayfair)

My Top 5 Favorites

[38] Le Havre (Z-Man)
[39] Battlestar Galactica (Fantasy Flight)
[40] 1846 18xx Game
[41] Agricola (Z-Man)
[42] Dvonn (Rio Grande)

Board Game Geek's Top 100

/r/boardgames

Shameless cut copy paste from Redditor Kitanata

Bacteria used to cleanup uranium

2011-11-03T18:58:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy

Researchers at Stanford and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using bacteria to reduce uranium to safe levels at sites such as this one in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where four unlined settling pits were built in 1951. Uranium-bearing wastes were piped in until 1983 and seeped into soils and groundwater. The site is now a parking lot.

BY HANNAH HICKEY

While the Cold War ended decades ago, its legacy will live for centuries in toxic waste. In remote corners of the country from Tennessee to the Pacific Northwest, dozens of federal laboratories struggle to clean up contaminants left from 50 years of weapons programs. New results show a promising technique for cleaning up uranium from some of the most severely contaminated areas by harnessing the powers of microbes already in the soil.

"Toxic uranium is often found in groundwater at places where uranium was either mined or enriched to make weapons," said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. "This uranium-contaminated water can migrate into surface waters, where it becomes a threat to organisms and water supplies. Excavation of contaminated soil or pumping and treating the water are prohibitively expensive and lead to additional disposal issues. An alternative is to stimulate naturally occurring subsurface microorganisms that can convert the dissolved uranium into a solid form that is not susceptible to transport by water."

For the past six years, a research team at Stanford headed by Criddle has worked with a research team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee headed by Phil Jardine, a soil chemist and distinguished research staff scientist there, to develop a possible solution to the problem. The group's strategy took groundwater that originally contained more than 1,000 times the drinking-water regulatory limit for uranium and brought concentrations down to the limit. The technique and its early results are described in a pair of papers to appear June 15 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. The papers were published online on May 13.

Funding for the $4.6 million, six-year project was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE Environmental Remediation Sciences Program (ERSP) supports basic research on bioremediation—the use of living organisms to clean up toxic waste—and aims to devise a safe, cost-effective solution to the problem of uranium contamination. It also oversees the Stanford-ORNL project and other field research projects at Oak Ridge and other locations. Until the early 1980s, the Oak Ridge laboratory enriched uranium for use in bombs. Wastewater was dumped in four unlined settling pits. When production ceased, lab officials drained the ponds, filled them with dirt and paved a parking lot the size of four football fields to cover the site.

That site is now home to an ERSP Field Research Center—the first DOE field test site for development of the science and technology needed to understand and predict long-term impacts of contamination and to mitigate those effects at 120 sites in 36 U.S. states and territories. The quantities are enormous: more than 475 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater; 75 million cubic meters of contaminated sediments; and 3 million cubic meters of leaking buried waste. The overarching DOE cleanup program has a budget of $220 billion and a timeline of more than 70 years to develop and implement solutions. This is the largest remediation effort of its type, and possibly the largest environmental cleanup ever attempted, Criddle said.

Among the most common contaminants at DOE sites are radioactive metals. These have spread over areas miles wide, making it impractical to store the dirt in closed containers or build barriers to separate the groundwater from drinking water. Uranium sticks to soil, making it impossible to remove efficiently by pumping contaminated groundwater to the surface and treating it there (where its removal creates another disposal problem). But uranium also doesn't stick well enough to soil—over time, it dissolves into the water and can be transported in the groundwater to surface waters, where it is a threat to wildlife and water supplies. In humans, uranium causes kidney damage and cancer.

Extreme bioengineering

The extreme conditions at the field site called for a wide range of skills that could only be supplied by a large and diverse team. Members of the Stanford group are Criddle and Professors Peter Kitanidis and Scott Fendorf; senior research engineer Wei-Min Wu; consulting Professor Olaf Cirpka; postdoctoral researcher Jian Luo; administrative associate Julie Stevens; and doctoral students Mike Fienen, Margy Gentile, Matt Ginder-Vogel and Jennifer Nyman. Their partners at ORNL include Jardine and about one dozen other researchers and staff. The Stanford-ORNL team also worked with the consulting firm RETEC to design and construct the field system.

An important initial decision was where to work. The Stanford-ORNL team chose to set up camp less than 20 feet from the edge of the parking lot. They targeted groundwater 45 feet down because field measurements indicated that this water carried high levels of uranium from the ponds. But the uranium was not the only thing present in the water. They also discovered a witches' brew of contaminants—the acidic mixture that was leftover from disposal of sulfuric, nitric and hydrochloric acids; toxic heavy metals; and solvents. Dealing with this mixture presented formidable technical challenges for the team but also was an opportunity to develop a strategy that could cut off contamination of the groundwater at its source.

The Stanford-ORNL team members developed a staged approach and employed an unusual amount of engineering to ensure process control, Criddle said. First, they prepared a region of the subsurface for microbial activity. This was accomplished by drilling wells and establishing a recirculation loop: Groundwater containing contaminants that would interfere with the uranium conversion was sucked to the surface, treated to remove those substances, then reinjected. The pH of the recirculating water was then increased from 3.6, roughly the acidity of vinegar, to 6, a level conducive to microbial growth.

After adjusting pH, the researchers provided weekly additions of ethanol to the recirculating water for more than a year. The ethanol stimulated growth of subterranean microbial populations that converted the uranium into an immobile form. After treatment, high levels of uranium remained on the soil, but the groundwater contained almost no uranium. Analysis of the soil-bound uranium confirmed that it was largely converted into the immobile form.

Bacteria are back

Bioremediation was used in the 1980s to clean up toxic organics, mainly spills of fuels and solvents. Bacteria basically ate the fuels—chomping down long-chain hydrocarbons—or they "breathed" the solvents and created nontoxic forms.

"Microorganisms also 'breathe' metals like uranium, converting it into a form that is immobile because it does not appreciably dissolve in water," said Nyman, a doctoral student whose laboratory studies helped to guide operations in the field. After microbes convert the uranium, it's "just sitting there, like a rock," Criddle said. "In future studies, we hope to see how stable we can make that 'rock.' Ideally, it will remain in that form for thousands of years."

Hannah Hickey is a former News Service intern.

Terrifying Talking Robot Can Mimic Human Speech

2011-11-03T03:24:00.001-07:00

The Sawada Group at Kagawa University apparently wants to freak us out as they’ve developed a large robot mouth that can mimic human speech.

Led by Professor Sawada, the mouth and tongue of the robot are made out of several types of silicone rubber while the inside is comprised of plaster, which emulates the structure of the membranes and bones of the inner nose.

According to Sawada, “air is sent from [an air] pump, and goes through a section equivalent to the vocal cords, which vibrate. When that happens, resonance occurs in the parts that touch the mouth. So by moving the mouth, the robot changes the volume of air in the cavity and forms words.”

This is all well and good, but what’s the point? Well, the robot can apparently hear sounds and figure out what motions the mouth needs to make to make it sound more human. It can change pitch by manipulating airflow and can retain information in its brain to make more sounds.

Angry Birds passes half a billion download mark

2011-11-03T03:04:00.001-07:00

"The most popular mobile game in history now has been downloaded more than 500,000,000 times, according to maker Rovio Mobile. Good thing the 300 million minutes of Angry Birds daily playing time around the world aren't being wasted or anything. Rovio chief executive Mikael Hed says: 'This is a fantastic landmark achievement for us, and we’re extremely delighted to see such an incredible amount of people enjoying our games. We remain committed to creating more fun experiences and bringing exceptional quality to Angry Birds Fans everywhere.'"

Strawberries protect the stomach from alcohol

2011-10-26T01:21:00.001-07:00

The positive effects of strawberries are linked to their antioxidant capacity. Credit: Image courtesy of John Wardell

In an experiment on rats, European researchers have proved that eating strawberries reduces the harm that alcohol can cause to the stomach mucous membrane. Published in the open access journal Plos One, the study may contribute to improving the treatment of stomach ulcers.

A team of Italian, Serbian and Spanish researchers has confirmed the protecting effect that strawberries have in a mammal stomach that has been damaged by alcohol. Scientists gave ethanol (ethyl alcohol) to laboratory rats and, according to the study published in the journal Plos One, have thus proved that the stomach mucous membrane of those that had previously eaten strawberry extract suffered less damage.

Sara Tulipani, researcher at the University of Barcelona (UB) and co-author of the study explains that "the positive effects of strawberries are not only linked to their antioxidant capacity and high content of phenolic compounds (anthocyans) but also to the fact that they activate the antioxidant defences and enzymes of the body."

The conclusions of the study state that a diet rich in strawberries can have a beneficial effect when it comes to preventing gastric illnesses that are related to the generation of free radicals or other reactive oxygen species. This fruit could slow down the formation of stomach ulcers in humans.

Gastritis or inflammation of the stomach mucous membrane is related to alcohol consumption but can also be caused by viral infections or by nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication (such as aspirin) or medication used to treat against the Helicobacter pylori bacteria.

Maurizio Battino, coordinator of the research group at the Marche Polytechnic University (UNIVPM, Italy) suggests that "in these cases, the consumption of strawberries during or after pathology could lessen stomach mucous membrane damage."

The team found less ulcerations in the stomachs of those rats which had eaten strawberry extract (40 milligrams/day per kilo of weight) for 10 days before being given alcohol.

Battino emphasises that "this study was not conceived as a way of mitigating the effects of getting drunk but rather as a way of discovering molecules in the stomach membrane that protect against the damaging effects of differing agents."

Treatments for ulcers and other gastric pathologies are currently in need of new protective medicines with antioxidant properties. The compounds found within strawberries could be the answer.

More information: José M. Alvarez-Suarez, Dragana Dekanski, Slavica Ristić, Nevena V. Radonjić, Nataša D. Petronijević, Francesca Giampieri, Paola Astolfi, Ana M. González-Paramás, Celestino Santos-Buelga, Sara Tulipani, José L. Quiles, Bruno Mezzetti, Maurizio Battino. "Strawberry Polyphenols Attenuate Ethanol-Induced Gastric Lesions in Rats by Activation of Antioxidant Enzymes and Attenuation of MDA Increase". Plos One 6 (10): e25878, October 2011.http://dx.plos.org … pone.0025878

Woman ages overnight WTF

2011-10-11T23:49:00.001-07:00

Thursday, Oct 06, 2011

Young woman mysteriously ages overnight

Nguyen Thi Phuong from Vietnam is only 26, but you would be forgiven for mistaking her as an old woman.

After suffering an allergic reaction in 2008 and taking a variety of medications prescribed for it, Phuong's skin on her face, neck and hands rapidly wrinkled and became saggy, giving her the appearance of a 70-year-old granny.

It all began when the young lady from Giong Trom district of Ben Tre province ate some seafood.

It made her face break out into an itchy rash so bad, that she used to scratch her face even in sleep, Phuong told Tuoi Tre, a major Vietnamese daily newspaper where the news first broke.

To alleviate the symptoms, she ate some medication her husband, Nguyen Thanh Tuyen, 34, bought her.

The medications did not work. She then visited a local doctor, who prescribed her pills for dermatitis.

However, the pills made her face swell up and hives erupt on her skin. She stopped taking them after a week, and turned to some traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in town.

She was given some medication that reduced the swelling, but also made her put on weight. However, the medication was expensive, costing VND30,000 (S$1.88) a day, and did not do much to improve her condition.

Phuong soon began wearing a face mask whenever she went out. After her husband quit his job in 2009 to take care of her, they ran out of money and she stopped taking all medications.

She then decided it as a fate decreed by God and the couple stopped trying to cure her condition, Phuong told local news outlets.

Woman gives birth hours after running Chicago Marathon

2011-10-11T04:59:00.001-07:00

Amber Miller said she was happy but called it the "longest day of my life" after giving birth to a daughter following completing the Chicago Marathon

Instead of having a rest after completing the Chicago Marathon, pregnant Amber Miller gave birth.

Mrs Miller, who was nearly 39 weeks pregnant, said "it was the longest day of my life". She gave birth to a healthy 7.7lb (3.5kg) girl, June.

The marathon was the eighth for the 27-year-old, who already had one child. On her doctor's orders she ran half and walked half the distance.

"Lots of people were cheering me on: 'Go pregnant lady'," she said.

"For me, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. I was running up until that point anyway," she told Associated Press news agency.

"I am crazy about running."

Because she half-walked the race, she finished the 26.2 mile (42.16km) course in 6:25 - slower than her usual pace.

"A few minutes after finishing, the contractions became stronger than normal and I understood what was going on," she said.

"When they became more regular, we had a sandwich and then we left for hospital," Mrs Miller added.

