Samsung has assistive tech trio for Galaxy Core Advance

Samsung Electronics introduced a trio of accessories on Friday that are designed to help users who are disabled and visually impaired—those with partial or greater loss of vision. Their smartphones can be transformed in this way into tools that enable easier handling of messages and more.

The three newcomers are called the Ultrasonic Cover, Optical Scan Stand, and Voice Label. The three are designed for the Galaxy Core Advance mobile device. Samsung said that the accessories are already available and are offered separately from the device. To be sure, smartphone handling, not to mention struggles reading small-screen text, have been barriers for those with special needs for vision support. Back in December, Samsung had already revealed its intentions of providing an Android smartphone with accessibility options. Assistive technology was on its agenda. The company referred to the Core Advance, which it said would be available early 2014. At the time, it spoke of an Optical Scan which "can automatically recognize text from an image and read it aloud to disabled and visually impaired users."Samsung officially described the three on Friday as the Ultrasonic Cover, which allows users in unfamiliar places to detect obstacles and navigate by sending an alert through a vibration or TTS feedback. "By holding the Cover in front of the user," said the announcement, "it can enhance a visually impaired user's awareness of their surroundings by sensing the presence of a person or object up to two meters away." The Optical Scan Stand positions the device to focus on printed materials; doing so automatically activates the Optical Scan application, which recognizes text from an image and reads it aloud to the user. With the Voice Label, users can make notes and tag voice labels on-the-go. "With NFC technology enabling a seamless connection to their smartphones, users can record, stop and access their notes. This feature can also help a user distinguish how to use electronics by allowing them to record a short explanation."

In the United States alone, approximately 10 million people are blind or visually impaired, though estimates vary. Samsung said the accessories are the result of research and in-depth interviews, resulting in their being specially designed with the needs of specific communities in mind. Among the tech sites responding favorably to Friday's announcement TechCrunch made the point that "these hardware add-ons really show Samsung is committed to provided the best phone experience possible for those who might ordinarily find smartphone operation frustrating."

Source Phys.org

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Smartphones become 'eye-phones' with low-cost devices developed by Stanford

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed two inexpensive adapters that enable a smartphone to capture high-quality images of the front and back of the eye. The adapters make it easy for anyone with minimal training to take a picture of the eye and share it securely with other health practitioners or store it in the patient's electronic record.

"Think Instagram for the eye," said one of the developers, assistant professor of ophthalmology Robert Chang, MD.

The researchers see this technology as an opportunity to increase access to eye-care services as well as to improve the ability to advise on patient care remotely.

Ophthalmology resident David Myung, MD, PhD, lead author of two upcoming papers describing the development and clinical experience with the devices, began the project with Chang about two years ago, just before Myung began his residency at Stanford. The papers will be published online March 7 in the Journal of Mobile Technology in Medicine.

The standard equipment used to photograph the eye is expensive—costing up to tens of thousands of dollars—and requires extensive training to use properly. Primary care physicians and emergency department staff often lack this equipment, and although it is readily available in ophthalmologists' offices, it is sparse in rural areas throughout the world.

"Adapting smartphones for the eye has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of eye care—in particular, to provide it in places where it's less accessible," said Myung. "Whether it's in the emergency department, where patients often have to wait a long time for a specialist, or during a primary-care physician visit, this new workflow will improve the quality of care for our patients, especially in the developing world where ophthalmologists are few and far between.

"A picture is truly worth a thousand words," he added. "Imagine a car accident victim arriving in the emergency department with an eye injury resulting in a hyphema—blood inside the front of her eye. Normally the physician would have to describe this finding in her electronic record with words alone. Smartphones today not only have the camera resolution to supplement those words with a high-resolution photo, but also the data-transfer capability to upload that photo securely to the medical record in a matter of seconds."

Chang, who is the senior author of the two papers, added that ophthalmology is a highly image-oriented field. "With smartphone cameras now everywhere, and a small, inexpensive attachment that helps the ancillary health-care staff to take a picture needed for an eye consultation, we should be able to lower the barrier to tele-ophthalmology," he said.

Adapters are available to attach a smartphone to a slit lamp—a microscope with an adjustable, high-intensity light—to capture images of the front of the eye. But Myung found this process time-consuming and inconvenient, even with commercially available adapters designed for this purpose. Given the fast pace of patient care, he wanted point-and-shoot ability in seconds, not minutes, with instant upload to a secure server. More importantly, the team envisioned the device to be readily usable by any health-care practitioner, not just eye doctors. So Myung decided to bypass the slit lamp, a complicated piece of equipment.

"I started entertaining the idea of a pocket-sized adapter that makes the phone do most of the heavy lifting," he said. After numerous iterations, he found a combination of magnification and lighting elements that worked.

"It took some time to figure out how to mount the lens and lighting elements to the phone in an efficient yet effective way," said Myung, who built the prototypes with inexpensive parts purchased almost exclusively online, including plastic caps, plastic spacers, LEDs, switches, universal mounts, macrolenses and even a handful of Legos.

After successfully imaging the front of the eye, he then focused on visualizing the inside lining of the back of the eye, called the retina. "Taking a photo of the retina is harder because you need to focus light through the pupil to reach inside the eye," said Myung.

To optimize the view through a dilated pupil, Myung used optics theory to determine the perfect working distance and lighting conditions for a simple adapter that connects a conventional examination lens to a phone. Myung and chief ophthalmology resident Lisa He, MD, shot hundreds of photos with various iterations of the adapter, consulting with Chang and Mark Blumenkranz, MD, retina specialist and chair of the ophthalmology department, until they got it right. Then Stanford mechanical engineering graduate student Alexandre Jais constructed computerized models of these "screwed-and-glued" prototypes to produce 3D-printed versions. Jais made the first of these prototypes on his own 3D printer before moving to the Stanford Product Realization Lab to manufacture higher-resolution adapters.

Chief resident He is leading a clinical study grading the quality of images taken using the adapters in the Stanford emergency department. A second study, spearheaded by resident Brian Toy, MD, will test the ability of the adapters to track eye disease in patients with diabetes.

