Wacom Inkling pen captures your hand-drawn masterpieces

Thanks to this new gadget, artists no longer have to choose between creating sketches on paper or creating them digitally.

Wacom, which specializes in the niche market of artist-tailored tablets and pens for computers, has introduced the Inkling pen. It looks and feels just like a regular ballpoint pen but inside it has all sorts of advanced circuitry.

Wacom Inkling pen captures your hand-drawn masterpieces | TG Daily

V-Ray VFX Demo Reel 2010

ChaosGroupTV’s Channel – YouTube

Entering The Stronghold | Audio Visual Animation HD!

Entering The Stronghold | Audio Visual Animation HD! – YouTube

6 Things You Won’t Believe Animals Do Just Like Us

“Being a human is a pretty sweet gig, all things considered. We’ve got opposable thumbs so dexterous they could start their own Cirque du Soleil troupe and brains so ripped our skulls can barely contain them. But before you grab your dog and give him a triumphant “IN YOUR (FAITHFUL, ADORABLE) FACE!” you should know that some of the traits and behaviors that make us human are also demonstrated by other animals. Animals that apparently think they’re people.”

6 Things You Won’t Believe Animals Do Just Like Us | Cracked.com

Dead Space 2 – Chapter 5 – Boss Fight

Dead Space 2 – Chapter 5 (Part 2/2) – BOSS – [HD] – YouTube

5 Questions for the Brain’s Code-Breaker

So how are you tapping into the code to restore vision?

We can bypass damaged cells using light to signal output neurons directly. The first step is genetically engineering the output cells to be light-sensitive. Then we convert images into a codelike pattern of light pulses that activates the modified genes and causes the output cells to fire off a message to the brain.

How would your technique work in the real world?
Patients would get a quick injection to implant the genes. They would then wear glasses outfitted with a camera and a microprocessor to convert what they “see” into patterns of light that would restore the communication link between the eyes and the brain. Patients might look a little Star Trek-y but should have near-normal vision.

5 Questions for the Brain’s Code-Breaker | Senses | DISCOVER Magazine

The end of ageing: The remarkable new treatment doctors say will keep us young

Here is a selection of the most remarkable age-reversal treatments on offer at the conference.

The end of ageing: The remarkable new treatment doctors say will keep us young | Mail Online

Ziggy X – Cap AndritXol (Extended Mix)

Zippyshare.com

Alexandra Stan – Saxobeats 2011 (full album)

Zippyshare.com

People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

“”How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

The studies’ findings include:

Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.

People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.

Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.

Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.

To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias — the kind to which people may not want to admit, such as racism. Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.”"

People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

OCZ RevoDrive 3 Series 120GB PCI Express x4 SSD

“Tip Intern
Multi-level Cell Da
Capacitate 120 GB
Interfata PCI Express x4
Viteza scriere 875 MB/s
Viteza citire 975 MB/s “

OCZ RevoDrive 3 Series 120GB PCI Express x4 SSD – PC Garage

Doing away with the dentist’s drill by helping teeth regenerate themselves

“”This may sound too good to be true, but we are essentially helping acid-damaged teeth to regenerate themselves. It is a totally natural non-surgical repair process and is entirely pain-free too,” said Professor Jennifer Kirkham, from the University of Leeds Dental Institute, who has led development of the new technique.

The researchers recently took the technique out of the laboratory and tested it on a small group of adults whose teeth showed the first signs of decay. The researchers claim the results from this small trial have shown that P 11-4 can indeed reverse damage and successfully regenerate the tooth tissue.

“The results of our tests so far are extremely promising,” said Professor Paul Brunton, who is overseeing the patient testing at the University of Leeds Dental Institute. “If these results can be repeated on a larger patient group, then I have no doubt whatsoever that in two to three years time this technique will be available for dentists to use in their daily practice.”"

Doing away with the dentist’s drill by helping teeth regenerate themselves

Are you a man or mouse? We all evolved from rodent that lived in China 160m years ago

“The discovery of Juramaia gives much earlier fossil evidence to corroborate the DNA findings, filling an important gap in the fossil record of early mammal evolution and helping to establish a new milestone of evolutionary history.

Juramaia also reveals adaptive features that may have helped the eutherian newcomers to survive in a tough Jurassic environment.

Its forelimbs are adapted for climbing. Since the majority of the Jurassic mammals lived exclusively on the ground, the ability to escape to the trees and explore the canopy might have allowed eutherian mammals to exploit an untapped niche.

Added Dr Luo: ‘The divergence of eutherian mammals from marsupials eventually led to placental birth and reproduction that are so crucial for the evolutionary success of placentals.

‘But it is their early adaptation to exploit niches on the tree that paved their way toward this success.’”

Are you a man or mouse? We all evolved from rodent that lived in China 160m years ago | Mail Online

Americanii fac autostrăzi cu 10 milioane de dolari pe km. Opt benzi!

“Faptul că americanii au renunţat la contract a fost o surpriză. Oficialul CNADNR spune că, până acum, nu a existat voinţă politică pentru a se discuta serios cu Bechtel. Au fost negocieri, dar niciodată nu s-a vorbit despre încheierea contractului.

Şefa de la Autostrăzi susţine că până şi oficialii americani au fost surpinşi de preţul mare plătit de România, o ţară care a tăiat anul trecut 25% din salariile bugetarilor, pe un kilometru de autostradă, când la ei acelaşi kilometru cu opt benzi pe sens nu costă mai mult de 10 milioane de dolari.”