50 Free Programming eBooks

2011-10-10T19:10:00.001-07:00

Learning a new programming language always is fun and there are many great books legally available for free online. Here’s a selection of 30 of them:

Lisp/Scheme:
How to Desing Programs
Interpreting Lisp
Let Over Lambda
On Lisp
Practical Common Lisp
Programming in Emacs Lisp
Programming Languages. Application and Interpretation
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days
Visual LISP Developer’s Bible

Ruby:
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby
Learn Ruby the Hard Way
Learn to Program
MacRuby: The Definitive Guide
Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book
Programming Ruby
Read Ruby 1.9
Ruby Best Practices
Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book

Javascript:
Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Eloquent Javascript
jQuery Fundamentals
Mastering Node

Haskell:
Implementing functional languages: a tutorial
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
Real World Haskell
The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming

Erlang:
Concurrent Programming in Erlang
Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good

Python:
Dive into Python
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist – Learning with Python
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Learn Python The Hard Way

Smalltalk:
Dynamic Web Development with Seaside
Pharo by Example
Squeak by Example

Misc:
Algorithms
The Art of Assembly Language
Beginning Perl
Building Accessible Websites
The C Book
C# Yellow Book
Compiler Construction
Dive Into HTML 5
Higher-Order Perl
Impatient Perl
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (
An Introduction to R
Learn Prolog Now!
Learning Go
Objective-C 2.0 Essentials
Parsing Techniques Programming Scala
Smooth CoffeeScript
Type Theory and Functional Programming

If you find any more books comment below

Take Any College Class for Free: 236 Open Courseware Collections, Podcasts, and Videos

2011-10-09T20:45:00.001-07:00

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

http://www.ai-class.com

Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is based on Stanford CS221, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. This class introduces students to the basics of Artificial Intelligence, which includes machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, robotics, and natural language processing.

The objective of this class is to teach you modern AI. You learn about the basic techniques and tricks of the trade, at the same level we teach our Stanford students. We also aspire to excite you about the field of AI. Whether you are a seasoned professional, a college student, or a curious high school student - everyone can participate.

This online class will make this material available to a worldwide audience. But rather than just watching lectures online, you will participate. You will do homework assignments, take exams, participate in discussions with other students, ask questions of the instructors, and also get a final score.

Basic and Advanced Tracks

This course is offered in two tracks. The advanced track is intended to be an undergraduate or early graduate level course, and you should plan on spending around ten hours a week or more on it. It will involve weekly homework assignments as well as a midterm exam and a final exam. In order to receive a statement of accomplishment for the advanced track you must take both the midterm and the final exam.

The basic track is for people interested in the material but who do not have time or would prefer not to do homework assignments and exams. You will be able to view the same lectures as the advanced track, and will have access to the homework assignments and exams after they have been completed by students in the advanced track but will not be scored on them. In order to receive a statement of accomplishment for the basic track you must stay active and continue to view material throughout the course.

You may switch between the tracks at any time, but be aware that while you are signed up for the basic track you will not have access to homework assignments or exams, and this will affect your score and eligibility if you decide to change back to the advanced track.

Introduction to Databases!

http://www.db-class.org

Machine Learning

Basic and Advanced Tracks

We offer the machine learning class in two tracks. The advanced track is intended to be an undergraduate or early graduate level course, and you should plan on spending around ten hours a week or more on it. It will involve watching video lectures, weekly review questions and programming exercises.

The basic track is for people interested in the material but who do not have the time or would prefer not to do the programming assignments. You will be able to access the same materials as the advanced track, including the programming assignments, but you will not be scored on them. You may switch between the tracks at any time.

http://www.ml-class.org/

While the courses, videos, and audio files below won't help you achieve a degree because they're not credited, you can still practice completing online assignments appropriately. Once you gain significant skills in any given subject, you might be able to translate those skills into credits for an undergraduate degree.

Broadcast Learning

Turning off the television has become a mantra. But, when it comes to educational TV, maybe too much isn't enough. The following broadcasting companies maintain Web sites that carry Podcasts, videos, and articles. Some sites maintain special sections expressly for students and teachers.

ABC Australia — This site offers various educational categories, includingarchives and the Big Ideas Wisdom Interview Podcasts.
BBC Learning — Online learning, support, and advice. This site offers internal and offsite links to a vast amount of materials.
BBC Video Nation — Current news in many categories.
Biography — The site holds videos to past interviews and biographies on people in topics that range from Black history to women's history.
Book TV — This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.
CBC Archives — Relive Canadian history through thousands of available radio and television clips.
Discovery — This channel is home to several different networks that focus on the military, animals, travel, etc. The Discovery site offers a "Video of the Day" from its home page, a separate online video section, and a Discover Education center where teachers can accumulate materials for K-12 teaching. It's impossible to list all their offerings here, so go discover!
History Channel — Visit the Video Gallery for a selection on historical topics. Like the Discovery Channel, this network provides many opportunities for you to gain access to information and reference materials.
NOVA — Watch current science shows or browse by category. PBS sponsors this channel.
PBS — The Public Broadcasting Service brings great shows to television (other than Nova, listed above), and they also offer research capabilities, information, and Podcasts to their viewers online.
Research Channel — Speakers, researchers and professors present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries. Use their Webstreams and an extensive video-on-demand library for research.
TVO — Canada's largest educational broadcaster brings Podcasts, video, educational television, and a special program entitled, Learn with TVO for parents and teachers of K-12 students. For older learners, TVO offers "course connections" listed at bottom left on the home page.
Weather Channel — You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Channel also offers dynamic content based upon seasons and special conditions and a special multimedia and education section.

Directories & Searches

Some of the items below, like Google, are fairly familiar to most Web enthusiasts. Others, such as "Archives Made Easy" might come as a surprise. You can find just about anything you need for your research and learning through the following directories and search engines. You can also learn more about how to search the "invisible Web" to find resources for your projects. Plus, you can use our list of 119 resources beyond Google to find more authoritative guides. Each resource below leads to educational materials:

A World of Ideas — This site catalogues video and audio lectures on academic topics according to discipline, theoretician and topic.
Academic Blog Portal — This wiki serves as a portal of the "Invisible College" - the academic blogosphere full of serious scholarship and quirky, erudite commentary. Blogs are organized by discipline and by university.
Archive Grid — Search through thousands of libraries, museums, and archives that have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid.
Archives Made Easy — An on-line guide to archives around the globe that includes tips on how to navigate various repositories. Hosted by the International History department at the London School of Economics and Political Science
British Academy Portal — The British Academy's directory of online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
DMOZ — The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory for the Web.
DOAJ — Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.
Economics Network — Economics Network of the UK's Higher Education Academy provides a range of services that support university teachers of economics in the UK. Their resources section carries many online directories to materials, notes, lectures, etc.
Google Scholar — Search for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
Infomine — Search for databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.
Lecture Webcasts — A swicki (cross between a search and a wiki) for lecture Webcasts at the Internet TV Search Engine.
Intute — A network of UK universities and partners created this free online search service with access to education and research resources.
Librarian's Internet Index — Categorized index to Web sites.
Merlot — Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials.
NetSerf — Links to all things Medieval.
Open Courseware Finder — Find a course online through a search or with tags.
Repositories of Primary Sources — The University of Idaho has compiled primary sources by international area. Dig deeper to discover the repository, where you can gain access to primary sources online.
World Lecture Hall — Find a lecture - written, video, audio, or course notes. Search by topic or by area. Brought to you by the University of Texas at Austin.
Voice of the Shuttle — A database that serves content dynamically on the Web for the arts and humanities.
Windows Live Academic Search — Search for scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings, dissertations and academic books.
Yahoo! Humanities Collection — Search for anything on the Web under the humanities heading.

eBooks & eTexts

You don't need to shell out big bucks for textbooks when most ancient texts and other public domain materials have been digitized. The following sources can help you save dollars while you learn. Some resources listed below may contain audio files rather than readable text and some sites may contain both text and audio files.

Audio Books for Free — Free files when you choose MP3 files at tolerable quality. Higher quality audio available at inexpensive prices.
Authorama — Completely free books from a variety of different authors in the public domain.
Bartleby — Bartleby contains many classic American and English texts searchable by author, title, and genre.
Economics Textbooks — A categorized list maintained by John Kane.
Electronic Text Center — This University of Virginia collection features 70,000 electronic texts that range across many topics and languages.
eMedicine — The original open access comprehensive medical textbook for all clinical fields with 10,000 contributors and 6,500 articles.
European Literature — Electronic text collections in western European literature. Compiled by the University of Virginia Library.
FreeTechBooks.com — Free online computer science and programmingbooks, textbooks, and lecture notes.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project — This project was designed to provide easy access to primary sources and other teaching materials in a non-commercial environment. It was developed and is edited by Paul Halsall at Fordham University and is divided into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern history along with several "sourcebook" selections.
Learn Out Loud — While many choices are free by membership only, Learn Out Loud also offers free audio and video.
LibriVox — LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net.
Literal Systems — A small but growing classic audio book collection.
Making of America Books — A digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
Many Books — Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook reader.
Manuscript Reading Room — The Library of Congress's Manuscript Division's current holdings, nearly forty million items contained in ten thousand separate collections, include some of the greatest manuscript treasures of American history and culture.
Online Books Page — This project indexes online free books rather than hosts them, but it's an easy resource to use.
Online Mathematics Textbooks — A list created by George Cain, School of Mathematics at Georgia Institute of Technology. You might also try the more comprehensive Textbooks in Mathematics compiled by Alex Stef.
Oxford Text Archive — This site hosts arts and humanities literature, languages and linguistics texts that you can download in various formats.
Perseus Digital Library — Tufts University's evolving digital library.
Philosophy — Canonical texts necessary for basic philosophy.
Project Gutenberg — The first producer of free electronic books, there are over 20,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.
Religion Online — More than 6,000 articles and chapters. Topics include Old and New Testament, Theology, Ethics, History and Sociology of Religion, Communication and Cultural Studies, Pastoral Care, Counseling, Homiletics, Worship, Missions and Religious Education.
Text Archive — Internet Archive's open source text directory.
WikiBooks — Since their founding in 2003, volunteers have written about 25,292 modules in a multitude of textbooks.
World Public Library — This repository maintains a public access eBook and eDocument collection.

Encyclopedias

While most colleges won't allow citations from encyclopedias in your research papers, these resources can lead you in the right direction to find more information.

Columbia Encyclopedia — Offered by Bartleby.
Counterbalance Interactive Library — Offers new views on complex issues from science, ethics, philosophy, and religion.
e-Podunk — Want to know information about a certain state, county, or city? e-Podunk maintains a site for this information and it's growing to include cemeteries, libraries, museums, and newspapers.
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Free trial offer for full version, free access toconcise version.
Encyclopedia Smithsonian — Each entry contains materials within the online Smithsonian and through other resources.
Highbeam™ Encyclopedia — Search through more than 57,000 frequently updated articles from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.
InfoPlease — Information Please is part of Pearson Education, the largest educational publisher in the world.
LoveToKnow 1911 — Based upon the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in 1911. While many of the science and health articles are obviously outdated, many of the biographical and historical articles and more complete and in-depth compared to materials available elsewhere.
Microsoft Encarta — Gain access to 16,000 articles and more than 2,200 photos, illustrations, maps, charts, and tables for free, with ability to upgrade.
Open-Site — Open-Site is edited by volunteer editors and accepts content submissions from the public to provide accurate information.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field.
Wikipedia — A multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopedia project.
World FactBook — Part of the Bartleby collection, this project provides the U.S. government’s complete geographical handbook, featuring 268 full-color maps and flags of all nations and geographical entities.

Open Courseware Collections - University

The list below contains courseware offered by various <="" a="" style="color: rgb(17, 141, 185); text-decoration: none; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; ">. This list is by no means all-inclusive, so you might want to try a search for a specific college to see what you can find. The colleges below offer more than one course or, like "Berklee Shares", a broad perspective on one topic.

<="" a="" style="color: rgb(17, 141, 185); text-decoration: none; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; ">

<="" a="" style="color: rgb(17, 141, 185); text-decoration: none; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; ">Columbia University Interactive — A gateway to selected electronic learning resources developed at Columbia University.
Berklee Shares — Free music lessons that you can download, share and trade with your friends and fellow musicians.
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative — OLI courses are designed to support you to learn a subject at the introductory college level.
Duke Law Center for the Public Domain — News, lectures, links to various other resources within the site and on the Web. Projects range from the arts to international law issues.
Fulbright Economics Teaching Program — FETP is a resource for people who work or study in policy-related fields to increase their knowledge and explore new approaches to learning and curriculum development.
Harvard Extension School — Course-related materials are supported by videotaped lectures.
Gresham College — Find lectures in various topics that are also available as audio and video files.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health — This project provides access to content of the School's most popular courses, from adolescent to refugee health.
MIT — Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a wide variety of open courses from aeronautics and astronautics to writing and humanistic studies.
Open University — Originating from the U.K., this collection ranges from arts and history to technology.
Tufts University — Six separate schools, from dentistry to the School of Arts and Sciences.
United Nations University — UNU promotes the idea of a Global Learning Space for science and technology.
University of California, Irvine — This college offers the California Subject Examination for Teachers (CSET) and a few other courses.
University of Notre Dame — From Africana studies to theology, students can take advantage of options within numerous Notre Dame departments.
University of Washington — This one is a bit tricky, as they offer free online courses through this link, but you can also find free materials through various departments outside this official online learning program.
Utah State University — Available departments online range from anthropology to wildland resources.

