Volkswagen bik.e replaces spare tire with electric mobility device

Volkswagen bik.e replaces spare tire with electric mobility device [w/video] — Autoblog Green

Volkswagen has rolled out its first ever two-wheeler at Auto China 2010. Following a flurry of flapping and arm waving highly sophisticated dance number, V-Dub research and development chief Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg rode confidently onto the stage aboard the VW bik.e (not a typo). A very cool looking piece of mobility art that looks a little like a small bicycle without the pedals, the battery-powered device has definitely been designed with both form and function in mind: the whole thing folds quickly down into a flat disc that fits quite nicely into the spare tire compartment found in the bottom of most trunks.

Mossano – Indianotech

YouTube – Mossano – Indianotech [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO]

DJ Project feat. Giulia – Nu

YouTube – DJ Project feat. Giulia – Nu

September – Becouse I love You

YouTube – September – Becouse I love You… (Orginal Version)

Deepcentral – In Love

YouTube – Deepcentral – In Love (official video) HD

YouTube – Guess Who – Locul Potrivit

YouTube – Guess Who – Locul Potrivit [ HD VIDEO ]

Dan Balan – Despre Tine Cant – Romanian Ballad Version

YouTube – Dan Balan – Despre Tine Cant – Romanian Ballad Version

Man claims to have had no food or drink for 70 years

Man claims to have had no food or drink for 70 years – Telegraph

So far, Mr Prahlad appears to be standing up to scrutiny. He has not eaten or drunk any fluids in six days, and similarly has not passed urine or a stool in that time. He remains fit and healthy and shows no sign of lethargy. Doctors will continue observing him for 15 days in which time they would expect to see some muscle wastage, serious dehydration, weight loss,and fatigue followed by organ failure.

It is common in India for Jains and Hindus to fast, sometimes for up to eight days, without any adverse affects, as part of their religious worship. Most humans cannot survive without food for 50 days. The longest hunger strike recorded is 74 days.

According to Dr Sudhir Shah, who examined him in 2003, he went without food or water for ten days in which urine appeared to be reabsorbed by his body after forming in his bladder. Doubts were expressed about his claim after his weight fell slightly at the end of the trial.

Space yacht will be first craft to travel on ‘solar waves’ as it sets sail for Venus

Space yacht will be first craft to travel on ‘solar waves’ as it sets sail for Venus | Mail Online

The £35million Ikaros will be the first use of such technology in deep space. Past experiments have limited crafts to orbits around Earth.

A Jaxa spokesman said: ‘This will be the world’s first solar powered sail craft employing both photon propulsion and thin film power generation during its interplanetary cruise.’

Incredibil! De 70 de ani nu mai bea şi nu mai mănâncă nimic

Incredibil! De 70 de ani nu mai bea şi nu mai mănâncă nimic / Foto :: Libertatea.ro

Un ascet hindus a fost pus sub observaţie de către medicii de la un spital indian, după ce a afirmat că de mai bine de 70 de ani a supravieţuit doar prin meditaţie, fără hrană sau apă.

Yoghinul Prahlad Jani, în vârstă de 83 de ani, a fost internat pentru o serie de analize care, speră medicii, să le dezvăluie noi secrete despre corpul uman. Bărbatul se află în spital sub supraveghere video 24 de ore din 24 şi nu a consumat nicio picătură de apă, nu a mâncat şi nu a mers la toaletă de când a fost internat. Ascetul susţine că la vârsta de opt ani a fost binecuvântat de o zeiţă şi de atunci trăieşte fără alimente.

Michael Kutsche Art

lines and colors :: a blog about drawing, painting, illustration, comics, concept art and other visual arts » Michael Kutsche

Michael Kutsche is a character designer and concept artist working in the film industry. He was one of the character designers on Tim Burton’s recent film, Alice in Wonderland, and is currently working on the upcoming John Carter of Mars, directed by Andrew Stanton and slated for release in 2012.

Cele mai subţiri monitoare LED din lume, disponibile în România

Cele mai subţiri monitoare LED din lume, disponibile în România – Capital.ro

BenQ, lider mondial în producţia de display-uri LED, a lansat pe piaţa românească cinci dintre cele mai subţiri monitoare LED din lume (14-15 mm) cu diagonale între 18.5” W şi 24” W, rezoluţii HD şi Full-HD.

Germans Get Paid to Use Wind Power

Germans Get Paid to Use Wind Power – GOOD Blog – GOOD

Germany has been investing in lots of wind power, and it’s starting to pay off (in a sense). In some parts of the country, there’s more power being generated than locals need, and the grid infrastructure to distribute it more widely doesn’t exist. This has some strange effects. From Bloomberg:

On windy nights in northern Germany, consumers are paid to keep the lights on.