Myung and Chang have recently been awarded seed grants from the School of Medicine and the Stanford Biodesign Program to fund the production of the initial batch of adapters, currently dubbed EyeGo, for distribution and continued evaluation. The initial adapters will be available for purchase for research purposes only while the team seeks guidance from the Food and Drug Administration. "We have gotten the production cost of each type of adapter to under $90 but the goal is to make it even lower in the future," Chang said. Recently, a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia used the two adapters on a medical mission trip to Ethiopia and told Chang they were excited about the results.

Myung, Chang, Jais and He co-authored both articles and Blumenkranz co-authored the article on the retinal-imaging adapter. Stanford's Office of Technology and Licensing is managing the intellectual property.

Source Medicalpress

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Chimps catch people’s yawns in sign of flexible empathy

Chimpanzees possess a flexible, humanlike sensitivity to the mental states of others, even strangers from another species, researchers suggest March 11 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Empathy’s roots go back at least to the common ancestor of humans and chimps, they say.

Psychologist Matthew Campbell and biologist Frans de Waal, both of Emory University in Atlanta, treated chimps’ tendency to yawn when viewing videotapes of others yawning as a sign of spontaneous empathy. Their research follows other scientists’ observations that young chimps mimic scientists’ yawns (SN Online: 10/16/13).

Nineteen chimps living in an outdoor research facility yawned when they saw the same action from chimps that they lived with, researchers and staff they had seen before and people who were new to them. Unfamiliar chimps and baboons failed to elicit contagious yawning. As in the wild, unfamiliar chimps were probably viewed as threats. Chimps in the study hadn’t seen baboons before.

Having socially connected with facility workers, chimps reacted empathically to human strangers who yawned, the researchers propose.

Imitating others’ facial expressions represents a rapid way to forge empathic ties, Campbell says. His research didn’t test whether chimps spend a lot of time trying to read others’ thoughts and feelings, a more complex type of empathy.

PASS IT ON Two chimps yawn after seeing video clips of chimps from their own social groups do it. Chimps also yawn just after watching familiar and unfamiliar humans doing it but they won’t imitate baboons and unfamiliar chimps in the behavior. Credit: M. Campbell and F. de Waal 2014/Yerkes National Primate Research Center/Emory Univ.

Source SN

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Malaysia Airlines mystery revives black-box debate

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has rekindled a debate over the iconic "black box" flight recorder and whether it's time for aircraft to start live-streaming in-flight data in real time.

Civil aviation industry sources agree thetechnology exists for commercial airliners to immediately relay via satellite vital technical information otherwise compiled by a flight data recorder in the course of a flight.

But it's another question whether airlines, forever struggling to keep costs down in a highly competitive business, want to front up the money involved—or even if it's truly worth the expense.

"There are no technical barriers ... and the cost barriers can be addressed," said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the US government agency that investigates major aviation accidents.

"But the reality is that air carriers don't want to do anything unless they're ordered to do it," he told AFP.

Commercial airliners typically carry two black boxes, which in fact are bright orange in color. One monitors cockpit conversations, the other records a vast array of technical data from airspeed to engine performance.

Whenever a crash occurs, investigators scramble to recover both devices—and if the tragedy happens on terra firma, they typically find them in short order.

At sea, however, it's another story.

Digital link yields clues

By then investigators already had a vague clue what might have happened thanks to the doomed flight's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), a digital datalink for brief text messages.

It puts out limited information about location and airspeed—but nothing compared to the several thousand parameters that a black box can monitor during the course of a flight.

Malaysia Airlines has said all its aircraft are ACARS-equipped, but it has so far declined to release whatever data it got from Flight 370.

Twelve years ago, US avionics manufacturer L-3 estimated it would cost $300 million a year for a global airline to transmit flight data in real time, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported.

But Goelz said "there's no reason to stream all the data all the time."

Systems could be programmed, for instance, to emit only a limited amount of data in normal circumstances—and then put out lots of data when an in-flight abnormality is detected.

The main hurdle is getting airlines to invest in such systems. Goelz said the onus is on governments to make them mandatory, as in the case of mid-air collision avoidance systems and smoke detectors in cargo holds.

"The technology does exist, but the question is: why spend the money?" added John Cox, a former airline captain who is chief executive officer of aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems in Washington.

Not only might there be "massive amounts of data" to be managed, but there would also be a potential for misinterpretation and misuse, on top of data protection concerns, he told AFP.

"If you look back in history, it's not as if we have a large number of these (lost) airplanes that we don't find... (and) it is not as though we are not finding the cause of aircraft accidents using the technology that we have."

Source phys.org

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World's first 3-D acoustic cloaking device hides objects from sound

Using little more than a few perforated sheets of plastic and a staggering amount of number crunching, Duke engineers have demonstrated the world's first three-dimensional acoustic cloak. The new device reroutes sound waves to create the impression that both the cloak and anything beneath it are not there.

The acoustic cloaking device works in all three dimensions, no matter which direction the sound is coming from or where the observer is located, and holds potential for future applications such as sonar avoidance and architectural acoustics.

The study appears online in Nature Materials.

"The particular trick we're performing is hiding an object from sound waves," said Steven Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. "By placing this cloak around an object, the sound waves behave like there is nothing more than a flat surface in their path."

To achieve this new trick, Cummer and his colleagues turned to the developing field of metamaterials—the combination of natural materials in repeating patterns to achieve unnatural properties. In the case of the new acoustic cloak, the materials manipulating the behavior of sound waves are simply plastic and air. Once constructed, the device looks like several plastic plates with a repeating pattern of holes poked through them stacked on top of one another to form a sort of pyramid.

To give the illusion that it isn't there, the cloak must alter the waves' trajectory to match what they would look like had they had reflected off a flat surface. Because the sound is not reaching the surface beneath, it is traveling a shorter distance and its speed must be slowed to compensate.

"The structure that we built might look really simple," said Cummer. "But I promise you that it's a lot more difficult and interesting than it looks. We put a lot of energy into calculating how sound waves would interact with it. We didn't come up with this overnight."

To test the cloaking device, researchers covered a small sphere with the cloak and "pinged" it with short bursts of sound from various angles. Using a microphone, they mapped how the waves responded and produced videos of them traveling through the air.