Open Courseware Collections

The following courseware isn't always labeled as "open courseware," but they qualify because each site contains collections filled with lectures, visuals, audio, video and other educational materials. This list contains sites that aren't hosted or generated by universities.

BBC Training & Development — The British Broadcasting Corporation brings training and online broadcast and new media courses online for anyone interested in media courses.
Connexions — A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. You can find 3993 reusable modules woven into 219 collections at Connexions.
Digital History — An interactive, multimedia history of the United States from the Revolution to the present.
Exploratorium — View Webcasts and visit the digital library. You'll find lectures, lessons, and more.
Music Theory — This site is a compact set of lessons, trainers, and utilities compiled by Ricci Adams.
NASA — The National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains updated and archived materials and several modules. They also maintain the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where a researcher can find many materials including university lectures.
National Geographic — While not as generous with online free videos as some sites, the work they offer is always stunning. They also offer aneducational resource for K-12.
Nature — This international weekly journal's online resource provides Podcasts, streaming video, gateways and databases for all things in nature.
Open Educational Resources — Internet Archives' collection of educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures.
Smithsonian — Learn through online museum exhibits, recordings, research, and Journeys.
Sofia — Content for eight courses is now available online for free through the Sofia open content initiative.
W3Schools — Web-building tutorials, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.
Wikiversity — This project comprises a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.

Podcasts - University

Georgia College & State University (see # below) was among the first of many campuses to put together an academic program using iPods when it launched a few pilot programs in 2002. Today, there are active iPod programs on many other campuses around the country. Therefore, the list below is limited when compared to how many campuses will take on this technology by this upcoming fall quarter/semester.

Alleghany College — News and events, conferences, etc.
American University — Podcast collections from this university's Washington College of Law.
Apple + iPods @ GCSU — Georgia College & State University provides a virtual learning community, courseware, and technology advances through this site.
Arizona State University — Lectures and speakers.
Berkeley on iTunes — Listen to events about the arts, education, politics, science and technology - extensive collection..
Buffalo State College — Lectures, forums, events, and more.
Cambridge University — Popular science broadcasts, including Science Festival Podcasts presented by Carol Vorderman.
Center for International Studies — University of Chicago's Chiasmos, a source for international events.
Chicago GSB — Chicago University's Graduate School of Business thought leadership on current topics affecting companies and organizations around the globe.
Classics Podcasts — Ever want to hear the news in Latin? Visit more links to readings of Latin and (ancient) Greek texts, brought to you by Bryn Mawr's Haverford College.
College of DuPage Codcasts — Classes, lectures, arts & leisure, and special topics.
College of St. Scholastica Podcasts — Visit the links on this page to find numerous course-specific lectures and speakers.
Distance Learning Podcast — Western Kentucky University's Podcasts for students and teachers.
Drexel CoAS Talks — Podcasts, Screencasts and Vodcasts(for video iPod) of talks or seminars in the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University.
Educator's Corner — The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series takes place every Wednesday during the academic quarters at Stanford University. Listen to archived materials.
Front Row — Boston College offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events.
Georgetown University Forum — A weekly radio program that highlights Georgetown University faculty's research and expertise.
Harvard Business Online — A free Podcast featuring breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management.
Havens Center — The University of Wisconsin-Madison's audios that are focused on the study of social structure and social change.
Insead Podcasts — Knowledgecasts and Leadercasts from one of Europe's elite business programs.
Johns Hopkins — Audio recordings from Johns Hopkins' faculty and alumni.
Knowledge@Wharton — Podcast archive for news and lectures at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lewis & Clark Law School — Events and speakers on law.
London School of Economics — Podcasts of public lectures and events.
Montclair State University — Interesting list from English department - mostly Noam Chomsky, but other lectures on Medieval literature to Vietnam War here as well. Some video.
NOVA — Nova currently offers four different Podcasts.
Perdue Boilercast — List of various Podcasts.
Princeton University Channel — A collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world.
Princeton University's Event Streaming Media — Special events, lectures, sports, etc.
SAIS — The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., part of Johns Hopkins University, offers news and events.
Southwest Tech's CourseCasts — Various course topics.
Stanford on iTunes — Download faculty lectures, interviews, music and sports.
Swarthmore College University Lectures — Lectures on various topics.
Times-Online MBA Broadcasts — Ten of the world's leading business thinkers provide the latest thinking in economics, management, finance, strategy, and marketing.
UCLA Bruincast — Course topic Podcasts.
University of Arizona College of Law — Lectures and Seminars.
University of Bath — "BathPods" from a public lecture series where leading names from the worlds of science, humanities, and engineering talk about the latest research in their field.
University of British Columbia — UBC offers a wide variety of UBC-related digital content, from public lectures and talks to student-created music and more.
University of Connecticut — Podcasts about general psychology.
University of New South Wales — Podcast lectures that relate to health and fetal development.
University of Nottingham — Browse through current issues, latest research and events.
University of Oregon UO Channel — Interviews, documentaries, lectures.
University of Virginia — Podcasts and Webcasts for news, events, and lectures.
University of Warwick — Hear university experts comment on important issues, their research and events.
University of Washington TV — This university project offers their "premiers" as Podcasts. You can also watch these shows as video.
Vanderbilt University — Interviews, lectures, news, and events.
Weber University — Lectures and speakers.
Yale University — A diverse collection from Yale's many schools.
York College Podcast Lectures — Current focus on philosophy and psychology from City University, New York (CUNY).

Podcasts - Other

This list of Podcasts are not hosted or generated by any school of higher learning. But, they contain collections that can turn your brain on to the world around you.

Evolution 101 — Dr. Zachary Moore offers Podcasts along with other resources on this topic.
Global Voices — Global Voices is an international, volunteer-led project that collects, summarizes, and gives context to some of the best self-published content found on blogs, Podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs from around the world, with a particular emphasis on countries outside of Europe and North America.
Listening to Words — Find, listen to, and discuss free lectures from around the Web.
Logically Critical — Don't be afraid to think. Visit this site, listen to the Podcasts, and agree to agree or disagree.
Ludwig Von Mises Institute — Use the links on this page to gain access to Podcasts and video.
Maria Lectrix — Six days a week of audiobooks - mystery, history, adventure, devotion - for people with Catholic tastes.
NPR — National Public Radio offers several venues to learn about various topics through articles and Podcasts.
Open Source — Christopher Lydon brings hot topics to online listening through Public Radio International (PRI).
Neo-Latin Colloquia — Graduate students and faculty associated with the UK Institute for Latin Studies are creating a variety of materials for the renewed study and enjoyment of neo-Latin colloquia scholastica, texts that date primarily from the 16th century. This is housed at STOA, the Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities.
Point of Inquiry — Point of Inquiry is the premiere Podcast from the Center for Inquiry, drawing on CFI’s relationship with the leading minds of the day including Nobel Prize-winning scientists, public intellectuals, social critics and thinkers, and renowned entertainers.
Scientific American — Enjoy 60-second science Podcasts or longer interviews with leading scientists and journalists.
The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe — A weekly Podcast talkshow produced by the New England Skeptical Society (NESS) in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) discussing the latest news and topics from the world of the paranormal, fringe science, and controversial claims from a scientific point of view.
Shakespeare by Another Name — MP3 audio files that discuss some of the stories, themes and characters in the book, Shakespeare By Another Name.
Sound of Young America — Public radio's "funniest, most fascinating interview program," available free on the air, on the Web or by Podcast.

Research

Whether it's at the library, through videos, Podcasts, or online, research is easier when it's free. Plus, you can ease some headaches if you know how to take copious notes. Check out Fifty Ways to Take Notes to pave your way, and use the following list to forge ahead.

Elements of Style — Visit Strunk & White at Bartleby.
Episteme Links — Search for over 19,000 categorized links to philosophy resources on the Internet.
HighWire Press — HighWire Press is a division of the Stanford University Libraries, which produces the online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. Some sites are free to peruse through trial periods or through archived materials.
In Other Words — A lexicon for the humanities. Learn the terminology of a new discipline and come to understand the generally accepted reference of terms.
Internet Public Library — Search through online collections in numerous categories.
LitSum — Free literature summaries and study guides.
Mayo Clinic — This site contains databases for diseases and conditions, drugs and supplements, and treatment decisions.
SparkNotes — Free online study guides.
U.S. Government Manual — The official handbook of the Federal Government.

Videos - University

The list of video collections below are either hosted or generated by a school of higher learning. Some resources also include Podcasts or other educational materials, so look around when you head to a specific site.

Berkeley Multimedia Research Center — Six videos that mainly focus on the university's multimedia presentation capabilities. You'll also find a chemistry lecture.
Butte College — Televised courses and events such as workshops, meetings, and conferences. All sent to you via streaming video.
CalTech Today — "Streaming Theater" for science and technology, society and culture, and campus life.
Carleton University Television (CUTV) — Two courses only: Introductory Chemistry, CHEM 1000 taught by 3M teaching award winner Robert Burk, and Natural History, BIOL 1902, taught by highly respect naturalist and wildlife photographer Michael Runtz.
Case School of Law — Lecture series dating from 2001 to current year.
Dartmouth Chance — Chance is a quantitative literacy course, and Dartmouth offers video lectures and more to help conduct your own Chance course.
Duke University Multimedia — Classroom video archives produced in the Duke University Mathematics Department Multimedia Classroom.
Georgetown University Webcasts — Current critical intellectual and social issues debated and discussed.
Harvard@Home — The mission of Harvard@Home is to provide the Harvard community and the broader public with opportunities for rich in-depth exploration of a wealth of topics through Web-based video programs of the highest caliber.
Harvard Law School — Events and lectures online.
Homeric Odyssey and the Cultivation of Justice — If you want to get to know this classic in depth, this is where you need to go. Online text, video lectures, the works. Brought to you by Professor Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Kennedy School of Government Video Archive — From Harvard University.
Landon Lecture Series — Gain live access on day of lecture or view archived lectures on public issues, thanks to Kansas State University.
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute — MSRI streaming video lectures.
MIT World Video Index — Search, or sort by title, date, or MIT host for videos on the sciences and arts.
Oxford Internet University Webcasts — Live and on-demand Webcasts of prominent speakers from events and conferences organized or recorded by the Oxford Internet Institute.
Princeton University's New Media Center — Student and faculty projects, including lectures, speakers, interviews, etc.
Princeton University WebMedia — Includes events, lectures and a small selection of Podcasts.
Rice University Webcasts — Live and archived events, speakers, and lectures at Rice.
Rockefeller University — A small collection of Flash videos.
St. Edward's University — Philosophy audio and video lectures.
Stanford University Audio and Video — Selections from the Graduate School of Business.
UC Berkeley Resources — Links to many resources online and at Berkeley. Some resources for students only, others open to the public.
UCLA Webcasts — UCLA Instructional Media Production (IMP) provides live Webcasts of important and interesting campus events, archives them, and makes them available for on-demand viewing.
University of California TV Video on Demand — Lectures, seminars, and talks on a variety of topics.
University of Connecticut — A video lecture series from this university's School of Medicine.
University of Texas at Dallas — UTDallas brings a list of online neuroscience lectures to the table.
Webcast Berkeley — Courses and events offered by the University of California (UC) Berkeley. Also offered as Podcasts.

Video - Other

The following list contains collections that are not maintained by a school of higher learning. But many of these resources offer great opportunities to learn through videos that range from short-shorts to entire movies.

2007 Exploring Space Lectures — Brought to you via Smithsonian Institute.
Atom Film Documentaries — Short film genre.
Center for Economic Studies (CES) — Lecture series from 2001 forward.
Cern Webcast Service — CERN lectures and seminars to universities, schools and to the general public.
Exploratorium — This is a Webcast archive filled with selected videos that date back to 1996.
Free Documentaries — Mostly political films.
Free Movies and Documentaries — Videos embedded from other sites, but worth a look for various categories under documentaries, news items, etc.
Free to Choose — TV series by economist Milton Friedman along with interviews.
Google Video — Educational lecture options from Google. Search for other genres, like documentaries.
Howard Hughes Medical Center Lectures — Gain access to information on everything from evolution to RNA.
Indymedia — The San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center is a non-commercial, democratic collective of bay area independent media makers and media outlets. This site also serves as the local hub for the global Indymedia network, and offers archival materials as well.
Lifesign — A short list of medical genre videos. It appears that this site, funded and maintained by the Department of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth, intends to grow.
Link TV — Current perspectives on international news, current events, and diverse cultures, presenting issues not often covered in the U.S. media.
Moving Image Archive — Internet Archive's collection of classic full-length movies, daily alternative news broadcasts, and user-uploaded videos of every genre. This is a mega-source.
National Archive — Over 250 titles collected by the NASA Office of Public Affairs between 1962 and 1981.
Nobel Prize Lectures — Provide a wealth of background to every Nobel Prize since 1901. You can find biographies, interviews, photos, articles, video clips, press releases, educational games and a great deal more information about the Nobel Laureates and their work.
ScienceLive — Free popular science videos.
The Royal Society — Video lectures on topics from biology and climate science to physics. They also maintain a short list of Podcasts.
Vega Science Trust — The Vega Science Trust aims to create a broadcast platform for the science, engineering and technology (SET) communities. Learn from seminars, lectures, and more (they have four priceless archival recordings delivered by Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand).
Webcasts — From the Library of Congress.
WGBH Forum Network — The WGBH Forum Network is an audio and video streaming Website dedicated to curating and serving live and on-demand lectures given by some of the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders.

