What happens when scientific research borders on science fiction? Michael Belfiore, author of the new book The Department of Mad Scientists, talks about the bizarre projects happening behind the scenes at DARPA ? the secretive research arm of the Department of Defense.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/04/19/177944078/utahs-fossil-finds-describe-an-ancient-world?ft=1&f=1007
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By John Walker on April 17th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.
You need a new puzzle platformer to fill four hours of your life. I have one. This is synergy. High fives in an orderly queue. Plazma Being is the terrible name for a deceptively tricky little puzzler from first-time dev, Felix Wunderlich. (Also, coincidentally, winner of Today?s Best Name.) You, as you may have guessed, play a blob of plasma. What you might not have intuited is that you?re captured by aliens, cast on a planet with an unfamiliar force called ?gravity?, and trying to find your way out of there.
Your blob, called Zeb, has the ability to telekinetically (or probably a word more to do with physics) move objects within a radius of his current position, letting you build pathways, flick switches, deflect laser beams, and all the like. Later you can ?possess? objects too ? you know ? it?s a puzzle platformer.
But what stands out here is that it?s smart. For a first time project, it?s impressively smart. And almost immediately very tricky. Made using L?VE, a free software framework for Lua, it?s inevitably on Greenlight. But you can already buy it from Desura for just ?1.50, or ?3 on IndieCity, and ?3 directly from Wunderlich.
Source: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/17/a-gaming-miasma-plazma-being/
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QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) ? The Pakistani army said Wednesday that it evacuated 16 seriously injured people by helicopter from the site of a deadly earthquake near the Iranian border.
There were conflicting reports about the death toll from Tuesday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake, which was centered in southeastern Iran but also hit Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province.
Initially, a Pakistani military official said 34 had died in Pakistan, but the head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Baluchistan, Maj. Gen. Obaidullah Khattak, later told reporters in the hard-hit Mashkel area that 10-12 people were killed and about 30 injured.
Iran's state-run Press TV initially said 40 people were killed in Iran but later backed away from that figure.
Iran's main state TV channel said Wednesday that only one person was killed ? a woman who was struck by falling rocks while she was collecting herbs ? and that 12 people were injured.
The discrepancies and apparent backtracking in the reports could not be immediately reconciled. It was the second earthquake to hit Iran in less than week and the area struck Tuesday is remote and difficult to reach.
The quake toppled homes and shops on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border and caused skyscrapers to sway in Dubai. It also forced Iranian officials ? for the second time in less than a week ? to issue assurances that its main nuclear reactor wasn't damaged.
Over 300 Pakistani soldiers, including doctors and engineers, were helping with the rescue and relief effort, the army said. The soldiers have set up a field hospital in the Mashkel area and have distributed food, medicine and blankets. Five army helicopters were participating in the relief operation, and some of them flew the more seriously injured to Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, the army said.
The population of the affected area in Pakistan is up to 15,000 people, and most houses are built of mud, the army said. Estimates of the numbers of homes destroyed in the Mashkel area have varied, with some officials saying the number is over 1,000.
A Pakistani policeman, Azmatullah Regi, said Tuesday that nearly three dozen homes and shops collapsed in just one village in the Mashkel area. Rescue workers pulled the bodies of a couple and their three children, ages 5 to 15, from the rubble of one house, he said.
The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the earthquake at 7.8 and said it occurred at a depth of 82 kilometers (51 miles). Press TV said the quake was centered near Saravan, about 50 kilometers (26 miles) from the Pakistani border. The website of Tehran Geophysics Center said the quake lasted 40 seconds and called it the strongest in more than 50 years in one of the world's most seismically active areas.
The quake was felt over a vast area from New Delhi ? about 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from the epicenter ? to Gulf cities that have some of the world's tallest skyscrapers, including the record 828-meter (2,717 -foot) Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Officials ordered temporary evacuations from the Burj Khalifa and some other high-rises as a precaution.
Pakistani news channels showed buildings shaking in the southern city of Karachi, where people in panic came out from offices and homes.
In 2003, some 26,000 people were killed by a magnitude 6.6 quake that flattened the historic southeastern Iranian city of Bam. Two years later, a magnitude 7.6 quake killed about 80,000 people in northwestern Pakistan and Kashmir and left more than 3 million homeless.
____
Associated Press writer Ali Akbar Dareini contributed to this report from Tehran, Iran.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pakistani-army-evacuates-injured-quake-area-074112581.html
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April 17, 2013 |??
This Mayorella?s (?) nucleus is smiling and wishing you a very happy day =) The auspicious pattern is formed by heterochromatin clumps. To the right of the nucleus is a contractile vacuole ? devoid of any emotion this time. Cells do speak to you from time to time. In your head. Pareidolia is fun!