Cummer and his team then compared the videos to those created with both an unobstructed flat surface and an uncloaked sphere blocking the way. The results clearly show that the cloaking device makes it appear as though the sound waves reflected off an empty surface.

Although the experiment is a simple demonstration showing that the technology is possible and concealing an evil super-genius' underwater lair is a long ways away, Cummer believes that the technique has several potential commercial applications.

"We conducted our tests in the air, but sound waves behave similarly underwater, so one obvious potential use is sonar avoidance," said Cummer. "But there's also the design of auditoriums or concert halls—any space where you need to control the acoustics. If you had to put a beam somewhere for structural reasons that was going to mess up the sound, perhaps you could fix the acoustics by cloaking it."

Source phys.org

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Sterilise farmed salmon to stop breeding with wild fish, researchers say

Farmed salmon should be sterilised to prevent them breeding with wild fish and introducing genetic weaknesses, experts have urged.
New research shows that while salmon bred in captivity for food consumption are genetically different from their wild relatives, they are just as fertile, potentially damaging wild populations if they escape and breed with them.

Millions of salmon escape from fish farms each year, and can get into wild spawning populations where they can reproduce and introduce negative genetic traits.

Recently-escaped salmon are not as good at reproducing as wild fish, but the new research shows that their sperm and eggs are as potent as those of wild salmon.

If farmed salmon can revive their spawning behaviour by a period in the wild, they could breed with wild populations, the researchers said.

Lead researcher Professor Matt Gage, from the University of East Anglia’s school of biological sciences, said: “Around 95% of all salmon in existence are farmed, and domestication has made them very different to wild populations, each of which is locally adapted to its own river system.

“Farmed salmon grow very fast, are aggressive, and not as clever as wild salmon when it comes to dealing with predators.

“These domestic traits are good for producing fish for the table, but not for the stability of wild populations.

“The problem is that farmed salmon can escape each year in their millions, getting into wild spawning populations, where they can then reproduce and erode wild gene pools.”

Researchers used a series of in-vitro fertilisation tests in conditions which mimicked spawning in the wild. All tests on sperm and eggs showed the farmed salmon were as fertile as wild salmon, identifying a clear threat that they could breed with wild populations.

Prof Gage said: “Some Norwegian rivers have recorded big numbers of farmed fish present – as much as 50%. Both anglers and conservationists are worried by farmed fish escapees which could disrupt locally-adapted traits like timing of return, adult body size and disease resistance.

“Salmon farming is a huge business in the UK, Norway and beyond, and while it does reduce the pressure on wild fish stocks, it can also create its own environmental pressures through genetic disruption.”

He said a viable solution was to induce a condition called “triploidy”, by pressure-treating salmon eggs just after fertilisation, so the fish grows as normal but with both sex chromosomes, which makes most of them infertile.

The process, normal for farming rainbow trout, has not been embraced by the industry because of fears the triploid fish do not perform as well in farms as normal fish, eroding profits, he said.

Published at theguardian.

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Pelican Learns To Fly With GoPro Strapped To Beak

In the popular YouTube genre of strapping GoPro cameras to animals, some videos soar more than others. For example, the viral footage of the bald eagle flying high above the mountains of Chamonix, France comes to mind.
Well, ladies and gentleman, add another one to this genre’s hall of fame. In fact, I think this great white pelican with a GoPro strapped to its beak may have just knocked the eagle off its perch.
After the pelican -- nicknamed “Big Bird” -- swam ashore after a big storm, the fine folks at Greystoke Mahale, a resort in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika, adopted the bird. It was apparently injured and orphaned and needed to relearn how to fly. Volunteers reminded the pelican how to use its wings by running along the shore and flapping their arms.
Of course, a GoPro was on hand to give free advertising and capture the uplifting moment when Big Bird took flight, giving us a beak’s-eye view as the pelican skimmed the shore’s shallow waters and swooped back around to the beach.
However, one local — a furry, green grump who lives in a trash can — didn’t think so highly of Big Bird. The indistinguishable being, known on his street as “Oscar the Grouch,” was reportedly not impressed.

Published at DNEWS

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Shining a light on radio waves

A new device, no bigger than a grain of salt, captures feeble radio waves and transforms them into laser pulses. The gadget is compact and works at room temperature, making it considerably more attractive than the bulky, expensive, cryogenically cooled amplifiers used today.
The contraption, which Eugene Polzik of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues describe in the March 6Nature, converts incoming radio waves to light. At the heart of the gadget is a square film of silicon nitride, just 500 micrometers on a side, coated with aluminum. A laser bounces off one side of the membrane. Radio waves impinging on the opposite side cause the membrane to vibrate like a drum. The vibrations change the brightness of the reflected laser beam, which a detector captures.

Fields as diverse as radio astronomy, medical imaging and navigation depend on detecting and transmitting weak radio waves. Currently, faint signals get a boost by costly amplifiers cooled to a couple hundred degrees below zero Celsius and then travel along leaky copper wires to computers. Membrane-coupled lasers can bypass the amplifiers and replace antiquated wiring with fiber optics, dramatically reducing losses.
Published at ScienceNews.

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Do elephants call ''human''? watch in video

African elephants make a specific alarm call in response to the danger of humans, according to a new study of wild elephants in Kenya.Researchers from Oxford University, Save the Elephants, and Disney's Animal Kingdom carried out a series of audio experiments in which recordings of the voices of the Samburu, a local tribe from North Kenya, were played to resting elephants. The elephants quickly reacted, becoming more vigilant and running away from the sound whilst emitting a distinctive low rumble.

When the team, having recorded this rumble [listen to the rumble here], played it back to a group of elephants they reacted in a similar way to the sound of the Samburu voices; running away and becoming very vigilant, perhaps searching for the potentially lethal threat of human hunters.

The new research, recently reported in PLOS ONE, builds on previous Oxford University research showing that elephants call 'bee-ware' and run away from the sound of angry bees. Whilst the 'bee' and 'human' rumbling alarm calls might sound similar to our ears there are important differences at low (infrasonic) frequencies that elephants can hear but humans can't.