Video Directories & Searches

Finally, this is a short list of directories and search engines dedicated to free online videos.

Ethics Videos on the Web — Compiled by Lawrence M. Hinman from the University of San Diego.
Mathematics Videos — A list of online lectures and videos compiled by Jean-Marc Gulliet and hosted at New York University.
Open Video Project — This repository provides video clips from a variety of sources, especially various video programs obtained from U.S. government agencies such as the National Records and Archives Administration and NASA.
Web Lecture Archive Project (WLAP) — Browse through lectures by category, or conduct an advanced search.

Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: 'Humans Are Just Modified Fish'

2011-10-07T15:44:00.001-07:00

Pectoral fin muscle formation in paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) utilises the fully derived mode of appendicular muscle formation and is not associated with an epithelial extension. (Credit: Cole et al., PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001168)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2011) — A study into the muscle development of several different fish has given insights into the genetic leap that set the scene for the evolution of hind legs in terrestrial animals. This innovation gave rise to the tetrapods -- four-legged creatures, and our distant ancestors -- that made the first small steps on land some 400 million years ago.

A team of Australian scientists led by Professor Peter Currie, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, and Dr Nicolas Cole, of the University of Sydney, report their results October 4 in online, open access journalPLoS Biology.

Scientists have long known that ancient lungfish species are the ancestors of the tetrapods. These fish could survive on land, breathing air and using their pelvic fins to propel themselves. Australia is home to three species of the few remaining lungfish -- two marine species and one inhabiting Queensland's Mary River basin.

There are big gaps in our knowledge, however. Most conclusions have previously been drawn from fossil skeletons, but the muscles critical to locomotion cannot be preserved in the fossil record. The team used fish living today to trace the evolution of pelvic fin muscles to find out how the load-bearing hind limbs of the tetrapods evolved. They compared embryos of the descendants of species representing key turning points in vertebrate evolution to see if there were differences in pelvic fin muscle formation. They studied "primitive" cartilaginous fish -- Australia's bamboo shark and its cousin, the elephant shark -- as well as three bony fishes -- the Australian lungfish, the zebrafish and the American paddlefish. The bony fish and in particular the lungfish are the closest living relative of the tetrapods' most recent common ancestor with fish.

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology.

"Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors."

Denver man 'thought dead friend was drunk'

2011-10-06T18:03:00.001-07:00

Robert Young said he didn't want to believe that Jeffrey Jarrett was dead

One of two men accused of driving around a US city with their friend's corpse in the back seat thought the dead man was just drunk, a court heard.

Robert Young said he "wanted to believe" that Jeffrey Jarrett had simply passed out.

Mr Young and Mark Rubinson visited bars and a strip club and withdrew cash using Mr Jarrett's card before reporting his death, Denver police say.

They face charges including identity theft and abuse of a corpse.

Authorities are awaiting autopsy results to determine how and when 43-year-old Mr Jarrett died.

"In my mind, I wanted to believe he was passed out," Mr Young, 43, told the court hearing.

"I didn't want to call 911 (emergency number). I didn't want to believe he was dead."

Police say the night on the town started when Mr Young went to Mr Jarrett's home on 27 August and found him unresponsive.

Instead of calling for help, Mr Young went to find Mr Rubinson, 25, it is alleged.

The pair then put the body in Mr Rubinson's car and went to two bars in Denver where they spent some time drinking while the corpse was left in the car, police records say.

Police say the men used Mr Jarrett's bank card to pay for the drinks.

Mr Young said he then realised Mr Jarrett was dead and the two men took his body back to his home and left it on a bed.

They then went to Shotgun Willie's, a strip club in nearby Glendale, where they withdrew $400 (£253) from Jarrett's account from a cash machine, police said.

Later the men later flagged down a police car and told officers they thought their friend was dead and where his body was, according to the police statement.

Mr Jarrett was pronounced dead at his home in Denver on 28 August.

Neither men face charges in connection with Mr Jarrett's death.

Mr Young was due to enter a plea on Thursday but his lawyer was granted an extension until 3 November.

France Continues Mass Processing Of Infringement Accusations: 60 People Get Third Strike Notice... 650,000 Get First Strike

2011-10-06T01:26:00.001-07:00

The latest stats coming out of France's HADOPI "three strikes" (really three accusations) policy are really quite stunning. Most of the focus is on the fact that 60 ISP account holders have received their third strike, and now await to see if they'll be fined and/or kicked off the internet without ever having actually been convicted of copyright infringement. But, to me, the much more interesting numbers are the first and second strike numbers. An astounding 650,000 people have received "first strike" notices, with 44,000 of those receiving a second strike as well. Those are huge numbers. It makes you wonder, at what point do those in power begin to recognize that if so many people are engaging in this, there must be some sort of better solution.

Well its a law it has to be upheld right? even for the MPAA?

Strike 1: http://gizmodo.com/329648/mpaas-university-toolkit-taken-down-for-violating-copyright [gizmodo.com]
Strike 2: http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/ [torrentfreak.com]
Strike 3: http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=95638 [amdzone.com]

BOOM!

No more MPAA! They're offline forever! After all, the law is just and equal and fair and blind, right? And the MPAA -- the people who, let's face it, basically *wrote* this law -- should be held to the highest standard themselves. They, more than anyone else, cannot call it a youthful mistake, or a silly error in judgement, or ignorance or anything else... they have zero excuse and so accordingly they will be punished for their obvious and flagrant transgressions!

Right? ... right? guess not

Chinese Farmer Builds and Flies Identified Flying Object

2011-10-04T18:06:00.001-07:00

UFOs are one thing, but identified flying objects, (IFOS) while not as mysterious and spine-tingling, are something else entirely.

In this case, effects are just as amazing, considering that the creator of this IFO is a farmer who built his Octocopter in his spare time, equipped with the barest of an education and no training of any kind either in mechanics or engineering.

Shu Mansheng, aged 46, has always been fascinated by aviation. In the past, he built two jet planes in his home, but both projects failed.

Shu has recently successfully completed a test flight in the 18-foot diameter flying saucer powered by eight motor-bike engines, which cost him £3,000 (about $US 5,000) to develop.

Shu is not a man who gives up easily, as this effort marked his second attempt to get his flying saucer off the ground.

Last month he managed to take off in the Octocopter but only for a few seconds.

This time, however, he reached a controlled height of six feet for more than 30 seconds.

Shu’s work is far from finished as he plans to further refine his Octocopter.

He has another even nobler noble mission as well, which touches upon what he has missed in his own life.

“My dream is to establish a special school where kids would be able to learn all sorts of things they don’t teach in ordinary schools,” Shu told the press

Of all the people in the world, Shu Mansheng is one of the few who probably understands how Orville and Wilbur Wright must have felt that momentous day back in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Go Shu, go!

Nobel physics prize honours accelerating Universe find

2011-10-04T16:56:00.001-07:00

The three researchers' work has led to an expanding knowledge of our Universe

Three researchers behind the discovery that our Universe's expansion is accelerating have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics.

Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will divide the prize.

The trio studied what are called Type 1a supernovae, determining that more distant objects seem to move faster.

Their observations suggest that not only is the Universe expanding, its expansion is relentlessly speeding up.

Prof Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half the 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize, with Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University and Prof Riess of Johns Hopkins University's Space Telescope Science Institute sharing the other half.

'Weak knees'

Prof Schmidt spoke to the Nobel commitee from Australia during the ceremony.

"It feels like when my children were born," he said.

"I feel weak at the knees, very excited and somewhat amazed by the situation. It's been a pretty exciting last half hour."

The trio's findings form the basis of our current understanding of the Universe's origins, but raises a number of difficult questions.

In order to explain the rising expansion, cosmologists have suggested the existence of what is known as dark energy. Although its properties and nature remain mysterious, the predominant theory holds that dark energy makes up some three-quarters of the Universe.

But at the time the work was first being considered, no such exotic explanations were yet needed.

"It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not," Prof Perlmutter told BBC News.

Dark energy and dark matter mysteries

He led the Supernova Cosmology Project beginning in 1988, and Prof Schmidt and Prof Riess began work in 1994 on a similar project known as the High-z Supernova Search Team.

Their goal was to measure distant Type 1a supernovae - the brilliant ends of a particular kind of dense star known as a white dwarf.

Because their explosive ends are of roughly the same brightness, the amount of light observed from the supernovae on Earth should be an indication of their distance; slight shifts in their colour indicate how fast they are moving.

At the time, the competing teams expected to find that the more distant supernovae were slowing down, relative to those nearer - a decline of the expansion of the Universe that began with the Big Bang.

Instead, both teams found the same thing: distant supernovae were in fact speeding up, suggesting that the Universe is destined for an ever-increasing expansion.

Prof Perlmutter said the fact that the two teams were rivals was probably best to set the scene for a surprising outcome.

"It was fierce competition in those last four or five years of the work," he said.

"The two groups announced their results within just weeks of each other and they agreed so closely; that's one of the things that made it possible for the scientific community to accept the result so quickly."

That result in the end sparked a new epoch in cosmology, seeking to understand what is driving the expansion, and Prof Perlmutter is enthusiastic that such fundamental problems have been highlighted by the Nobel committee.

"It's an unusual opportunity, a chance for so many people to share in the excitement and the fun of the fact that we may be on to hints as to what the Universe is made out of. I guess the whole point of a prize like this is to be able to get that out into the community."

Commenting on the prize, Prof Sir Peter Knight, head of the UK's Institute of Physics, said: "The recipients of today's award are at the frontier of modern astrophysics and have triggered an enormous amount of research on dark energy."

"These researchers have opened our eyes to the true nature of our Universe," he added. "They are very well-deserved recipients."

The Nobel prizes have been given out annually since 1901, covering the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.

Monday's award of the 2011 prize for physiology or medicine went to Bruce Beutler of the US, Jules Hoffmann from France and Ralph Steinman from Canada for their work on immunology.

This year's chemistry prize will be announced on Wednesday.

Woman, 67, abandons her car after getting stuck reversing out of car park

2011-10-04T02:58:00.001-07:00

Wiola Nowicka's car wedged in the car park driveway (Picture: CEN)

Wiola Nowicka, 67, attempted to turn around in the car park's narrow driveway once she noticed the high prices she would have to pay.

Nowicka's bad sense of judgement resulted in the driveway being blocked for five hours, as her car was wedged between the driveway walls.

'I didn't mean to be a nuisance,' said Nowicka. 'After a few turns I couldn't go backwards or forwards any more.'

Engineers were able to get the car out from the tight space, with careful inch by inch precision.

Nowicka isn't the only driver over 50, to have misjudged at the wheel.

Earlier this year, an 86-year-old Californian woman crashed her car through the Rock N' Road cycling shop, narrowly missing customers.

Authorities discovered that the woman had hit the accelerator pedal by mistake, instead of the break.

Lucky no one was hurt in either of the incidents.

The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011)MPG - DVDScr - MusicKingz

2011-10-04T01:40:00.001-07:00

The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011)MPG - DVDScr - MusicKingz

Download torrent

...::: Movie INfo IMBD :::...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1857913/
...::: Trailer :::...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eova0lSmxGw

Code:

General
Complete name : The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011)MPG - DVDScr - MusicKingz.mpg
Format : MPEG-PS
File size : 753 MiB
Duration : 1h 37mn
Overall bit rate : 1 078 Kbps
Video
ID : 224 (0xE0)
Format : MPEG Video
Format version : Version 2
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Duration : 1h 37mn
Bit rate : 800 Kbps
Width : 352 pixels
Height : 288 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 1.222
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Standard : PAL
Color space : YUV
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.316
Stream size : 581 MiB (77%)
Audio
ID : 192 (0xC0)
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 2
Duration : 1h 37mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 224 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Delay relative to video : -80ms
Stream size : 156 MiB (21%)

Enjoy !!!

Tracker list

http://pow7.com/announce
http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
http://tracker.novalayer.org:6969/announce
http://10.rarbg.com/announce
http://tracker.istole.it/announce
http://tracker.torrent.to:2710/announce
udp://tracker.1337x.org:80/announnce
udp://tracker.1337x.org:80/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce

Immune pioneers share Nobel prize for medicine

2011-10-03T18:06:00.001-07:00

Ralph Steinman was awarded for his discovery of the dendritic cell

Three scientists who "revolutionised" understanding of how the body fights infection have shared this year's Nobel prize for medicine.

Bruce Beutler, of the US, Jules Hoffmann from France and Ralph Steinman from Canada all shared the prize.

Profs Beutler and Hoffman discovered how the body's first line of defence was activated.

Prof Steinman discovered the dendritic cell, which helps defeat infection.

Twin defences

The immune system can be broadly divided into two parts: innate and adaptive.

The innate immune system is the immediate response and halts infection by destroying foreign microorganisms and triggering inflammation.