About the Author: Psi Wavefunction is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia working as a researcher at Indiana University, Bloomington, and blogs about protists and evolution at The Ocelloid as well as at Skeptic Wonder. Follow on Twitter @Ocelloid.More??
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=d5c39296adbedb7cb51aa6c93e0d3e8b
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The Verizon LG Lucid?was a solid budget smartphone? that sold like gangbusters. Now, a year later, LG brings us the Lucid 2, which is bigger and better than the original in every way. It's even free this time around. But the times are a-changin', and with lots of solid, well-priced options to choose from, the LG Lucid 2 isn't quite as killer a deal this time around.
Design and Call Quality
There are some budget phones where you'd barely be able to tell the difference next to a phone that costs hundreds of dollars more. The LG Lucid 2 is not one of them. It doesn't feel shoddy or poorly made, but the textured plastic finish gives off an unmistakably bargain bin vibe. The phone is predominantly black, with silver accents around the buttons on the sides and a glass front panel. The front feels slightly off balance, with extra bezel space at the top to make room for the pronounced Verizon and LG logos.
The phone measures 4.82 by 2.51 by 0.39 inches and weighs 4.55 ounces, which makes it light and comfortable to hold. The 4.3-inch, 960-by-540 LCD is a step up in terms of size and resolution from the original, but not in terms of overall quality. Some details, like text, can look a little jagged compared with much of the ultra-high-res competition, and there's a faint vertical pattern that runs through the screen, which is particularly visible in lighter areas. There's plenty of room for typing, which feels comfortable on the Swype-enabled onscreen keyboard.
The Lucid 2 taps into Verizon's 4G LTE network where it's available, and 3G everywhere else. Verizon LTE is very fast, and received top honors in our?Fastest Mobile Networks?tests last year. The phone can also be used as a mobile hotspot to connect up to 10 devices simultaneously with the proper service plan. The Lucid 2 has good reception, but sometimes had trouble pulling in a 4G signal. You can also connect the phone to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi networks.
Call quality is mixed. Voices are understandable in the phone's earpiece, but volume is a problem. Even at the halfway mark the phone's case begins to rattle; at higher volumes it can be painful to listen to. Calls made with the phone sound clear but a little muted, with decent noise cancellation. And calls sounded fine through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset, though I had a lot of trouble using the standard Android voice dialer over Bluetooth; it often took multiple attempts before getting it right. The phone's very large 2,460mAh battery was good for an impressive 13 hours and 43 minutes of talk time. The phone also supports wireless charging, but requires you to buy a special battery cover and a wireless charging pad.
User Interface, Hardware, and Apps
The Lucid 2 is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Quaclomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor, which makes for speedy, responsive performance. It's not as fast as any of the new quad-core chips, or even the 1.5GHz processor in the Samsung Galaxy S III, but it turned in solid benchmarks scores, and is fast enough to run any of the 800,000+ apps in the Google Play store without a problem.
The Lucid 2 runs Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean), along with LG's Optimus UI 3.0 customizations. There's no word on an update to Android 4.2.2 (the most recent version of Jelly Bean), but 4.1.2 is close enough. Optimus UI is a very heavy layer over Android that won't please purists, but will look appealing to newbies.
Speaking of newbies, LG has created a Starter mode for first-time users. It places all of your important apps on the main home screen, like your Web browser, email, and Google Play store. There's another screen to add eight quick contacts, then another screen for your settings. It's not a radical change from your standard Android layout, but it's helpful to have all the important stuff up front.
Back in Standard mode, you get five customizable home screens to swipe between that come preloaded with a few apps and widgets. LG has added four themes to the phone that change your wallpaper and icons. In addition to Optimus, which is what you get out of the box, there's Adventure, Fancy, and my favorite, the particularly weird Monsterland. Verizon has loaded the Lucid 2 with a good amount bloatware, none of which can be deleted.
You get all the usual Android goodies, like a fast Chrome Web browser, excellent email support, and voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions via Google Maps. You also get QuickMemo, which is LG's system-wide note taking service that lets you annotate screenshots with handwritten notes and sketches, which you can then share. And SmartShare lets you display music, photos, and video on your HDTV or monitor via DLNA.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Lucid 2 comes with 3.74GB of free internal storage, so you'll probably want to pop a microSD card into the slot underneath the battery cover to expand your storage options. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine. The phone was able to play all of our audio test files except FLAC, and sound quality was good over both wired 3.5mm headphones as well as?Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones, though there was a faint hissing sound in the background. All of our test videos played back at resolutions up to 1080p, but audio fell out of sync over Bluetooth.