'Elephants appear to be able to manipulate their vocal tract (mouth, tongue, trunk and so on) to shape the sounds of their rumbles to make different alarm calls,' said Dr Lucy King of Save the Elephants and Oxford University who led the study with Dr Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert from Disney's Animal Kingdom, and colleagues.

'We concede the possibility that these alarm calls are simply a by-product of elephants running away, that is, just an emotional response to the threat that other elephants pick up on,' Lucy tells me. 'On the other hand, we think it is also possible that the rumble alarms are akin to words in human language, and that elephants voluntarily and purposefully make those alarm calls to warn others about specific threats. Our research results here show that African elephant alarm calls can differentiate between two types of threat and reflect the level of urgency of that threat.'

Significantly, the reaction to the human alarm call included none of the head-shaking behaviour displayed by elephants hearing the bee alarm. When threatened by bees elephants shake their heads in an effort to knock the insects away as well as running – despite their thick hides adult elephants can be stung around their eyes or up their trunks, whilst calves could potentially be killed by a swarm of stinging bees as they have yet to develop a thick protective skin.

Lucy explains: 'Interestingly, the acoustic analysis done by Joseph Soltis at his Disney laboratory showed that the difference between the ''bee alarm rumble'' and the ''human alarm rumble'' is the same as a vowel-change in human language, which can change the meaning of words (think of ''boo'' and ''bee''). Elephants use similar vowel-like changes in their rumbles to differentiate the type of threat they experience, and so give specific warnings to other elephants who can decipher the sounds.'

This collaborative research on how elephants react to and communicate about honeybees and humans is being used to reduce human-elephant conflict in Kenya. Armed with the knowledge that elephants are afraid of bees, Lucy and Save the Elephants have built scores of 'beehive fences' around local farms that protect precious fields from crop-raiding elephants.

'In this way, local farmers can protect their families and livelihoods without direct conflict with elephants, and they can harvest the honey too for extra income,' says Lucy. 'Learning more about how elephants react to threats such as bees and humans will help us design strategies to reduce human-elephant conflict and protect people and elephants.'Published ar PHY.ORG

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Why are some snakes so venomous?

Australia is world famous for its venomous critters, including its many highly venomous snakes.

The snake that holds the popular title of "world's most venomous" is the inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus), an inhabitant of Australia's arid interior. Astonishingly, a single bite from an inland taipan is capable of delivering enough venom to kill 250,000 lab mice.

The venom of the inland taipan has attracted considerable research interest and the toxins responsible for its extreme toxicity have been identified. Effective antivenom also exists for the treatment of bites.

What we don't know, though, is why the inland taipan needs such toxic venom. We know almost nothing about the evolutionary selection pressures that have refined and enhanced the toxins present in the venom of this iconic species of snake.

Snakes vs humans

Historically, the focus of snake venom research worldwide has been anthropocentric – examining the impact the venom has for humans. Large species of venomous snake, those that are known to be potentially dangerous to humans, have received the lion's share of attention.

Most attention has been given to the development of antivenom and to studying the building blocks of toxic proteins found in snake venoms. This has allowed us to learn more about human physiology and to search for compounds that may be useful in drug design, such as the toxin from the venom of a pit viper from which the blood pressure medication Captopril was developed.

These are important goals for venom research, but the result of this bias toward human interest is that we still know very little about the ways in which snakes use their venom in nature. We also do not know how diet influences its composition – the ecology of venom is an almost completely neglected area of research.

We do know that the common ancestor of all snakes possessed a rudimentary venom system. This means that all snakes had an equal evolutionary opportunity to become venomous. That not all snakes developed sophisticated venom delivery systems suggests that being highly venomous is not always the most efficient way for a snake to secure a meal.

There are no herbivorous snakes, but venom is not the only way that snakes can subdue their prey. Many snakes use constriction, as dramatically demonstrated in the recent battle between a python and crocodile in Queensland.

Some snakes simply rely on powerful jaws while others feed on defenceless prey such as eggs, so have no need of any additional deadly method of subjugation.

Snake evolution in Australia

In Australia there is a unique opportunity to study the evolution of snake venom.

The majority of snakes in this country are members of the Elapidae family, which means they have fixed fangs at the front of their mouths, and all are venomous.

The family, which arrived in Australia some 10 million years ago, includes some of the world's most famous snakes such as the cobras of Asia and Africa and the mambas of Africa.

Like all elapid snakes, the common ancestor of modern Australian species would have possessed a sophisticated venom system capable of delivering a complex cocktail of toxins into potential prey animals.

Elapid snakes quickly diversified in their new environment and today Australia is home to approximately 100 terrestrial species and more than 30 marine species – more than a third of the world's elapid snake fauna.

Australian elapid snakes are extremely diverse in ecology and prey preference: some are general feeders that will tackle any prey, some prefer mammals, others frogs or reptiles. Some are marine specialists, while others prefer eggs.

Despite the opportunity this diversity represents to study venom ecology, the majority of venom research has focused on large species that are potentially dangerous to humans. As these species are typically generalist feeders, this research has given us little insight into what has shaped the venom in the other species.

So why so toxic?

A popular theory in the past was that snakes simply evolved the most toxic venom possible in order to kill quickly any potential prey they might come across. Occasionally the extreme toxicity of inland taipan venom is still used in support of this "nuclear bomb" theory of snake venom evolution.

But recent research is revealing a strong correlation between prey preference and venom composition. This extends to species with strong shifts in prey preference throughout their lives – if babies and adults specialise on different prey types, they may have different venoms.

At the molecular level, individual toxins have been identified that are 100-fold more toxic to natural prey than to laboratory organisms such as rodents. The evidence suggests that snakes evolve venom that is fine-tuned for the specific context in which it is used.

Why then is the inland taipan so toxic when it targets solely rodents? The precise answer to this question awaits further research, although it is possible to indulge in thought experiments.
The fact that inland taipans specialise on rodents may partly explain their extreme toxicity to lab mice, but there's probably more to it that that.