In 1996, Prof Hoffmann discovered that a gene called "Toll" was essential for kick starting the innate system in fruit flies. Without the gene, the flies could not "sense" and then fight bacterial infection.

An equivalent gene, Toll-like receptor, was found by Prof Beutler in 1998 in his study on mice.

More than a dozen Toll-like receptors have since been found in humans.

The adaptive immune system takes longer to activate, but clears the infection and can provide long lasting protection.

Prof Steinman discovered, in 1973, the dendritic cell. He showed that it can act as a bridge between the two immune systems, deciding whether to activate the adaptive system.

The Nobel prize committe said: "Together Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann and Ralph Steinman have revoluntionised understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation.

"They have opened up new avenues for prevention and therapy."

Professor of clinical allergy research and panel member, Annika Scheynius, said: "We are definitely sure that these discoveries will lead to health improvement, mainly in the terms of new vaccines.

"Different types of vaccines that are targetting the dentritic cells, meaning that we can improve the health of patients with cancer, inflammatory diseases, auto-immune diseases, asthma."

A MAN who lived in his own “zoo” of lizards and insects was fatally bitten by a pet black widow spider ? then eaten by the other creepy-crawlies.

2011-10-01T23:43:00.001-07:00

Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.

Neighbours alerted police after becoming alarmed by the stink.

And horrified officers were met by a nightmare scene.

Spider's victim ... the body of tragic Voegel is taken away

A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.

“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.

“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

Hungry ... termites ate body

Loner Voegel, 30, never invited people back to his “jungle” home, a small apartment in the German city of Dortmund.
Police described it as a cross between a botanical garden and the butterfly breeding ground in the serial killer movie The Silence Of The Lambs.

One tarantula had built a nest the size of a swallow’s in a corner of the ceiling.

Voegel also had a boa constrictor and several poisonous frogs from South America.

Lair ... a cage is taken away
Picture: JOCHEN ALTHOFF

Spider expert and animal cruelty officer Gabi Bayer said he kept creatures “that should never be allowed in a private home”.

She said: “He had spiders so aggressive they are the equivalent of a pit-bull in the animal world.”

The reptiles were allowed to roam free in the flat.

The heating elements on two tanks containing spiders and their termite snacks had exploded and dislodged the metal tops allowing them to escape.

Danger ... he kept snakes

Voegel is thought to have been dead for between seven and 14 days.

A post-mortem will be carried out in the next few days. But authorities believe Bettina alone was responsible for Voegel’s death.

Toy Robot Prepares For Ironman Triathlon

2011-10-01T17:16:00.001-07:00

The challenge of Hawaii’s grueling Ironman Triathion course is a formidable goal for anyone, but for a tiny Japanese robot known as Evolta, it would seem to be an impossible task.

But Evolta is no stranger to hardship as this Panasonic creation has already scaled the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, endured the Le Mans 24-hour circuit racetrack and has walked 310 miles from Tokyo to the old Japanese capital of Kyoto.

The hand-sized, green and white robot gets its stamina from three rechargeable batteries, which the robot bears on its back, and is fitted with three different bodies to accommodate the different physical challenges. These include: one mounted on a tiny bicycle, one in a round hoop with a supporting rear wheel and another mounted on a curved, fin-like blade.

Evolta will swim, bicycle and run its way through one of the world’s toughest triathlon routes, which commences on October 24 and will continue without stopping for seven days and nights.

“This is very tough even for a sportsman, but I think it is worth a challenge… Evolta’s height is just one-tenth of a grown man, so we figured out that it would take it 10 times more time. … I hope it will … succeed in the end,” said Tomotaka Takahashi, creator of Evolta.

The robot’s assignment is to swim, run and bike for approximately 143 miles. The time given to complete the task is one week or 168 hours, which is ten times longer than it would take a human of normal proportions.

Evolta’s creator had his own challenges as well. For one thing, he had to find away to make the tiny robot impervious to moisture and effectively protect it from mold. The batteries are slated to go on sale in late October. They have a long life and can be recharged up to 1,800 times via a recharger pad.

French Fry Coated Hot Dog Recipe

2011-09-28T01:39:00.001-07:00

One thing that struck me about finding the French fry coated hot dog on a stick in South Korea was that they were doing it wrong, the sort of cultural misunderstanding that happens when one culture cooks the food of an unrelated and unattached culture and then impales said food on a wooden stick.

Firstly, the hot dog on a stick wasn’t coated in real American fries but chunks of potato and secondly, the hot dog batter was wheat flour rather than a more American corn dog batter. If Americans had have first cooked this one handed food, it would probably be a very different but equally deadly beast. So I set about cooking myself an American-style French fry coated hotdog.

I cooked the French fries from scratch which is entirely un-American: feel free to use the frozen variety.

Ingredients:

One hotdog
One large russet burbank potato
Plenty of oil for deep frying

For the batter:
100gms of plain flour
75gms of cornmeal
1 egg
2 teaspoons of sugar
half a cup of milk

Method:

Find yourself a russet burbank potato, about the length of a hotdog.

Peel the potato then slice into french fries in a mandolin slicer (or do it by hand). Set aside.

Mix together the dry batter ingredients, add the egg and the milk. Mix to a thick paste, adding more milk if it is too dry: you’re aiming at the batter being thick and sticky rather than runny like a real corn dog batter, slightly more viscous than a dough. Set aside.

Fry the french fries in oil until golden. Remove from the oil onto a paper towel.

Coat the hotdog in the batter, then glue the french fries to the dog as best you can. Drop this monstrosity back into the boiling oil and fry until the french fries begin to brown.

Le Pogo et frites

Remove from the oil and poke a stick into it. Call your cardiologist to make preliminary enquiries about heart surgery. Enjoy.

Birds fall out of trees when drunk I also fall over, have difficulty flying and run into things when drunk so theory seems plausible.

2011-09-27T19:57:00.001-07:00

Each wet season drunken red-collarred lorikeets abound in the Northern Territory. (Credit: Getty Images)

"Each wet season in northern Australia dozens of colorful lorikeets have to be rescued because they appear drunk, fall out of trees and even get a hangover-like sickness. No one knows quite what's going on, but the best explanation is they get smashed from fermented fruit. From the story: 'Experts say they are not sure if the lorikeets are actually drunk, but they do have tell-tale symptoms. "They exhibit odd behavior like falling over or difficulty flying [and] they keep running into things," says Darwin vet Dr Stephen Cutter from The Ark Animal Hospital.'"

Doctor Who's Sonic Screwdriver (Actual Screwdriver) Sale Price: $38.95

2011-09-24T19:23:00.001-07:00

Doctor Who's 11th Doctor Sonic Screwdriver (Actual Screwdriver)

Solid metal die-cast 11th Doctor Sonic Screwdriver
An actual fully-functioning screwdriver: includes 3 different sized (S, M, L), interchangeable and reversible Phillips and flat-head tips
When not in use, screwdriver bits fit neatly inside the tool
Lights up and makes sound
Requires 3 AG13 batteries 1.5 V (included)

Resurrected ancient protein is a potent antibiotic

2011-09-24T19:20:00.001-07:00

IF MODERN medicine cannot provide an answer to multidrug-resistant microbes, perhaps ancient animals can. Biologists have resurrected a mammalian antimicrobial compound that was last seen on Earth 59 million years ago when mammals were recovering from the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. Even now it is potent enough to destroy some of our most troublesome pathogens.

Last year the Infectious Diseases Society of America launched an initiative with the aim of producing 10 antibiotics to tackle multidrug-resistant bugs by 2020. The lower reaches of the tree of life are being explored for those antibiotics, says Ben Cocks of La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia.

Already, promising molecules have been found in the tissues of primitive fish called lampreys (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1108558108).

Such an approach is effective because these molecules are so simple, says Cocks. Conventional antibiotics target precise flaws in a pathogen's armour, such as a particular enzyme. This is similar to how the adaptive immune system found in vertebrates works: it learns how to fight a new pathogen and then remembers the lesson for future battles. The trouble is that the pathogens patch their armour, requiring the immune system - and drug companies - to identify new weaknesses.

Cocks says this evolutionary arms race can be side-stepped by falling back on the cruder innate immune system that is found in all plants and animals - and which has largely been ignored in our fight with multidrug-resistant pathogens.

The molecules of the innate immune system use simple chemistry to target the lipids in cell membranes. They can either disrupt and weaken bacterial membranes, or subtly alter the properties of the host's healthy cells so that pathogens can no longer attack them.

But there's a problem: animals with the strongest innate immune systems tend to be so distantly related to humans that molecules taken from them can have toxic effects in humans. Cocks's solution is to study the mammals with the best innate immune systems, the molecules of which are more likely to be compatible with humans. His work has taken him inside the wallaby's pouch.

As marsupials, wallabies give birth to young at a much earlier stage in their development than placental mammals. For example, the tammar wallaby,Macropus eugenii, is born after 26 days, equivalent to a 6-week-old human fetus. The tiny wallabies then crawl into their mother's pouch to grow larger.

"It's not a clean environment," says Cocks. Bacteria closely related to the superbugs affecting humans in hospitals have been found in the wallaby pouch. But the baby wallabies are so underdeveloped that they lack an adaptive immune system to fight them; their survival depends on their innate immune system.

Cocks's team scoured the wallaby genome and found genes that code for 14 cathelicidin peptides, a component of the innate immune system. Lab tests revealed that many of the peptides could kill a range of multidrug-resistant pathogens - without damaging human cells.

The team noticed that genes in five of the cathelicidins were remarkably similar and probably evolved from a single ancestor. "We thought that the ancestral form would have a special broad-range activity," says Cocks.

Using the changes within the five peptides, Cocks and his collaborators at the University of Sydney, Australia, worked backwards to predict the genetic sequence that codes for the original peptide. His team then used it to produce a synthetic version of the peptide, effectively resurrecting it.

"The amazing thing was that it worked well against a broad range of pathogens," he says. Lab tests showed it destroyed six of seven multidrug-resistant bacteria, and was 10 to 30 times more potent than modern antibiotics such as tetracycline (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024030).

"This is really significant," Cocks says. "Now we have access to ancient peptides for future drug development."

Damian Dowling at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says some ancient and extinct peptides might be more effective than those found in living creatures because bacteria haven't been exposed to them for millions of years. "Even if the bacteria once developed resistance against the peptide, it has probably lost it," he says.

Man Living Entirely Off His Wife’s Breast Milk

2011-09-23T19:25:00.001-07:00

If you’ve haven’t already gleaned from all our coverage over the last year, breast milk is no longer just for babies. But while we’ve seen human breast milk turned into an array culinary delights for the adult set, this is the first time we’ve caught wind of a man opting to turn it into his sole source of sustenance. One man has decided to see how long he can survive on a diet consisting entirely of his wife’s breast milk. Currently, the parents of three maintain a 22-cubic-foot freezer full of milk that they haven’t been able to donate to breast milk banks. So what’s a couple to do? There’s no waste in this household – each drop will be consumed, and the couple is blogging daily about their breast milk experiment!

BERKELEY University have found a way to view images directly from the brain

2011-09-23T19:22:00.001-07:00

The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation

BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.

It may also lay the groundwork for brain-machine interface so that people with cerebral palsy or paralysis, for example, can guide computers with their minds.

However, researchers point out that the technology is decades from allowing users to read others’ thoughts and intentions, as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as “Brainstorm,” in which scientists recorded a person’s sensations so that others could experience them.

Mind-reading through brain imaging technology is a common sci-fi theme

Previously, Gallant and fellow researchers recorded brain activity in the visual cortex while a subject viewed black-and-white photographs. They then built a computational model that enabled them to predict with overwhelming accuracy which picture the subject was looking at.

In their latest experiment, researchers say they have solved a much more difficult problem by actually decoding brain signals generated by moving pictures.

“Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie,” said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant’s lab. “In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.”

Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.”

“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said.

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.

Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images.

“We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals,” Nishimoto said.

Ultimately, Nishimoto said, scientists need to understand how the brain processes dynamic visual events that we experience in everyday life.

“We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said. “For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.”

Other coauthors of the study are Thomas Naselaris with UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; An T. Vu with UC Berkeley’s Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering; and Yuval Benjamini and Professor Bin Yu with the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics.

RELATED INFORMATION

New species of genuflecting plant buries its own seeds

2011-09-23T18:56:00.001-07:00

Spigelia genuflexa bends over to release its seeds to the ground

A new plant that "bends down" to deposit its seeds has been discovered in the Atlantic forest in the state of Bahia, northeastern Brazil.

The new species has been named Spigelia genuflexa after its unusual adaptation.

After fruits are formed, the fruiting branches bend down, depositing the capsules of seeds on the ground and sometimes burying them in the soft cover of moss

The discovery is reported in the journal PhytoKeys.

S. genuflexa was described by Alex Popovkin, an amateur botanist who has catalogued and photographed over 800 species in his property in Bahia.

A friend of Mr Popovkin's noticed the unusual plant, and brought it to his attention.

In his efforts to identify it, Popovkin contacted experts in several countries. Finally, a botanist named Lena Struwe from Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, offered to help Popovkin study the new species.