The 5-megapixel camera is decent. It can take shots automatically, but that often didn't allow for the autofocus to lock in?better to give it a beat before pressing the shutter button. Without the sound turned on, it was hard to tell when a photo was taken, because it happens quickly and there's no animation so it's easy to miss it. You can hold the shutter button down and the camera will fire off a shot every 0.3 to 0.4 second. Photos show decent detail and color but tend to be noisy. The camera also records 1080p video at a smooth 30 frames per second. It's not as sharp as I'd like it to look indoors, but video recorded outside looks quite good. The 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera is fine for self portraits and video chat.
The LG Lucid 2 gets you a lot of phone considering it won't cost you a dime with a contract. But it isn't quite the same steal that the original was because there are so many other reasonably priced options available. We haven't tested it yet, but judging by the specs the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II looks very similar to the Lucid 2, with the addition of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Nokia Lumia 822?is a solid Windows Phone 8 handset, and the Apple iPhone 4?gets you access to the best app catalog on the planet, and they're both free just like the Lucid 2. And if you're willing to spend a little more money, the Droid Razr M?gets you a nicer display, a better camera, and a sharper design than the Lucid 2, for just $50.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/gCZ_ytgRuEg/0,2817,2417718,00.asp
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Apr. 14, 2013 ? Bioengineered rat kidneys developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators successfully produced urine both in a laboratory apparatus and after being transplanted into living animals. In their report, receiving advance online publication in Nature Medicine, the research team describes building functional replacement kidneys on the structure of donor organs from which living cells had been stripped, an approach previously used to create bioartificial hearts, lungs and livers.
"What is unique about this approach is that the native organ's architecture is preserved, so that the resulting graft can be transplanted just like a donor kidney and connected to the recipient's vascular and urinary systems," says Harald Ott, MD, PhD, of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine, senior author of the Nature Medicine article. "If this technology can be scaled to human-sized grafts, patients suffering from renal failure who are currently waiting for donor kidneys or who are not transplant candidates could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells."
Around 18,000 kidney transplants are performed in the U.S. each year, but 100,000 Americans with end-stage kidney disease are still waiting for a donor organ. Even those fortunate enough to receive a transplant face a lifetime of immunosuppressive drugs, which pose many health risks and cannot totally eliminate the incidence of eventual organ rejection.
The approach used in this study to engineer donor organs, based on a technology that Ott discovered as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota, involves stripping the living cells from a donor organ with a detergent solution and then repopulating the collagen scaffold that remains with the appropriate cell type -- in this instance human endothelial cells to replace the lining of the vascular system and kidney cells from newborn rats. The research team first decellularized rat kidneys to confirm that the organ's complex structures would be preserved. They also showed the technique worked on a larger scale by stripping cells from pig and human kidneys.
Making sure the appropriate cells were seeded into the correct portions of the collagen scaffold required delivering vascular cells through the renal artery and kidney cells through the ureter. Precisely adjusting the pressures of the solutions enabled the cells to be dispersed throughout the whole organs, which were then cultured in a bioreactor for up to 12 days. The researchers first tested the repopulated organs in a device that passed blood through its vascular system and drained off any urine, which revealed evidence of limited filtering of blood, molecular activity and urine production.
Bioengineered kidneys transplanted into living rats from which one kidney had been removed began producing urine as soon as the blood supply was restored, with no evidence of bleeding or clot formation. The overall function of the regenerated organs was significantly reduced compared with that of normal, healthy kidneys, something the researchers believe may be attributed to the immaturity of the neonatal cells used to repopulate the scaffolding.
"Further refinement of the cell types used for seeding and additional maturation in culture may allow us to achieve a more functional organ," says Ott. "Based on this inital proof of principle, we hope that bioengineered kidneys will someday be able to fully replace kidney function just as donor kidneys do. In an ideal world, such grafts could be produced 'on demand" from a patient's own cells, helping us overcome both the organ shortage and the need for chronic immunosuppression. We're now investigating methods of deriving the necessary cell types from patient-derived cells and refining the cell-seeding and organ culture methods to handle human-sized organs."
Ott's team focuses on the regeneration of hearts, lungs, kidneys and grafts made of composite tissues, while other teams -- including one from the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine -- are using the decellularization technique to develop replacement livers. Lead author of the Nature Medicine paper is Jeremy Song, MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine; additional co-authors are Jacques Guyette, PhD, Sarah Gilpin, PhD, Gabriel Gonzalez, PhD, and Joseph Vacanti, MD, all of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine. The study was supported by National Institute of Health Director's New Innovator Award DP2 OD008749-01.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/f8_z1bYJGAQ/130414193433.htm
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