How to spot a hidden religious agenda

www.newscientist.com

A game without a point hits the iPhone and is well worth the wait

www.tgdaily.com:
YOU WON’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES
Zen Bound challenges you to wrap a rope around mid-air suspended object to cover its surface with paint. This ingenious idea is combined with great use of both touch and tilt controls, resulting in unique meditative experience. On top of that, Zen Bound features perhaps most convincing graphics we have seen on iPhone to date, with super shading, immersive sound backdrop and moody tune.

See Video at page 2 of original article.

IP Man – very good kung-fu drama, recommended

IMDB:
Tagline: The celebrated Kung Fu master of Bruce Lee.
Plot:      A semi-biographical account of Yip Man, the first martial arts master to teach the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun.

Air-breathing planes: the spaceships of the future?

www.newscientist.com:
For decades, engineers have dreamed of a better way: a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle that would be lighter, cheaper, and easy to reuse. A fleet of these vehicles, supporters say, could be almost as easy to maintain as conventional jet planes, reducing the preparation time before each launch from months to days or even hours.

Since most of a rocket’s weight is taken up by oxidiser, one logical approach is to save weight by developing an engine that can use oxygen from the atmosphere to burn fuel at least part of the way.

Are we getting any closer to this goal? Last week, the UK firm Reaction Engines announced they had received €1 million from the European Space Agency to develop three key parts for an air-breathing rocket engine. The firm hopes those components could one day help fulfill a decades-old plan to build a space plane called Skylon, which could take off and land on a runway like a conventional jet.

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

www.wired.com:
Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. “If everything you’re doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?” OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. “Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?” The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD’s vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: “Now imagine you’ve got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game.”

Is Aging an Accident of Evolution? -A Galaxy Insight

www.dailygalaxy.com:
“Everyone has assumed we age by rust. But how do you explain animals that don’t age? Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, there are whales that live to be 200 and clams that make it past 400 years.”

Top 10 Google Earth Finds – Photos

www.time.com

Big Dog’s US Army Antics Keep Freaking Us Out – amazing video

i.gizmodo.com:
If you were freaked out by the spooky Big Dog quadruped robot, you are going to love seeing it in action alongside US Army soldiers, following them like a smart giant dog.

And that’s what it is: A really smart giant dog. Big Dog—which is being developed by robotics company Boston Dynamics—has some of the most advanced artificial intelligence and navigation systems in the planet. In fact, US Army officials are stunned by its programmed behaviors, which make Big Dog extremely helpful in the battlefield.

Chair kills teenager

www.tgdaily.com:
Chicago (IL) – That gas cylinder in office chairs we don’t really think about could be more dangerous than generally believed. A 14-year old Chinese teenager suffered heavy blood loss after the device exploded and turned out to be fatal.

Introducing the gel-filled army helmet that will crush bullets as they penetrate it

www.dailymail.co.uk:
On the face of it a layer of orange jelly may not sound the best way to protect a soldier’s head from high velocity bullets and shrapnel.

But the British Army’s standard-issue combat helmet is set to be upgraded with a liner made from gooey miracle gel, which responds to a sudden impact by locking instantly into a solid form – absorbing huge amounts of energy harmlessly.

A UK-based technology company was today celebrating a £100,000 contract from the Ministry of Defence to develop its D3O shock-absorbing gel to help save the lives of British troops fighting on the frontline in Afghanistan.

Stem cell ‘fabrics’ promise universal tissue

www.newscientist.com:
Embryonic stem cells can survive being spun into polymer threads – a technique that could be used to weave flexible synthetic tissues able to adapt to any transplant environment, say UK biophysicists. The approach could be a step towards the production of artificial organs.

Forests in the sky could be built to clean air of pollution belched out by factories

www.dailymail.co.uk:
Visionary architects have designed a revolutionary skyscraper to combat global warming by growing trees hundreds of feet in the air.

The CO2 Scraper will hold up to 400 trees in a bid to absorb dangerous pollutants and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Its award-winning designers say it should be built near factories or other major sources of pollution in order to clean the air.

Ten ways to avoid cancer

www.newscientist.com:

The report urges governments across the world to make it easier for people to lose weight and eat healthily, by increasing access to sports facilities and making it safer to cycle to work, and by reducing the cost of healthy foods so people are more inclined to buy them.

“Individuals decide for themselves what to eat, but let’s make it easier for individuals and their families to make healthy decisions,” says Marmot.