'Short-lived'

Dr Struwe told the BBC that the the plant could have evolved its remarkable seed-planting ability for several reasons.

"In this species, it is most likely that because it is so short-lived (just a few months) and lives in small fragments of suitable environments, the mother plant is most successful if she deposits her seeds right next to herself, [rather than] spreading them around far into less suitable environments," Dr Struwe told the BBC.

"Since the plant only survives for one season, the mother plant will not compete with her daughter plants either, which can be a problem for more long-lived plants."

Dr Struwe explained that other plants have evolved this same ability in order to survive on cliff walls - to deposit their seeds safely into cracks - or to avoid seed predators.

Mr Popovkin, a Russian emigre who lived in the US before moving to Brazil, said the discovery was a dream come true.

"I went to Salvador, Bahia, for the first time on a vacation," he recalled.

"At that time, in 1985, I was living in New York, [but] I fell in love with the place, climate and nature, and started thinking of one day moving there to live."

He finally made the move in 1991, settling in a rural area of northeastern Bahia, 130 km from Salvador.

"I started serious collecting and photographing at about five years ago," he said.

"I have collected over 900 [specimens] so far, of about 800 different species, including some rare ones that have not been collected in Brazil for over 60 years.

"It's taken me 30 years, from my days as a volunteer at the greenhouses of the botanic garden of the University of St Petersburg, Russia, to realise my dream of living in the tropics and studying its plants up close."

Endangered forest

Dr Struwe said: "This story shows that scientists need amateurs, naturalists, and citizen scientists to help discover and describe the amazing biodiversity that has evolved on Earth.

"New species are discovered every day, but so many more are not yet known."

The discovery also highlights the urgent need to protect the Atlantic Forest, which is under threat from deforestation.

"The Atlantic Forest has among the highest biodiversity in the world, with many species that are found only there," said Dr Struwe

"It is also one of the most endangered areas."

"Large areas have already been cut down and changed into agricultural land by humans, so the small remnants that are left need to be protected and preserved."

Particles found to break speed of light

2011-09-22T17:10:00.001-07:00

730 km traveled in 60 nanoseconds less than light would take works out to the neutrino going at 1.000025 times the speed of light.

GENEVA (Reuters) - An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.

The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research center near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.

A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos -- tiny particles that pervade the cosmos -- were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN toward Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.

Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- less than light beams would have taken.

"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."

Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.

"I just don't want to think of the implications," he told Reuters. "We are scientists and work with what we know."

Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.

The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.

It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.

To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN -- also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe -- have to pass through water, air and rock.

The underground Italian laboratory, some 120 km (75 miles) to the south of Rome, is the largest of its type in the world for particle physics and cosmic research.

Around 750 scientists from 22 different countries work there, attracted by the possibility of staging experiments in its three massive halls, protected from cosmic rays by some 1,400 metres (4,200 feet) of rock overhead.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Tom Miles and Kevin Liffey)

Flesh-eating plant inspires super-slippery material that repels everything

2011-09-21T19:51:00.001-07:00

This first test involves something the lab-boys call repulsion gel. You're not part of the control group by the way - you get the gel. Last poor son of a gun got blue paint, ha ha ha! All joking aside, that did happen. Broke every bone in his legs - tragic. But informative! Or so I'm told.

Tak-Sing Wong from Harvard University has created a synthetic material so slippery that it makes a duck’s back look like a sponge. It is “omniphobic” – it repels everything. All manner of liquids, from water to blood to crude oil, roll straight off it. Ice cannot form on it. It even heals itself when damaged. It’s an extraordinary material and it was inspired by the lips of a flesh-eating plant.

The pitcher plant kills and eats animals. Some of its leaves are shaped like deep pitchers, and their rims, known as peristomes, are exceptionally slippery. Insects that explore the rim, looking for nectar, soon lose their footholds and fall in. They soon drown, and are broken down by the pitcher’s digestive fluids. (There are some exceptions – see slideshow at the bottom).

Under the microscope, the secret to the peristome’s slipperiness is clear. It is lined with cells that overlap one another, creating a series of step-like ridges and troughs. The plant secretes nectar onto this uneven surface. The troughs collect the nectar, and the ridges hold it in place, preventing it from draining away. The result is an extremely smooth, stable and slippery surface that repels the oils on the feet of insects. Any bug that walks on this frictionless zone falls to its doom.

Wong has mimicked these structures to create SLIPS – slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces – that are more slippery than either their natural counterparts, or other man-made materials. They are made of either stacks of tiny posts, each a thousand times thinner than a human hair, or a random network of similarly thin fibres. These provide a rough structure, which Wong filled with a lubricant, just as the pitcher plant saturates its rough cells with nectar. The lubricant mixes with neither water nor oils, and it barely evaporates.

The SLIPS are like sponges – solid blocks that trap liquids – but they are designed to firmly hold the liquid in place, while keeping its surface smooth and flat. This combination allows them to to repel a far greater range of liquids than any other man-made surface. Drops of water, blood and crude oil sit on the SLIPS as spheres. The angles between the drops and the SLIPS are usually no greater than 2 degrees (the angle would be 0 for a perfect sphere).

If the SLIPS are gently angled, the drops roll off, leaving nothing behind. You can see that in the images below. Drops of oil and blood leave no traces as they roll over the SLIPS, but they form big stains as they travel over the middle Teflon layers. Ice won’t form on the slips either – the second the crystals come together, they slide off. Nor can insects get a grip – an ant, climbing after a dollop of jam, slips off just as it would on the rim of a pitcher plant (with the jam quickly following).

Wong’s SLIPS are around ten times as slippery as the next best synthetic ones. They are smoother, they work under high pressures, and they can be made transparent. They can also heal themselves. When Wong damaged the solid structure, the liquid part simply refills the affected area within less than a second. Best of all, they’re easy to make. The materials for the solid part are widely available and can easily be shaped into the right structures. For the liquid part, a wide variety of chemicals can be used and tailored to the chosen solids.

There are many possible applications. A wall coated in SLIPS would be impossible to graffiti. Medical devices or instruments covered in SLIPS would be hard to contaminate. The SLIPS are stable under a range of temperatures and pressures, which makes them useful for transporting fluids from crude oil to biofuels, or for exploring the deep ocean. They’re ice-resistant, and could be used to coat instruments in polar conditions. They are transparent and self-cleaning, so you could used them to make lenses, sensors, solar cells or night-vision devices.

This is not the first time that a naturally liquid-repellent surface has inspired the design of man-made ones. Lotus leaves are famous for their ability to repel water and clean themselves. Like the pitcher plant’s rim, they also have a microscopically uneven surface, with rows upon rows of tiny studs. Drops of water sit on top of these studs and as they roll off, they pick up dirt and other particles. Many scientists have mimicked the lotus’s structure to create water-repellent, self-cleaning surfaces.

But these lotus-inspired materials, unlike the pitcher-based ones, are fragile, sensitive and limited in their use. “They only work against water,” says Joanna Aizenberg, who led the Wong’s study. Other complex liquids, such as oils, can easily force their way into the air pockets between the studs and ruin their ability to repel water. Water itself can also do this under high pressure; a heavy rainstorm is enough. The studs can also be easily damaged; every new defect threatens to hold drops of liquid in place and prevent them from rolling off. “These surfaces are still not robust enough for many standard applications, let alone harsh conditions,” says Aizenberg.

These problems can be overcome, but at great difficulty and expense. Wong opted for a different approach by trading the lotus’s empty bumps for the pitcher plant’s liquid-filled ones. Walter Federle from the University of Cambridge, who discovered the structure of the pitcher plant’s peristome, says, “It’s really exciting to see that this principle has inspired the authors and allowed them to develop something that could prove extremely useful.” However, he adds, “I am curious whether it will be possible to make these surfaces survive over long periods of time under demanding outdoor conditions.”

Wong has designed the SLIPS so that their film of liquid lubricant stays in place. However, Aizenberg says, “Certain conditions such as the extremely high shear forces encountered by a high-speed jet could potentially deplete the liquid.” It’s incredible that those are the types of forces that would ruin the material, but the team sees this as a weakness nonetheless. They are now working on tweaking the properties of the liquid layer so that it can withstand even “high-flow or turbulent environments”.

Reference: Wong, Kang, Tang, Smythe, Hatton, Grintha & Aizenberg. 2011. Bioinspired self-repairing slippery surfaces with pressure-stable omniphobicity. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10447

Images: Pitcher plant by Thomas Gronemeyer; all others from Nature

Forever alone body pillow

2011-09-19T20:05:00.001-07:00

The Total Body Support Pillow.

Providing an extraordinary level of comfort, this pillow gives optimum support for upper and lower extremities, while cushioning and maintaining proper spinal alignment no matter your sleep position. Originally invented to help relieve fibromyalgia--a chronic condition marked by muscular pain and tenderness at specific points of the body--it has now been recognized as an effective aid to getting a good night's sleep. Both adults and children can use and enjoy the flexible, total-body pillow to sit or lie on the floor, sofa, or bed in total comfort. It can be folded into a U-shape, or come full circle to create beanbag-shaped seating. The pillow is stuffed with hypoallergenic Fusion fiberfill. The fill will become even softer and fuller with each washing (machine washable). Comes with one white poly/cotton pillowcase. Made in the U.S. 15 1/2" W x 130" L overall, 65" L folded. (10 1/2 lbs.)

The Total Body Support Pillow comes with The Hammacher Schlemmer Lifetime Guarantee at no additional charge. If this product ever disappoints you, for any reason, you may return it for exchange, credit, or refund.
Should you have any questions, we are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Please call 1-800-321-1484 to speak with a product specialist or email us at customerservice@hammacher.com to receive a response within one hour.

Item 75405 Price $119.95

Fireplace Flame Colouring Kit $20.00

2011-09-19T06:22:00.001-07:00

If you can dye eggs different colors for Easter, you can color fireplace flames - it's easy & fun. Our easy to use kit comes with complete instructions and just about everything you need to make colored flames on virtually any wood or paper product. The only thing you'll need is a few tablespoons of rubbing alcohol (or really any alcohol), some water, a few containers (cups will do) and some wood chips or pinecones or whatever it is that you want to burn. If you don't have anything handy, we've even thrown in some Popsicle sticks to get you started. You can always scale up your coloring operation to make large batches if your planning on a large bonfire, etc.
Kit includes:
5 color producing chemicals, Popsicle Sticks, Full Instructions complete with helpful hints as well as a list of chemicals and what colors to expect are included.

'Mass casualties' after crash at Reno air show At least 3 dead, scores injured as vintage plane plunges into crowd

2011-09-17T01:59:00.001-07:00

RENO, Nev. — A vintage World War II-era fighter plane crashed into a seating area Friday at a popular annual Reno air race show, killing at least three people, including the pilot, and injuring more than 50. Officials feared the death toll would rise.

Witnesses reported a horrific mix of blood, body parts and smoking debris strewn across the crash site.

The accident happened just before 4:30 p.m. during the National Championship Air Races at the Reno-Stead Airport.

Witnesses told KTVN-TV that planes in the Unlimited race were ascending when one aircraft, a vintage P-51 Mustang flown by a renowned air racer and movie stunt pilot, nose-dived into a box-seat area near a spectator grandstand in the southeast corner.

The plane disintegrated, strewing debris into the nearby stands.

Mike Draper, a spokesman for the Reno National Championship Air Races, described the scene as "a mass-casualty situation." Bloodied bodies were spread across the area as people tended to the victims and ambulances rushed to the scene.

Marilyn Newton / AP file

Jimmy Leeward is seen in this Sept. 15, 2010, photo with his P-51 Mustang.

Jimmy Leeward, 74, of Ocala, Fla., who flew the P-51, was killed, said Mike Houghton, president and CEO of Reno Air Races.

"Dear friends, we are deeply saddened by the tragedy at the air race today. Please join us in praying at this time for all the families affected," Leeward's family wrote in a message posted on Facebook.

Renown Medical Center spokeswoman Kathy Carter said at least two others taken to the hospital had died, but did not provide their identities.

'Unbelievable gore'
Witness Maureen Higgins of Alabama said the pilot was on his third lap when he lost control of the plane. She told the Gazette-Journal she was sitting about 30 yards away from the crash and the man in front of her was struck in the head by a piece of debris.

"I saw body parts and gore like you wouldn't believe it. I'm talking an arm, a leg," Higgins told the newspaper. "The alive people were missing body parts. I am not kidding you. It was gore. Unbelievable gore."

Video apparently taken from the stands and posted on YouTube showed a plane crashing nose-down at the show after several other planes raced by in the air.

Spectators could be heard gasping: "Oh my God." A photograph captured the doomed plane, nose down just before impact.

"It was in the Unlimited Gold race on about the second lap when the third-place aircraft, No. 177, the Galloping Ghost flown by Jimmy Leeward experienced mechanical problems," said Tim O'Brien, a Grass Valley resident on assignment at the races for The Union newspaper. "The plane vaulted violently upward, followed by a dive straight into the front of the reserve grandstands."