YouTube – Trifonic – Parks on Fire – awesome video

YouTube – Trifonic – Parks on Fire Official Video

183 Heavenly HDR Wallpapers – Shooting challenge

183 Heavenly HDR Wallpapers – Shooting challenge – Gizmodo

There’s no going wrong with HDR photography. At its most sensitive, the technique allows for color/tone gradients rarely appreciated by anything but the naked eye. At its most aggressive, HDR’s a hyperreal spectacle. This week’s Shooting Challenge celebrate both schools:

Brain-like computing on an organic molecular layer

Brain-like computing on an organic molecular layer

Information processing circuits in digital computers are static. In our brains, information processing circuits—neurons—evolve continuously to solve complex problems. Now, an international research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University has created a similar process of circuit evolution in an organic molecular layer that can solve complex problems. This is the first time a brain-like “evolutionary circuit” has been realized.

This computer is massively parallel: The world’s fastest supercomputers can only process bits one at a time in each of their channels. Their circuit allows instantaneous changes of ~300 bits.

Their processor can produce solutions to problems for which algorithms on computers are unknown, like predictions of natural calamities and outbreaks of disease. To prove this unique feature, they have mimicked two natural phenomena in the molecular layer: heat diffusion and the evolution of cancer cells.

The monolayer has intelligence; it can solve many problems on the same grid.

Their molecular processor heals itself if there is a defect. This remarkable self-healing property comes from the self-organizing ability of the molecular monolayer. No existing man-made computer has this property, but our brain does: if a neuron dies, another neuron takes over its function.

The work is described in the Nature Physics paper “Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer.” It is coauthored by Ranjit Pati, of the Michigan Technological University Department of Physics. Lead author is Anirban Bandyopadhyay, National Institute for Materials Science, National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan.

First Evidence That Mirror Matter May Fill the Universe?

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: First Evidence That Mirror Matter May Fill the Universe?

The consensus is that, despite this global effort, dark matter remains well hidden. Nobody has had a whiff of the stuff.

That is nobody except an Italian group which has spent the last ten years or so watching a giant lump of sodium iodide. Their thinking is that any dark matter hitting the sodium iodide should generate a photon. And that as Earth moves around the Sun, they should see more photons when heading into the background sea of dark matter than when moving away from it.

Sure enough, this seasonal signal is exactly what this team says it sees. They claim that it’s experiment called DAMA/LIBRA is the first direct evidence of dark matter.

Netbook 2011 supports Wireless display

Fudzilla

Cedar-Trail M based netbooks should bet Intel Wireless display 2.0 with 1080p support in the second half of 2011, or immediately at launch, and having a streamed HD video on your TV via Air only with a touch of a button, is quite impressive thing.

You do need an adapter, something like NETGEAR Push2TV Adapter for Intel Wireless Display to connect on the recovering end, your TV, but as we said the technology works like a charm.

Life got going all on its own

Self-starter: Life got going all on its own – life – 21 April 2010 – New Scientist

“Not only is there a chemical reason for these affinities between amino acids and their triplets but you can see them in a natural, biological system,” says Yarus. What’s more, he adds, the ribosome is an evolutionarily ancient structure, supporting the idea that these affinities go way back. All this, he says, backs his theory that relatively simple chemical interactions allowed Luca to evolve the universal genetic code.

It also allows him to speculate about Ida. While the genetic code is central to life as we know it, there is no reason to think that other self-replicating life forms have to use it. However, since Ida gave rise to the RNA-based Luca, it is logical to assume Ida was also made of RNA or something very similar. But that creates a problem: how did RNA – made from a long chain of nucleotides – assemble itself?

Nucleotides don’t tend to form chains without catalysts to help them. In living cells, those catalysts are always proteins, yet the first proteins were made by Luca; they did not exist in the time of Ida. Something is needed that is like RNA but simple enough to replicate itself without a catalyst.

Yarus says that the answer lies in small-molecule enzymes called cofactors that help RNA and DNA do their jobs. “They’re absolutely universal in biology today and therefore very old,” he says. Because they are made of nucleotides, the cofactors could have started RNA chains…

Scientists Reveal New Way to Analyse Neural Signals

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Scientists Reveal New Way to Analyse Neural Signals
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One good example of the role that the environment plays in computation is the ‘intelligent’ oil drop that can navigate its way through a maze and was developed by a team at Northwestern University a few months ago. A video of this process shows the blob seemingly deliberating at forks in the maze, making various wrong turns then back-tracking and eventually arriving at the centre. It certainly looks intelligent.

It is nothing of the kind, however. The maze is immersed in an alkaline liquid and a blob of acidic gel placed at its centre. The chemical gradient this creates changes the surface tension on the droplet as it sits on the liquid surface and this generates a force that pushes the droplet along.

The droplet, of course, is entirely dumb. Any study of its ability to process information and solve mazes would be futile.

Here, all the information is in the environment and the behaviour of the droplet makes no sense without it.

The importance of the environment in computation is an idea that some roboticists are beginning to get to grips with. They want to use it to design machines that exploit the information content of the environment rather than ignore it. And the success they are having is throwing into stark relief how obviously evolution has exploited this particular trick over the eons.

Perhaps it’s a trick that neuroscientists can learn from too.