In nature, taipans need to kill their relatively dangerous rodent prey quickly, before it escapes or has a chance to retaliate. Living in a harsh, arid environment also means they must conserve resources, so they likely deliver only a tiny fraction of the contents of their glands each time they bite a prey animal.

Inland taipans are also engaged in a co-evolutionary arms race with their natural prey, which may over time have evolved some resistance to the snake's venom. The hapless laboratory mice used in toxicity testing are evolutionarily naïve and may be much more sensitive to the venom.

So the impressive figure of 250,000 mice per bite is misleading, reflective more of "laboratory reality" than evolutionary reality.

Pulished at PHY.ORG

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Colored diamonds are a superconductor's best friend

Flawed but colorful diamonds are among the most sensitive detectors of magnetic fields known today, allowing physicists to explore the minuscule magnetic fields in metals, exotic materials and even human tissue.

University of California, Berkeley, physicist Dmitry Budker and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and UCLA have now shown that these diamond sensors can measure the tiny magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors, providing a new tool to probe these much ballyhooed but poorly understood materials.

"Diamond sensors will give us measurements that will be useful in understanding the physics of high temperature superconductors, which, despite the fact that their discoverers won a 1987 Nobel Prize, are still not understood," said Budker, a professor of physics and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

High-temperature superconductors are exotic mixes of materials like yttrium or bismuth that, when chilled to around 180 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero (-280ºF), lose all resistance to electricity, whereas low-temperature superconductors must be chilled to several degrees above absolute zero. When discovered 28 years ago, scientists predicted we would soon have room-temperature superconductors for lossless electrical transmission or magnetically levitated trains.

It never happened.

"The new probe may shed light on high-temperature superconductors and help theoreticians crack this open question," said coauthor Ron Folman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who is currently a Miller Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. "With the help of this new sensor, we may be able to take a step forward."

Budker, Folman and their colleagues report their success in an article posted online Feb. 18 in the journal Physical Review B.

Flawed but colorful

Colorful diamonds, ranging from yellow and orange to purple, have been prized for millennia. Their color derives from flaws in the gem's carbon structure: some of the carbon atoms have been replaced by an element, such as boron, that emits or absorbs a specific color of light.

Once scientists learned how to create synthetic diamonds, they found that they could selectively alter a diamond's optical properties by injecting impurities. In this experiment, Budker, Folman and their colleagues bombarded a synthetic diamond with nitrogen atoms to knock out carbon atoms, leaving holes in some places and nitrogen atoms in others. They then heated the crystal to force the holes, called vacancies, to move around and pair with nitrogen atoms, resulting in diamonds with so-called nitrogen-vacancy centers. For the negatively charged centers, the amount of light they re-emit when excited with light becomes very sensitive to magnetic fields, allowing them to be used as sensors that are read out by laser spectroscopy.

Folman noted that color centers in diamonds have the unique property of exhibiting quantum behavior, whereas most other solids at room temperature do not.

"This is quite surprising, and is part of the reason that these new sensors have such a high potential," Folman said.

Applications in homeland security?

Technology visionaries are thinking about using nitrogen-vacancy centers to probe for cracks in metals, such as bridge structures or jet engine blades, for homeland security applications, as sensitive rotation sensors, and perhaps even as building blocks for quantum computers. Budker, who works on sensitive magnetic field detectors, and Folman, who builds 'atom chips' to probe and manipulate atoms, focused in this work on using these magnetometers to study new materials.

"These diamond sensors combine high sensitivity with the potential for high spatial resolution, and since they operate at higher temperatures than their competitors – superconducting quantum interference device, or SQUID, magnetometers – they turn out to be good for studying high temperature superconductors," Budker said. "Although several techniques already exist for magnetic probing of superconducting materials, there is a need for new methods which will offer better performance."

The team used their diamond sensor to measure properties of a thin layer of yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), one of the two most popular types of high-temperatures superconductor. The Ben-Gurion group integrated the diamond sensor with the superconductor on one chip and used it to detect the transition from normal conductivity to superconductivity, when the material expels all magnetic fields. The sensor also detected tiny magnetic vortices, which appear and disappear as the material becomes superconducting and may be a key to understanding how these materials become superconducting at high temperatures.

"Now that we have proved it is possible to probe high-temperatures superconductors, we plan to build more sensitive and higher-resolution sensors on a chip to study the structure of an individual magnetic vortex," Folman said. "We hope to discover something new that cannot be seen with other technologies."

Researchers, including Budker and Folman, are attempting to solve other mysteries through magnetic sensing. For example, they are investigating networks of nerve cells by detecting the magnetic field each nerve cell pulse emits. In another project, they aim at detecting strange never-before-observed entities called axions through their effect on magnetic sensors.

Published at : PHY.ORG

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Microsoft unveils 'SurroundWeb'—whole room web display concept

Microsoft has published a concept paper on its research web site in which it describes a concept it calls SurroundWeb—a means for displaying web content on multiple flat surfaces and satellite screens in a physical room.

The concept relies on Kinect technology to scan a room to "recognize" flat surfaces and other objects. Once that's accomplished it would use software to parse out different parts of web content which it would divvy out to different surfaces (or satellite devices such as phones or tablets) in the room, effectively adding more screens. The idea is that different parts of web content would fit just right onto different patches of walls and other flat surfaces.

At first blush, the concept appears rather simple—a closer look, however, reveals that what Microsoft is actually proposing is a way to create immersive applications for the home that don't violate the privacy of their users. As its name implies, SurroundWeb is Internet based, thus, if such a system were to scan a room and allow information about what is found to make its way to the web, all manner of privacy violations could occur. In its concept paper Microsoft outlines how SurroundWeb could be implemented without violating privacy. The design of the system would mimic operating system design—different parts would be allowed access to different information—each level having access only to what it needs to function.

As an example, if an initial scan of a room reveals a can of a certain brand of soda sitting on a table, that brand information data would become a trusted object, available only to a section of the "local" software that allows for an ad to be displayed showcasing that or a related type of product. In such a scenario, the brand identity would never be able to make its way to the web, yet ads could still be displayed based on user preferences. Such recognition could also serve in the user's favor as is noted in the paper—if a pot in the kitchen begins to boil, for example, a message could be displayed in another room as an alert.