Jeff Martinez, a KRNV weatherman, was just outside the air race grounds at the time. He said he saw the plane veer to the right and then went "straight into the ground."

"You saw pieces and parts going everywhere," he said.

'Like a massacre'
Local TV stations aired videotape of the scene that showed numerous people being treated at the scene or being carried on stretchers to ambulances.

Debris from the crash was strewn through a seating area in front of the grandstands.

“It’s just like a massacre. It’s like a bomb went off,” said Dr. Gerald Lent of Reno, who witnessed the crash, told the Gazette-Journal. “There are people lying all over the runway.”

He added: "One guy was cut in half. There's blood everywhere. There’s arms and legs."

Stephanie Kruse, a spokeswoman for the Regional Emergency Medical Service Authority, told The Associated Press that emergency crews took a total of 56 injury victims to three hospitals.

She said they also observed a number of people being transported by private vehicle, which they are not including in their count.

Kruse said of the total 56, at the time of transport, 15 were considered in critical condition, 13 were in serious condition with potentially life-threatening injuries and 28 had non-serious or non-life threatening injuries.

"This is a very large incident, probably one of the largest this community has seen in decades," Kruse told The AP. "The community is pulling together to try to deal with the cope of it. The hospitals have certainly geared up and staffed up to deal with it."

Liz Margerum/The Reno Gazette-Jo

Medics help injured bystanders out of a helicopter into Renown Medical Center.

Houghton, of Reno Air Races, said it was too early to know for sure what caused the wreck, but there appeared to be a "problem with the aircraft that caused it to go out of control."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fire Stash Keyring £6.99 with free delivery

2011-09-15T23:41:00.001-07:00

Stock £6.99 with free delivery

An essential item for camping trips

The hot wobbly stuff we call fire is incredibly handy. But stuffing some plasticky disposable lighter in your pocket is about as cool as ramming giant pickled onions up your nose. For this reason and many more you need the Fire Stash.
Impossibly titchy, this keyring-friendly zinc alloy capsule unscrews to reveal a fully functioning refillable lighter. Presto, Instant fire wherever you may roam. Chrome plated, the Fire Stash even features a waterproof neoprene ‘O’ ring around its thread, so shipwrecked sailors, clumsy boozers and cross-channel smokers can still light up (assuming they don’t forget their keys).

It's small but flaming useful!

But even if you don’t smoke, this sleek gizmo is sure to come in handy at some point. Use it to light candles, bonfires, barbecues, blow offs, whatever. You can even wave it around during power ballads. The possibilities are endless. Best of all, at just £6.99, it won’t burn a hole in your pocket. Flame on!

Colour changing bathroom tile that responds to heat or touch. At $30/tile, it will take all your money!

2011-09-15T23:23:00.001-07:00

Northern Lights™ Color Variations

Dinosaur feather evolution trapped in Canadian amber

2011-09-15T23:21:00.001-07:00

A wide array of different feather shapes was captured in the same place within just a few years

Samples of amber in western Canada containing feathers from dinosaurs and birds have yielded the most complete story of feather evolution ever seen.

Eleven fragments show the progression from hair-like "filaments" to doubly-branched feathers of modern birds.

The analysis of the 80-million-year-old amber deposits is presented in Science.

The find, along with an accompanying article analysing feather pigment, adds to the idea that many dinosaurs sported feathers - some brightly coloured.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of reports about the beginnings of feathers as we know them now in birds.

So-called compression fossils found in China bear outlines of primitive "filament" feathers that are more akin to hair.

But modern feathers are highly branched and structured, and the full story of how those came to be had not yet been revealed by the fossil record.

Now a study of amber found near Grassy Lake in Alberta - dated from what is known as the Late Cretaceous period - has unearthed a full range of feather structures that demonstrate the progression.

"We're finding two ends of the evolutionary development that had been proposed for feathers trapped in the same amber deposit," said Ryan McKellar of the University of Alberta, lead author of the report.

The team's find confirms that the filaments progressed to tufts of filaments from a single origin, called barbs. In later development, some of these barbs can coalesce into a central branch called a rachis. As the structure develops further, further branches of filments form from the rachis.

"We've got feathers that look to be little filamentous hair-like feathers, we've got the same filaments bound together in clumps, and then we've got a series that are for all intents and purposes identical to modern feathers," Mr McKellar told BBC News.

"We're catching some that look to be dinosaur feathers and another set that are pretty much dead ringers for modern birds."

Lucky find

By the Late Cretaceous, feathers had more or less reached the end of their evolution, and it is simply lucky that specimens bearing the full range of different feather types happened to be captured in the same amber deposit.

"We've known for quite a while that several of the non-bird dinosaurs actually had feathers and many of them had feathers that are identical to the feathers you see on a pigeon in the park today," said Mark Norell, chairman of the palaeontology division at the American Museum of Natural History.

"What's interesting is the diversity of feathers that were present in [these] non-avian dinosaurs that existed pretty close to that time interval when those animals disappeared around 65 million years ago," he told the BBC.

The most developed of the feathers seem to be similar to water-dwelling and diving birds - almost like down. However, Mr McKellar said that none of the feathers was adapted for flight, but rather for an ever-more complex ornamentation strategy.

Like the modern grebe's feather here, the latest feathers show adaptations for swimming

A second article in Science examines another aspect of the ornamentation: colour.

Feathers are given their colour by structures in their cells called melanosomes, which contain melanin, the same chemical that gives us our skin colour. Study of remnants of these melanosomes has already yielded evidence for example that one of the first feathered dinosaurs ever discovered, theSinosauropteryx, was a "redhead".

But most often, the melanosomes of feathers or the melanin they leave behind are destroyed with time, leaving few clues as to what colour a given dinosaur would have been.

Now Roy Wogelius of the University of Manchester in the UK has shown a method using high-energy rays of light from a synchrotron that can spot tiny amounts of metal atoms left behind by eumelanin, one of the types of melanin responsible for a range of black and brown colours.

"A perfect understanding of colour is unlikely except in perhaps exceptional cases," Dr Wogelius said in an online chat about the work in July.

"But, with the technological advances we are optimistic that we will be able to find chemical details beyond simply dark and light patterning."

In fact, a picture is emerging that many dinosaurs were not the dull-coloured, reptilian-skinned creatures that they were once thought to be.

"If you were to transport yourself back 80 million years to western North America and walk around the forest... so many of the animals would have been feathered," said Dr Norell.

"We're getting more and more evidence... that these animals were also brightly coloured, just like birds are today."

PORSCHE INVOLVED IN HIGH-SPEED CHASE

2011-09-12T16:13:00.001-07:00

A man has been arrested and charged after a dramatic two-hour police chase on the Gold Coast yesterday.

The 23-year-old Ashmore man has been charged with one count each of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and unlawful use of a motor vehicle.

The man was allegedly driving a yellow Porsche Boxter, believed to be stolen, at speed through suburban streets and along the M1.

Police were unwilling to continue the pursuit when it reached excessive speeds, calling the chase off three times.

The man drove the Porsche the wrong way up a one-way street, narrowly missed a pedestrian and later crashed into a guard rail damaging the front driver's side wheel.

The man continued driving at high speeds despite the car catching on fire and the wheel eventually dislodging.

After crashing the vehicle the man fled on foot before allegedly stealing a Nissan Navara.

He was captured by police after crashing the second vehicle near Reedy Creek.

It is believed the Porsche was stolen from a Mudgeeraba address last month and used in a number of break-ins.

Bender Hat with Ear Flaps $23.00 USD

2011-09-12T00:40:00.001-07:00

Are you a Robot fan? Do you have a cold head? Then this hat is for you!! Presenting the all new Robot crocheted hat. Now this robot darling can sit upon your head whenever and wherever you please!
The hat pictured is sized for an adult/ teenager but I can easily adjust the pattern to fit a child. All my hats are made with acrylic yarns but if you prefer something else please contact me and I will work with you. I just find acrylics easier to wash! I will get started on your hat right after purchase. I try to work as fast as possible because I know how boring it can be waiting for a package to arrive
Thanks for looking and please tell your friends if you like what you see!
*BREAKING NEWS: Thank you guys so much for liking the hell out of this hat. I never thought that I would be so busy doing something that I love. If you would be so kind as to give me extra time to finish your orders that would be great. I am making them as super fast as my artistic ability allows me to. Thanks guy!!

Corporate Taxes: How Low Can You Go?

2011-09-11T00:51:00.001-07:00

The idea that America's 35 percent corporate tax rate is stifling U.S. economic growth is almost an article of faith among some politicians.

The sound bites from Republican presidential debates to campaign stops are basically interchangeable: "We need to bring that corporate tax rate down."

But in fact, very few corporations pay taxes on 35 percent of their profits. With the help of complex international tax loopholes, some companies manage to pay almost no corporate tax at all.

'Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich'

It's not necessarily big oil or pharmaceutical companies that are cashing in on complex offshore tax loopholes. In fact, the corporation with one of the most advanced tax-shirking techniques may have helped you find this very article: Google.

"If Google paid taxes at the full 35 percent rate on all of its profits, it would lose almost a quarter of its total profits," Bloomberg reporter Jesse Drucker tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

Drucker says the company saved more than $3 billion from 2007-2009 through a winding system of offshore subsidiaries. Google's not the only company that does this, he says; many other tech giants like Microsoft and Apple have similar structures. But Google's offshore tax rate — 2.4 percent by Drucker's count — bests its peers in the technology sector in ways that a retail giant like Wal-Mart could never hope to.

EnlargeGoogle Press

Google's Netherlands Office has an indoor bike lane.

In 2003, Drucker says, Google transferred all of its non-U.S. intellectual property rights to a subsidiary in Ireland.

"From that point forward," he says, "any profits coming from sales overseas would be contributed not to the U.S. parent — where they would be taxed at a rate of 35 percent — but to the Irish subsidiary."

The corporate tax rate in Ireland? 12.5 percent.

But Google didn't stop there, Drucker says. The company used a financial tool known in the corporate tax world as the "double Irish."

"The Irish subsidiary pays royalties to a second Irish subsidiary," Drucker says, this one that declares its tax residency in Bermuda, where there's no corporate income tax.

Google faced another problem it had to work around. The company would have to pay taxes to move money directly from Ireland to Bermuda, Drucker says, so it used another tool known as the "Dutch sandwich."

"So the payments go from the Irish sub to the Dutch sub to the Bermuda-resident Irish sub," Drucker says.

"The combination of these strategies has helped Google cut its effective tax rate overseas to the low-single-digit rate," he says.

Bermuda Or Bust

Google, like most corporations, will be the first to tell you that this is all completely legal under U.S. tax law.

"We have an obligation to our shareholders to set up a tax-efficient structure, and our present structure is compliant with the tax rules in all the countries where we operate," a spokesperson told NPR.

To some politicians and economists, that sounds like a good reason to lower the U.S. corporate tax rate and draw Google's profits back home.

But draw them from where?

"We know that the corporate income tax rate in a number of countries overseas — even in our competitors, in the G-7 countries — is in the mid- to high-20 percent range," Drucker says.

"U.S. companies are not shifting income into those countries. They are not shifting income into the U.K., France and Italy. They are shifting income into Bermuda and the Cayman Islands," he says, "jurisdictions where there is no corporate income tax at all."

"If that's the case, it seems to me that it raises questions about whether cutting the U.S. corporate income tax rate would do anything to change any of this behavior," Drucker says.

Taxes On Holiday

All of Google's crafty accounting applies only to profits it collects overseas.

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader says the situation in the U.S. isn't much better.

He cites a recent report by the liberal Citizens for Tax Justice, which lists 12 corporations that — thanks to various loopholes, subsidies and other advantages written into the tax code — paid zero federal income taxes over the last three years.

"This is a seismic change in what might be called any semblance of U.S. corporate patriotism," Nader says.

So what would a fair corporate tax rate look like?

"I think we need to get back to where the OECD countries are, in the low- to mid-20s," says economist Stephen Slivinski of the conservative Goldwater Institute, referring to the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

If that happens, Slivinski says, "you could probably see some kind of capital coming back into the U.S."

Drucker says that even under a proposed corporate tax holiday that would allow major U.S. corporations to bring profits home at a low rate of around 5 percent — marketed by the likes of Cisco and Pfizer as a "second stimulus" — Bermuda and the Cayman Islands would still offer lower rates.

A similar tax holiday in 2005 wasn't very productive at all, he says.

"All of the cash brought back from overseas was used to buy back stock and give companies a boost in their stock prices," Drucker says. "It wasn't used to hire people and build factories."

Cobra Ink System CHEAP INK

2011-09-11T00:47:00.001-07:00

Sounds like a great idea!!!!!!

Good riddance paper! Someday.