Ten ways to avoid cancer

1. Body fat: aim for a body mass index (BMI) of 21 to 23 and avoid weight gain during adulthood

2. Physical activity: aim for 30 to 60 minutes of moderate physical activity, like brisk walking, every day

3. Junk food: avoid sugary drinks and energy-dense fast food

4. Meat: eat no more than 500 grams of red meat per week and avoid processed meats

5. Alcohol: limit daily intake to one drink for women, two drinks for men. Do not binge drink

6. Fruit and vegetables: eat five portions of fruit and non-starchy vegetables each day and limit refined starchy food Preservatives: avoid salt-preserved foods. Limit salt intake to 6 grams per day

7. Dietary supplements: to be avoided, except in special cases – such as folic acid during pregnancy

8. Breastfeeding: new mums should try to breastfeed for six months

9. Cancer survivors: seek professional nutritional advice

An Ant colony functions like a single brain

www.physorg.com:
Colonies of social insects such as ants and bees could collectively make decisions using mechanisms similar to those used in primate brains, according to new research from the University of Bristol.

Cea mai ieftină maşină din lume apare peste o lună

www.capital.ro

Can The Flash-Based ioDrive Redefine Storage Performance? : Can Fusion-io Trigger A Meltdown For Hard Drive Makers?

www.tomshardware.com

Conclusion

Fusion-io did an amazing job with this product, which is the first flash SSD storage device to deliver truly revolutionary performance. Forget everything you know: this device is faster. Although we did not match the benchmark numbers we found in Fusionio’s data sheet, the 500 MB/s throughput and up to over 40,000 I/O operations per second are many times what hard drives, RAID arrays, and even existing flash SSD solutions are capable of delivering.

It’s Not A Drive, But It’s Amazing Storage

The ioDrive isn’t a classic drive as we know it, as it connects via x4 PCI Express. Thanks to this rather direct link, the ioDrive provides several times the bandwidth of Serial Attached SCSI or SATA. This, by the way, is still a reason why flash SSDs haven’t been completely embraced by the enterprise segment: there are only SATA drives available, and reliability is a rather large unknown that only time can make clear.

Toyota wants to build a car from seaweed

www.tgdaily.com:
Chicago (IL) – With the entire world looking for green alternatives, Toyota is in talks regarding an ultra lightweight, incredibly efficient plug-in hybrid with a body made of seaweed. The vehicle could potentially be seen in showrooms in 15 years, but it’s definitely not coming any time soon.

Salt solution: Cheap power from the river’s mouth

www.newscientist.com:
Veerman and his colleagues at Wetsus, the Dutch Centre for Sustainable Water Technology in Leeuwarden, believe they can tap energy locked up in the North Sea’s saltwater by channelling it, along with fresh water from the Rhine, into a novel kind of battery. With a large enough array of these batteries, he says, the estuary could easily provide over a gigawatt of electricity by a process they’ve called Blue Energy – enough to supply about 650,000 homes.

“Salinity power” exploits the chemical differences between salt and fresh water, and this project only hints at the technology’s potential: from the mouth of the Ganges to the Mississippi delta, almost every large estuary could produce a constant flow of green electricity, day and night, rain or shine, without damaging sensitive ecosystems or threatening fisheries (see map). One estimate has it that salinity power could eventually become a serious power player, supplying as much as 7 per cent of today’s global energy needs.
…

Membrane development remains the biggest headache, says Stein Erik Skilhagen, manager of the PRO project at Statkraft. Unfortunately, membranes used in desalination plants are too thick, he says, and cannot draw enough water through. So Statkraft’s engineers have been working with membrane developers to improve designs. While their first membranes generated about 100 milliwatts per square metre, the latest version generates over 3 watts per square metre, close to their target of 5 watts.

Skilhagen reckons these membranes are now efficient enough to be worth testing beyond the lab, and in the next few months the company plans to turn on the world’s first prototype PRO plant at the Södra Cell paper pulp factory in Tofte, alongside a fjord 60 kilometres from Oslo.

Păsări care îşi fac cuiburi din metal

www.gandul.info:
Păsări mai „moderne” decât cele din Hong Kong nu se găsesc nicăieri în lume, pentru că acestea au învăţat cum „să-şi ţeasă” cuiburi din metal, relatează Agerpres, citând un ziar chinez. Cercetătorii au descoperit că aceste cuiburi erau construite din fire metalice cu o lungime de până la 30 cm şi un diametru de circa 1 cm, fiind realizate cu aceeaşi iscusinţă pe care o arată păsările care împletesc paie sau fire de iarbă.

Researchers develop ‘wireless’ activation of brain circuits

www.physorg.com:
By using semiconductor nanoparticles as tiny solar cells, the scientists can excite neurons in single cells or groups of cells with infrared light. This eliminates the need for the complex wiring by embedding the light-activated nanoparticles directly into the tissue. This method allows for a more controlled reaction and closely replicates the sophisticated focal patterns created by natural stimuli.