In its favor, the SurroundWeb concept is being put forth in a public forum, which means readers of all technical levels can study the idea and trade opinions regarding the soundness of the design. Thus, if there are privacy holes in the system, others will find them allowing Microsoft to refine the idea until the concept is deemed "safe."

SurroundWeb is still just an idea, one that Microsoft is clearly tossing around. Only time will tell if the company decides it's an idea worth pursuing.

Published at: PHY.ORG

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Facebook Looking Into Buying Drone Maker Titan Aerospace

Facebook, one of the primary backers of the Internet.org initiative, which aims to bring affordable Internet access to the 5 billion people in the world who still lack connectivity, is in talks with a company that could help further that agenda. TechCrunch is hearing that Facebook is buying Titan Aerospace, makers of near-orbital, solar-powered drones which can fly for five years without needing to land. According to a source with access to information about the deal, the price for this acquisition is $60 million*.

From our understanding, Facebook is interested in using these high-flying drones to blanket parts of the world without Internet access, beginning with Africa. The company would start by building 11,000 of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), specifically the “Solara 60″ model.

You can see an example of these UAVs, first introduced last year, here on YouTube. As the video explains, these drones are “atmospheric satellites” that can conduct most of the operations of an orbital satellite, but are cheaper and more versatile. The drones could potentially have many uses, including weather monitoring, disaster recovery, Earth imaging, or communications, the company has said, but clearly Facebook would be interested in that latter part.

The Solara 50 and 60 models can be launched at night using power from internal battery packs, then when the sun rises, they can store enough energy to ascend to 20KM above sea level where they can remain for five years without needing to land or refuel. Such capabilities make them ideal for regional Internet systems, like those that Internet.org would be focused on. (For those interested, Ars Technica took a more in-depth look at the technology and history behind Titan’s aircraft last August).

Titan Aerospace is a privately held venture with R&D facilities in New Mexico. The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding through seed and Series A and A-1 rounds, and had announced in October 2013 it would open a B round soon.

Titan is currently led by CEO Vern Raburn, previously founder and CEO of Eclipse Aviation. The company was founded in 2012 by Max Yaney (CTO), in order to produce what it refers to as “atmosats,” new types of UAVs that do the work of near-Earth satellites at a fraction of the cost.

The designation of “satellites” is important here, as the idea has been to position these aircraft above the airspace that the FAA regulates in the U.S. Class A airspace ends at 60,000 feet stateside, and above that the U.S. doesn’t regulate, Fortune had pointed outlast summer. That means the only issue in launching these in the U.S. would be the initial climb. In other parts of the world, the laws will, of course, vary. But in the developing markets Internet.org is focused on, it’s likely they’re not as far along in regulating such new technology.

Following the acquisition, all of Titan Aerospace’s production would be for the Internet.org project only, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Facebook’s Own “Project Loon,” Worth Less Than WhatsApp?

The Internet.org project competes with Google’s own R&D effort called “Project Loon,” which would involve balloons, not aircraft. TechCrunch had previously heard that Facebook has its own counterpart to “Project Loon” in the works, and this could be a part of that agenda.

In any event, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s $60 million to bring Internet to the world, and $19 billion for WhatsApp. That may seem odd, but this acquisition and WhatsApp would share the same broader goal of making the Internet more accessible, from Facebook’s point of view.

If Facebook could project weak but free Internet to developing nations via Titan Aerospace drones, it could then make a basic version of WhatsApp available to those users. They may not be able to send or view photos, but they likely could send messages and view status updates without having to pay for the Internet. While phones are getting cheaper, it’s the data costs that make the web unaffordable to much ofthe world. Titan’s drones could help Facebook fix that.

Facebook’s acquisition of Onavo could lend a hand, too. We hear the team is hard at work on data compression technologies that would allow the same functions to require less transmitted data to complete. Onavo-optimized WhatsApp or Facebook apps could run on a weaker Internet signal, such as from drones, because they don’t need to send or receive as much data.

Many ask why Facebook would even care about getting these parts of the world on the Internet if they currently have such little buying power that it’s hard to make money off of ads shown to them. There’s the altruistic side of Internet.org, but when it comes to business, Facebook is playing the long game. It hopes that with time, everyone in the world will gain affordable access to the Internet and smartphones, which could help them join the knowledge economy and gain more buying power.

If Facebook can use Titan’s drones to be someone’s first experience on the Internet, they’re likely to get deeply hooked into the social network’s service and eventually become a lucrative lifetime user.

*Our initial tip on the deal came from someone outside the company who had unauthorized access to this information. We have since confirmed discussions are taking place, and have spoken to Titan board member, Asher Delung, about the unauthorized access, without revealing sources.

Published at: TC

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16+ Ways to Get Natural Links

Link building is one of the biggest challenges faced by marketers in the web world. Inbound marketing without links built really doesn’t count for much especially in the eyes of the client and for this very reason consistent strategy is required.

Here are some basic tips on how to try and acquire natural links by tapping various sources and scouring them out:

Get the community together. Think of an interesting topic, find influential bloggers and get them to talk about it. Then get the information together and send it to them as a real book. That should get you enough natural links in one go.

Try and get bloggers together and take them to an event of common interest. Ask for a post each with a link back to your site.

Scour Twitter and look for tweets pertaining to something that you might have posted. Contact the tweeter and offer them a way of embedding it in their site.

Explore guest blogging. Research to check out where your competitors are posting and look for unique opportunities for your own self to follow the same path.

Find new and unique platforms to post your content on. Research and look for places that might still be budding but have the potential to catch on. Contact them for possible back links.Interact with other bloggers and if you have paywalled content, allow them first-click access if they are willing to give you a link in return.

Another way to efficiently use bloggers is to check with them with regards to the content that they want, create posts around those and then get them to link back to the site.

One of the most productive ways of acquiring links is to consistently create good, shareable content that attracts natural links.

Talk to your audience based on what they know and create worthy relationships. Don’t be over aggressive but once a rapport is built, ask them politely for a linkPlace different offers and incentives on your sites and post the offer on various platforms. Attract geeks and ask for links in return to offers.
One of the best ways to get links is photos. If a website uses your photo ask for a link as the credit for the photo; it’s a tactic that works well, for the most part.