Meanwhile I have stacks of color pages I have to print. I am designing a few full-color books and that means proofing them on paper so I really need really cheap printing. Those spammy refill ink cartridges aren’t cheap or dependable enough.
After much research and trial and error I found that the easiest cheapest method of printing is a continuous ink supply built into a printer. Once you are set up you can buy ink inexpensively by the pint, quart or gallon. A pint bottle of ink will cost no more than one of those itty bitty 1 oz. cartridges and will last hundreds of times as long.
A continuous ink system runs tubes from the refillable ink containers into the moving ink head in the printer. The printer operates normally. You simply refill the outside container with bulk ink and keep printing on the same originally installed cartridges. There are a number of outfits that will sell you a kit to do this yourself. I’ve heard of occasional satisfaction with this method. But installing this gear can get really messy and hairy. You are on your own if it does not work correctly. And some printer models are easier to retrofit than others.
I opted for a more elegant and not that much more expensive option: have the pros do it. Cobra Systems will install their continuous ink supply system on twelve different brand new Epson printer models. For about $50-100 more than the cost of the new printer, they will ship you a ready-to-use modified new printer with refillable ink containers already installed. Because this modification voids Epson’s warranty, they provide their own warranty. They guarantee it will work. Period. In fact, in my experience Cobra’s service is amazing. They will make absolutely sure your system is working to your satisfaction no matter what, even if they have swap it out at their cost.
Because Epson (and all the other printer manufacturers) discourage these kinds of workarounds of their pricey inks, there are some kludgy maintenance steps (like squeezing a bypass switch every now and then) needed to fool the cartridges into going beyond their programmed death. But these inconveniences are minor.
The Epson printers work as advertised. You can get a new 8x11 Epson Workforce 30 installed out of the box with a bulk ink system for $100. I've been using a new Epson Workforce 1100 with the Cobra-modified system installed for $280. It's a serious large-format general purpose printer for up to 11 x 17 inch pages, with 5 huge ink tanks. After about 30 minutes of easy set up, purging the system of air from shipping, I was ready to print. I now churn out hundreds of 11 x 17 full color pages for a few dollars worth of ink. I saved the extra cost of the continuous ink system in the first week of use. (It’s shocking how much ink is consumed when a printer cleans its heads.) You can get long-lasting pigment inks, or high-heat inks, or plain old dye inks. Half a liter (a pint) of dye ink goes for $27. Compare that to the thimblefull in most ink cartridges.
Important caveat: You need to situate the printer in a work place you don’t mind getting stained with spots of color because even though the system is well designed to minimize spills, the inks are not sealed and sooner or later you WILL spatter some ink at some point. Count on it. Also, since the ink tanks are velcro'd to the side of the printer, these units won't win any style prizes if that is important to you.
For most folks a bulk system is overkill. If all you need is infrequent home printing, I still recommend the previously reviewed HP OfficeJet K5400 as the cheapest per page cost for an off-the-shelf device. But if you are doing large volume printing, saying proofing a book, or running a T-shirts business (Cobra’s main customers), or printing flyers and posters, then I recommend Cobra’s continuous ink system and their fantastic support. (You can also send them your own Epson printer and have them add their continuous ink supply.)

-- KK

Epson Workforce 1100 with Cobra dye ink system
$270
Available from and manufactured by Cobra Ink

How one man had sex on the moon

2011-09-10T00:23:00.001-07:00

On August 4, 2011 4:41 PM

How far would you go to impress a girl? Dinner, dancing, fine wine and jewelry are all expected presents when a boy is wooing a girl. But one man made sure his romance was out of this world — literally — when he stole NASA's moon rock collection to impress his lady love.

On July 20, 2002, star NASA intern Thad Roberts stole a 600-pound safe, which contained moon rocks from every moon mission since 1969, from the organization's headquarters. He brought the rocks to a cheap Orlando hotel, scattered them out on the bed and had sex with his girlfriend on them. He eventually tried to sell the ill-gotten goods on the internet and was busted by a Belgian mineral collector.

It's all part of a bigger story, detailed in the new book, Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich.

Author Mezrich has written about college kids scamming Las Vegas (in Bringing Down the House) and college kids inventing the world's most successful website (in The Accidential Billionaires). But Thad Roberts' space heist takes the cake. "This is the craziest story that I've ever been involved with," Mezrich told The Current guest host Jim Brown. "It's crazy. You couldn't invent a story like this."

The heist took place in 2002, but NASA worked hard to keep the incident quiet, and did so successfully for nearly a decade. Only once Roberts' got out of prison and decided to tell his story did the world learn about the moon rock theft and the bizarre details of the caper: Thad Roberts dreamed of being the first person to land on Mars, and his rising-star status at NASA meant this could possibly happen; he stole the invaluable rocks and minerals to impress a girl he'd known for only three weeks; it took NASA 48 hours to even notice that the safe was missing; Roberts served seven and a half years in a federal prison for his crime.

But why? Why throw all that promise and potential away? Even after spending a year with Roberts, Mezrich isn't sure. 'I think he assumed that it was a college prank," Mezrich suggests. "He never thought he was stealing this national treasure, which is exactly what he did. He just didn't think of it that way."

Perhaps he should have. After all, the writer who has seen and heard it all still can't quite believe this actually happened.

"I was blown away by all of it," Mezrich admits.

He's sure readers will be too.

Beer’s black market

2011-09-08T04:47:00.001-07:00

Todd Jenkins/FTWP - Hundreds of beer drinkers gather at California's Russian River Brewing Company to drink Pliny the Younger, an imperial India pale beer offered only once a year.

One Friday in February 2010, hundreds of beer geeks descended upon California’s Russian River Brewing Co. to score some Pliny the Younger, an imperial India pale ale that is released just once a year — only on draft. Within eight hours, they had bought all 600 gallons, and within days, 64-ounce growlers were selling on eBay for $150 and up. To thwart profiteers, this year Russian River decided not to fill containers. “The only way it was going to get out of there,” co-owner Natalie Cilurzo says, “was in your stomach.”

Nonetheless, Cilurzo caught two men trying to smuggle Pliny out of the brew pub, and an eBay listing appeared once again and was removed only after she complained to both eBay and the seller.

Her experience is not unique. The Web site has become beer’s most high-profile black market, a market that is increasingly angering some of the world’s best brewers, who consider resale immoral, illegal or just plain insulting.

In the words of Tomme Arthur, whose Lost Abbey beers are routinely resold for hundreds of dollars, “We believe those selling beer on eBay should be chased down.” The site’s alcohol policy explicitly forbids the sale of alcohol, except for pre-approved sales of wine, and eBay spokeswoman Amanda Coffee says the company “works with law enforcement and regulatory authorities to ensure listings are in compliance.”

But the beer trade persists, thanks to a loophole that allows the sale of “collectible containers” as long as sellers post an eBay-provided disclaimer, which states that “any incidental contents are not intended for consumption.” The disclaimer also notes that “the buyers and sellers ensure that the sale complies with all applicable laws” — even though many beer sales probably do not.

“There’s an awfully good chance that somebody selling interstate will be running afoul of state law,” says Thomas Hogue, congressional liaison for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Still, eBay beer sales seem to be on the rise. “It’s becoming a more typical practice,” says the Bruery’s Patrick Rue, who brews the imperial stout Black Tuesday, an eBay favorite. “And a lot more breweries are becoming aware of it and trying to stop it.”

Last month, for example, San Diego’s Stone Brewing Co., whose rare Vertical Epic beers are sometimes listed on eBay for more than $1,000 per bottle, began selling the first beer in its new Quingenti Millilitre series via a lottery system, and Stone has announced that people who try to resell it will be banned from future drawings. “We have involuntarily been a part of the eBay aftermarket for many years,” says Greg Koch, Stone’s co-founder and chief executive. “This is the first time we’ve come out, laid it on the table and said very point-blank, ‘Please, do not resell.’”

On Sept. 17, residents of the Washington area will be able to participate in what is probably the most creative response to eBay piracy thus far: Zwanze Day. Belgium’s Cantillon Brewery, whose beers are considered the gold standard of the spontaneously fermented style known as lambic, has shipped barrels of its annual Zwanze release to 20 leading beer bars spanning the globe from Finland to California to Japan, including Washington’s ChurchKey. The beer is not being sold in bottles, and all of the barrels will be tapped that Saturday, at the local equivalent of 3 p.m. EST where possible, resulting in a synchronized worldwide celebration that discourages stockpiling and online sales.

Jean Van Roy, Cantillon’s head brewer, came up with that plan after noticing that Zwanze 2010, which he sold for six euros per bottle, was soon going on eBay for 70 or 80 euros. “The goal with Zwanze Day is to try to reach directly the beer fan, the Cantillon fan,” he says, “and to give the possibility to those people to taste the beer at a correct price.” Likewise, Stone’s use of a lottery is intended to keep its beer accessible and relatively inexpensive. The brewery hopes to reward devotees rather than opportunists, and although it is selling the beer for $25 per bottle, that price reflects the cost of production instead of what the market will bear.

“In another life, I would be a consumer advocate,” Stone’s Koch says, adding that high prices also are problematic because they often accompany second-tier products. Some beers, such as hoppy India pale ales, quickly lose their vibrancy or go rancid when exposed to light and heat. “Frankly, somebody’s naive if they pay big dollars for this stuff on eBay,” Koch says. “They think they get a rare, special beer, but the reality is that they get a rare beer but it’s no longer special.”

Ultimately, though, what seems to upset brewers most is their sense that they are being exploited. “You want to hear about the framboise story?” said Russian River’s Cilurzo. “I am furious about this.”

Last September, Russian River released Framboise for a Cure, a raspberry-flavored beer that it sold for $12 per bottle to raise money for a local breast cancer treatment center. The beer sold out in a day, and soon somebody sold a bottle on eBay for $400. Then someone else put one up for sale. “We contacted that person,” Cilurzo says, “and we said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous, because we donated 100 percent of this for charity.’”

The seller didn’t budge. “The guy said, ‘I have to support my habit somehow.’ ” Not heroin or cocaine. He meant craft beer.

Velociraptor On Zebra

Sex and drug parties in S’pore chalets?

Udacity and the future of online universities

The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway.

How to grow your own fresh air

Australian tries to sell stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia on eBay

Popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com shut down; founder, others indicted on piracy charges

Team Fortress 2 cosplay

Zombie ants: When ants become walking dead

A parasitized ant. Image credit: David P. Hughes.

philislothical

New drug may keep you sober no matter how much you've had to drink

Kanzi, The Bonobo Ape That Lights Fires and Cooks Food

Cop speeding through an intersection kills two people proceeds to arrest the relatives and rewarded with paid vacation

First prize every single game on steam!

North Korea's Kim Jong-il dead at 69

SMRT says sorry for 'income opportunity' alert

Target Gets Robbed via Facebook Promotion

Tattoo fail for her humorous win for us

PDF Converter Pro 10 07 (With Pacth)

what appears to be two wounded pelicans fighting over carrion

Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender of Justice by Night

Teen says 'It's your fault I burgled you' in letter to robbery victims

Electronics Books Collection

Helpful Mouse Fetuses Naturally Send Stem Cells to Mom to Fix Her Damaged Heart

Cardiomyocytes damaged by a heart attack

Chocolate Swirl Cookies

Complete National Geographic on 6 DVD-ROMs - 2010 Updated Edition $29.95

What a woman’s brain looks like on sex

Asked to choose between bacon and sex, 43 per cent of Canadians would choose...bacon!

Jesus Riding a velociraptor!

Obese Monkeys Lose Weight On Drug That Attacks Blood Supply of Fat Cells

Zynga worlds most evil company taking it to another new level

Two female room-mates 'tied up teenager and cut him 300 times during two-day satanic sex torture marathon'

Polish newspaper claims 'Pedobear' is 2010 Vancouver Olympic mascot

A Polish newspaper mistakenly identified "Pedobear", a notorious internet meme, as one of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Western black rhino declared extinct

Angry birds is the new snake

One-molecule nanocar takes a test drive

Mapping a World of Human Activity

Rugby player who had stroke woke up gay and became hairdresser

Khan Academy Gets $5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a Physical School

Science strikes again! Let's rip up space and see what's underneath. What could go wrong?

The World’s Largest Family: 181 Live in 100-Room House

Scrat, the fictional saber-toothed squirrel from the Ice Age films, may not be so fictional after all.

board games actually worth buying?

Gateway Games (1 to 1 1/2 hours playtime / Simple Rulesets)

Medium Weight Games (1 1/2 - 2 hours playtime / Intermediate Rulesets)

Heavy Games (2 - 3 hours playtime / Time to teach/learn 30 minutes)

Disclaimer: DO NOT START WITH THESE GAMES

My Top 5 Favorites

Bacteria used to cleanup uranium

Terrifying Talking Robot Can Mimic Human Speech

Angry Birds passes half a billion download mark

Strawberries protect the stomach from alcohol

Woman ages overnight WTF

Woman gives birth hours after running Chicago Marathon

50 Free Programming eBooks

Take Any College Class for Free: 236 Open Courseware Collections, Podcasts, and Videos

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

http://www.ai-class.com

Basic and Advanced Tracks

Introduction to Databases!

Machine Learning

Basic and Advanced Tracks

Archives

Broadcast Learning

Directories & Searches

eBooks & eTexts

Encyclopedias

Open Courseware Collections - University

Open Courseware Collections

Podcasts - University

Podcasts - Other

Research

Videos - University

Video - Other

Video Directories & Searches

Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: 'Humans Are Just Modified Fish'

Denver man 'thought dead friend was drunk'