Americanii fac autostrăzi cu 10 milioane de dolari pe km. Opt benzi! – Auto si Transporturi > Capital.ro

Learning machines: The education of an animat

“IN January, Max Versace and Heather Ames were busy with two newborns: their son Gabriel and Animat, a virtual rat.

Like all babies, when Gabriel was born his brain allowed him to do only simple things like grasp, suck and see blurry images of his parents. The rest was up to him. From the first day his body experienced the world, his senses began to respond. He learned to follow a moving object with his eyes, tell red from yellow, and reach for his mother. Over the next couple of years, he will learn to crawl, walk, talk and, eventually, look after himself.

With any luck, Animat’s development will follow a similar path. It didn’t start with much programming, either. But Animat’s interaction with its virtual world has already taught it how to tell colours apart and understand the space around it. As it develops, it will use its senses to learn even more.

Animat’s “parents”, researchers at Boston University, are trying to build intelligent machines based on the smartest machine we know of: the brain. But instead of focusing on programming the brain itself, they are taking a cue from biology. Like every human baby, and unlike the vast majority of engineered intelligence, the development of Animat’s intelligence will depend on the way its body senses the world. They hope this approach will advance machine intelligence to the point that robots start to think in a more human way.

That goal has proved a formidable challenge. Take Watson, IBM’s supercomputer which in February stole the crown from two human champions on the US quiz show Jeopardy! To do so, it used sophisticated successors of the first AI algorithms to tap massive databases stored on 90 servers. All that machinery required 80 kilowatts of energy to run, enough to power a small village. Our grey matter is spartan in comparison. “A brain consumes less power than a light bulb, and occupies less volume than a 2-litre bottle of soda,” says Dharmendra Modha, a computer scientist at IBM.

But power and space are just practical considerations. The more fundamental issue is that brute-force computation cannot compare with the functioning of a real brain. Human intelligence arises not from logic, but from our ability to respond to ambiguity and adjust to rapidly changing situations. “The idea that human expertise can be formalised in logical rules turned out to be a fundamentally wrong assumption,” says Rolf Pfeifer, an AI researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Researchers had started clamouring for a different approach decades ago. In the 1980s, Rodney Brooks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed an alternative. He argued that it was backwards to start by programming complex abilities, when we didn’t even know how to make a rudimentary intelligence that could avoid bumping into walls. Instead, he said, we should emulate nature, which has given us senses that allow us to survive independently in an unscripted world. To build machines that can think without explicit instructions, Brooks reasoned, we first need to build their bodies.

Brooks’s idea worked. In 1989, he built Genghis, a six-legged insect-robot that was able to navigate without the help of a central control system. Its sensors responded in real time to feedback it gleaned by interacting with its environment. As the robot walked around, for example, its force inputs changed, and these changes, in turn, steered its next movements, allowing it to negotiate terrain it had not been explicitly programmed to expect (Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol 6, p 3).”

Learning machines: The education of an animat – tech – 24 August 2011 – New Scientist

Bastion on PC? Now you’re thinking with portals

“All the graphical options look great on paper, but when you watch the game in action with the resolution and anti-aliasing maxed out you’ll see just how beautiful the game looks. Bastion looked wonderful on consoles, but simply because of the sharpness of my PC’s monitor and by sitting closer to the display I was able to pick out more of the detail and flourishes in the game’s graphics. This a game with impressive graphics and animations, and the PC version shows them all to great effect.”

Bastion on PC? Now you’re thinking with portals

The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction

“There is nothing we take for granted as much as sanity. No matter what “crazy” unexpected thing might happen at the office tomorrow, you still know that you’re not going to show up and find, say, your boss replaced by a talking guitar.”

The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction | Cracked.com

From Dust review

“I’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s a game about sculpting landscape by sucking up swirls of lava, water and earth and trickling them into rivers and ridges to protect your masked tribe. It’s extraordinary, exhausting, spectacular, and frequently no fun at all.

The terraforming is smooth and organic: lava oozes and hardens, water sloshes, dust settles into soft dunes. What you’re doing with it isn’t: you need a perfect wall of rock to stop that tidal wave. That tension, between the hard rules of your objectives and the soft physics of nature, is a big part of the challenge.”

From Dust review | PC Gamer

Bicicleta Giant Oneway pliabila

“Reducere de 500 RON din pretul unei biciclete GIANT Oneway pliabila, cu 7 viteze de pe magazinuldebiciclete.ro”

Bicicleta Giant Oneway pliabila

Evidence that humans began cooking with fire 2m years ago

“Processing food played a vital role in human evolution. By boosting calorie intake, and reducing feeding time, it would have aided fitness and survival and set the stage for evolutionary progress.

Experts calculated that if humans were ordinary primates living off raw food, eating would take up 48 per cent of their day. In fact, modern humans devote just 4.7 per cent of each day to the business of food consumption.

Did an extraordinary 7,000-mile sea journey by a yeast sample give birth to the lager lout?
Was the human race given an ever-lasting boost by breeding with Neanderthal man?

As well as spending much less time eating than chimpanzees and other apes, humans have also evolved far smaller teeth, jaws and guts.

The physical changes could not have evolved without the introduction of food processing, say the scientists, which would also have included non-thermal techniques, such as preserving ingredients with salt and drying out meats in the sun.

According to the new research, there is evidence that this occurred with the emergence of Homo erectus – a direct ancestor of modern humans that evolved around 1.9million years ago.

Like modern humans, Homo erectus had molars too small to be due to natural forces of evolution alone.”

Evidence that humans began cooking with fire 2m years ago | Mail Online