Infographics posting, especially on relevant, interesting topics can get you some great links especially if the graphic goes viral and is shared extensively.

Create blogger competitions . Find innovative ways to make the contest popular and possibly go viral. Great way to promote your site and get natural links too.Do some search marketing and find out where your competitors are getting their links. Analyze and determine what is working for them and try and use similar methodologies.

Find a good pool of outsourced writers and get them to regularly write guest blogs and consequently build links

Explore linker outreach. Think of a topic and look for people who have potentially contributed to it on the web already. Those with a history of sharing and linking to that content are most likely to do it again.

We’d all love to have an extensive network of links built organically and there’s no doubt it’s a goal that requires blood, sweat and toil. But it’s work that’s well worth its weight in gold if you want to see your website’s street cred shoot up. We mean that with a grain of salt, of course.
Share with us what’s been effective for you and what hasn’t. You know we love to hear from you!

Published at TECHMAGNATE.

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World's fastest car Watch in Video

Hennessey Venom GT car has set the new record fastest car in the world with reaching a top speed of 270.49 mph (436 km/h) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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SETI Releases Paper About Hektor, a Dual Shape Trojan Asteroid With a Small Moon

This dual shape Trojan asteroid, named (624) Hektor, has a small moon orbiting it. Hektor is the only known Trojan asteroid to possess a small satellite. The unusual system has been studied by scientists from the SETI Institute for the past eight years.

SETI calls the unique system a "complex mini geological world" in a release. The moon was detected in 2006. The study found the 12 kilometer moon orbits the 250 km asteroid every 3 days at a distance of 600 km in an ellipse inclined almost 45 degrees with respect to the asteroid's equator. The researchers also found the asteroid is made of a mixture of rock and ices.

The new study also suggests the asteroid and its moons are the result of the collision of two asteroids. SETI researchers used W. M. Keck Observatory data and photometric observations to come up with the conclusion. They also collaborated with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley. The researchers had to overcome some technical and mathematical hurdles before they could release the paper.

Franck Marchis, astronomer at the Carl Sagan center of the SETI Institute, says in a release, "The major one was technical: the satellite can be seen only with a telescope like Keck Observatory's fitted with LSG-AO, but time on the mighty Keck's is highly prized and in limited availability. Secondly, the orbit of the satellite is so bizarre that we had to develop a complex new algorithm to be able to pin it down and understand its stability over time."

Matija Cuk, coauthor and scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, says, "The orbit of the moon is elliptical and tilted relative to the spin of Hektor, which is very different from other asteroids with satellites seen in the main-belt. However, we did computer simulations, which include Hektor being a spinning football shape asteroid and orbiting the Sun, and we found that the moon's orbit is stable over billions of years."

The research paper, "The Puzzling Mutual Orbit of the Binary Trojan Asteroid (624) Hektor," is published here in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Published at : Science, Space & Robots

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Sensor Gel Stick: Safely Clean Your Sensor Like They Do at the Service Center

Sensor cleaning, especially if you’ve never tried to do it yourself, is a scary prospect. Sure, taking off your lens and using a rocket blower isn’t all that nerve-wracking, but start talking to someone about wet cleaning a sensors and beads of perspiration will immediately begin to accumulate on their newly-furrowed brow.

Fortunately, there’s a cleaning solution now available that is easy and safe enough that many a sensor-cleaning newb will want to give it a try: the Sensor Gel Stick.
The Sensor Gel Stick is nothing new. In fact, it’s what at least a few manufacturers use in their service centers. But until now, we’ve not seen it available for the average consumer.

The basic premise is simple: it’s a stick with a piece of sticky gel on one end that you simply press and remove over and over to pull all of the dust and oil off of your sensor. When the gel gets dirty enough, you pull out a piece of sticky paper, remove the dirt and keep going.

The folks over at Fstoppers got to take the gel stick for a test drive, and were pretty well impressed. Bellow you see Patrick Hall cleaning first an ND filter, then his D300s and then a D600 — and all seem to show remarkable improvement after just one go-around.

As you can see, it seems both easy and safe to use. Just stick and pull… over and over again. You won’t have to worry about leaving behind a residue like you might with wet cleaning, and since the big guys use this in their own factories, it seems likely they’ve deemed the process safe.

The one thing we wouldn’t do if we were you is clean the mirror like Hall does in the video above. Not that the gel stick wouldn’t take dust off well, but messing with that mirror could throw it out of alignment and then you’d have an entirely different set of issues to deal with.

To find out more about the Sensor Gel Stick, or if you’d like to pick up one of your own, head over to Photography Life by clicking here. The stick will cost you $40 and packs of the companion sticky paper are $13. If that seems expensive, just compare that to how much it costs to send off your DSLR to be cleaned at the service center… in very short order, you’ll end up ahead.

Published at: PataPixal

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Tackling Tumors With Space Station Research

In space, things don’t always behave the way we expect them to. In the case of cancer, researchers have found that this is a good thing: some tumors seem to be much less aggressive in the microgravity environment of space compared to their behavior on Earth. This observation, reported in research published in February by the Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal, could help scientists understand the mechanism involved and develop drugs targeting tumors that don’t respond to current treatments. This work is the latest in a large body of evidence on how space exploration benefitsthose of us on Earth.

Research in the weightlessness of space offers unique insight into genetic and cellular processes that simply can’t be duplicated on Earth, even in simulated microgravity. “Microgravity can be approximated on Earth, but we know from the literature that simulated microgravity isn’t the same as the real thing,” says Daniela Gabriele Grimm, M.D., a researcher with the Department of Biomedicine, Pharmacology at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, and an author of the FASEB paper.

True weightlessness affects human cells in a number of ways. For one thing, cells grown in space arrange themselves into three-dimensional groupings, or aggregates, that more closely resemble what happens in the body. “Without gravitational pull, cells form three-dimensional aggregates, or spheroids,” Grimm explains. “Spheroids from cancer cells share many similarities with metastases, the cancer cells which spread throughout the body.” Determining the molecular mechanisms behind spheroid formation might therefore improve our understanding of how cancer spreads.

The FASEB paper resulted from an investigation in the Science in Microgravity Box (SIMBOX) facility aboard Shenzhou-8, launched in 2011. Cells grown in space and in simulated microgravity on the ground were analyzed for changes in gene expression and secretion profiles, with the results suggesting decreased expression of genes that indicate high malignancy in cancer cells.

The work was funded by a grant from the German Space Life Sciences program, managed by the German space agency, DLR, in collaboration with Chinese partners.

Grimm and her colleagues are following up with additional research, a Nanoracks Cellbox investigation called “Effect of microgravity on human thyroid carcinoma cells,” scheduled to launch in March on SpaceX's third commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station. Another follow-up investigation, “Spheroids,” is planned in 2015. The overall goal is to find as many genes and proteins as possible that are affected by microgravity and to identify the cellular activities they influence. Researchers can then use this information to develop new strategies for cancer research.

In a recent paper published in Nature Reviews Cancer, Jeanne Becker, Ph.D., a cell biologist at Nano3D Biosciences in Houston and principal investigator for the Cellular Biotechnology Operations Support System (CBOSS) 1-Ovarianstudy, examined nearly 200 papers on cell biology research in microgravity during four decades. This body of work shows that not only does the architecture of cells change in microgravity, but the immune system also is suppressed. Other studies in addition to Grimm’s have shown microgravity-induced changes in gene expression. The key variable, Becker concluded, is gravity. And the only way to really mitigate gravity is to go into space.

To maximize use of the space station’s unique microgravity platform, in 2011 NASA named the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) as manager of the station’s U.S. National Laboratory. By selecting research and funding projects, connecting investors and scientists and improving access to the station, CASIS accelerates new technologies and products with the potential to benefit all humanity.

CASIS recently requested proposals for research on the effects of microgravity on fundamental stem cell properties. That request, says Patrick O’Neill, communications manager, generated a terrific response from the research community – larger than any other CASIS proposal to date. That, he says, is because CASIS has become more known within the scientific and research community as a viable option for sending research to the space station. It is also because, now that the station is complete, crew members can increase their focus on research. All in all, this is an ideal time to send research to the station.

Grimm agrees. “The station is an invaluable tool for long-term studies of cells in microgravity. Exposure to real microgravity in space will always be the gold standard for all microgravity research and will therefore always be an important cornerstone of our work.”

Thanks to that research in space, scientists continue to learn more about diseases and their possible treatment here on Earth. With this new knowledge, we can turn that unexpected behavior in microgravity to our own advantage.

Published at NASA

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Windows may kill up to 988 million birds a year in the United States

Between 365 million and 988 million birds die from crashing into windows in the United States each year, according to the latest estimate.
That might equal 2 to 10 percent of the (admittedly uncertain) total bird population of the country.

The biggest share of the deaths comes not from glass massacres at skyscrapers but from occasional collisions with the nation’s many small buildings, says Scott Loss of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “It’s death by a million nicks.”

Low-rise buildings four to 11 stories tall account for about 56 percent of deaths in the new estimate, Loss and his colleagues report in the February Condor: Ornithological Applications. Residences that are one to three stories tall make up around 44 percent, with skyscrapers representing less than 1 percent.

Any given small building kills only a few birds each year versus the 24 expected to die annually at a single skyscraper. But the United States has about 15.1 million low-rises and 122.9 million small residences, and only about 21,000 skyscrapers. Loss applauds efforts to make skyscrapers bird-friendly, but cautions that protecting birds takes a broader effort.

Some species — many of them Neotropical migrants — appear especially vulnerable to the deceptions of windows, Loss and his colleagues find. Among the possible reasons are the risks of disorientation from artificial lights for birds on long-haul migrations at night. Compiling data from all kinds of buildings, the team found that Anna’s hummingbirds, black-throated blue warblers, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Townsend’s solitaires and golden-winged warblers topped the risk list.

Among those birds, conservationists have already flagged the golden-winged warbler because of its steep population decline in recent decades. Six other troubled species nationally also rank high in vulnerability to window crashes, including painted buntings, wood thrushes and Kentucky warblers.

It’s these already distressed species that worry Loss the most. For individual species with dwindling numbers, he imagines window kills might affect population trends.

The estimate puts windows, just behind cats, as the second-largest source of human-related menaces that kill birds directly (SN: 2/23/13, p. 14). From what Loss knows of estimates of other perils to birds such as wind turbines and vehicle kills, he says, “nothing else comes close.”

There’s no nationwide reporting of birds thumping into glass or succumbing to a paw, so estimating death tolls has long been difficult and controversial (SN: 9/21/13, p. 20). The new estimate of mortality from windows, based on statistical analysis of 23 local studies, comes close to an old estimate (100 million to 1 billion) that had been derided for its simple, back-of-the-envelope approach. “We were a little surprised,” Loss says.

There are plenty of uncertainties in extrapolating from small, diverse, local studies, particularly in trying to estimate overall species vulnerabilities, says Wayne Thogmartin of the U.S. Geological Survey in LaCrosse, Wis. But even such “imperfect science” has value, he says. For one thing, it may inspire people to start filling in gaps in data.

The total for window kills isn’t the whole story, though, says ornithologist Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who did the earlier calculation: “The moral imperative of preventing even one unwanted and unintended death of these utilitarian and aesthetically pleasing creatures is, or should be, compelling enough.”
Pulished at; ScienceNews

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GEAR AND GADGETS Tasty Tech Eye Candy Of The Week

This week in tech, we present amazing concepts from exceptionally creative minds. These ideas are so good, you'll wonder why no one invented them before. How about germ-proof clothing? Odors that can be sent via text message? A car that comes with its own drone and a fish that's able to drive an aquarium. Those are just a few. Read on.

STRING JUNGLE GYM: Croatian-Austrian collective Numen/For Use is known for its large-scale interactive environments. The group's latest design is an inflatable building rigged with a network of cables. The String Prototype gives kids and adults alike a jungle gym experience. Climb aboard.

Publish at : News

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