January 31, 2003 -
Longer Chromosomes, Longer Life?
- By Reuters NULL, WiredNews,
LONDON -- Could extending telomeres,
those bits of DNA at the ends of
chromosomes in cells, prolong lives?
Some scientists think so. Researchers in
the United States, who discovered that
elderly people with longer telomeres
lived five to six years longer than
people with shorter ones, think
increasing the length of telomeres could
be a possible key to a longer life...
January 31, 2002
-
US mulls Linux for world's biggest computer - The Register,
By Andrew Orlowski in New York, Linux is in the running to power
the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo.
A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the
US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server
farm to the three leading US research labs, which is scheduled to
come on stream by the end of 2004. But this differs from your usual
Linux-employed-in-big-lab story in a particularly interesting way,
which is orthogonal to the interest in file system architecture raised
by our Longhorn story...
January 29, 2002
-
Billions of Earths could be out there
- New figures boost chances of finding life-sustaining worlds,
By Robert Roy Britt, SPACE.COM, Chances are you haven’t spent
a whole lot of time wondering how many planets like Jupiter exist
in our galaxy. But Charley Lineweaver has, because it bears on a more
important question: How many potentially habitable planets are there?
New calculations by Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University
of New South Wales in Australia, provide an encouraging answer to
this question. The researchers expect a flood of Jupiters will be
found, perhaps 50 percent more than currently expected...
January 01, 2002
-
Honey, I Shrunk the Medical Equipment, By Cade Metz, PC
Mag, Imagine shrinking an entire blood-testing lab into a device
no larger than the head of a thumb tack. This may seem fantastic,
but it's very much a reality. The "lab-on-a-chip," offered
by such companies as New Jersey–based i-Stat Corporation, is revolutionizing
the way hospitals treat their patients. Traditionally, when blood
had to be tested, emergency room doctors had no choice but to send
it to a remote lab, sometimes waiting hours for the results. With
this lab-on-a-chip, typically housed in a handheld device, they can
test the blood themselves in a matter of minutes...
January 28, 2002 -
The Great Dying - Science NASA, 250 million years ago
something unknown wiped out most life on our planet. Now scientists
are finding buried clues to the mystery inside tiny capsules of cosmic
gas. It was almost the perfect crime. Some perpetrator -- or perpetrators
-- committed murder on a scale unequaled in the history of the world.
They left few clues to their identity, and they buried all the evidence
under layers and layers of earth...
January 30, 2002 -
Car work for quantum mechanics - PHILIP BALL, Nature.com,
A quantum afterburner extracts laser light from vehicle exhaust. The hot
gases belching out of your car's exhaust are not just useless waste.
They are a laser waiting to happen, says physicist Marlan Scully1. All
you need to harness this potential, suggests Scully, of Texas A&M
University in College Station, is a quantum afterburner. This
hypothetical modification would use quantum mechanics to boost the
engine's efficiency by clawing back waste heat and turning it into
useful energy - laser light...
January 03, 2002 -
Bionic Eyes - NASA, Using space technology,
scientists have developed extraordinary ceramic photocells
that could repair malfunctioning human eyes. Rods and
Cones. Millions of them are in the back of every healthy human
eye. They are biological solar cells in the retina that
convert light to electrical impulses -- impulses that travel
along the optic nerve to the brain where images are formed...
January 15, 2002 -
Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons - NASA, NASA
funded scientists are crafting microscopic vessels that can
venture into the human body and repair problems – one cell at
a time. It's like a scene from the movie "Fantastic
Voyage." A tiny vessel -- far smaller than a human cell --
tumbles through a patient's bloodstream, hunting down diseased
cells and penetrating their membranes to deliver precise doses
of medicines. Only this isn't Hollywood. This is real
science...
January 28, 2002 -
Ice Worm Stars on Web - Associated Press,
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Armed with a sophisticated ice borer,
professor Daniel Shain went hunting on Byron Glacier for a
scientific treasure: the tiny, fragile ice worm. "We know
there are millions of worms on Byron Glacier in the summertime
and unless they migrate to Florida or something, there aren't
too many other places they could be," the Rutgers University
professor said Sunday, as he prepared to tackle the glacier
about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage. "The prediction is that
they dive straight down into the glacier to stay warm," he
said...
January 16, 2002 -
Turning script kiddies into real programmers - By Robert
Vamosi, AnchorDesk, COMMENTARY--Last month I got an e-mail from a
19-year-old San Francisco Bay Area youth who objected to my frequent
use of the term "script kiddie." He felt I was picking on young people
as a group, and therefore guilty of ageism. He noted that older people
are interested in writing destructive viruses, too. He's right about
that. The e-mail got me thinking: Where does the admittedly pejorative
term "script kiddie" come from, anyway? And how do we encourage young
people to get interested in Internet security as a tool for good?
January 21, 2002 -
Teaching Robot Dogs New Tricks - Scientific American,
Aibo, the Sony Corporation's popular robot dog, has delighted scores
of critics and consumers since its introduction. But the plastic pup
has also caused its creators some grief. Sony is currently struggling
to resolve a copyright dispute that centers on the work of a quirky
hacker known only as AiboPet. The controversy poses serious questions
about the proper use of robots in homes and exposes a potentially
stifling effect of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of
1998...
January 25, 2002 -
How to Build a PC - By Joel Durham Jr., Gamespot.com,
The first time you looked into a computer case, it was probably pretty
daunting to try to imagine how it all worked. Don't let that scare you
off. If you've cracked open a PC case to install more memory or a new
graphics card, then you already have a head start on what you need to
know. Assembling a PC just takes some time, care, and good
instructions to follow. This guide will take you through how to safely
assemble the dozen or so major components that go into a desktop
system...
January
21, 2002 -
Computing Gem
- By Cade Metz, PC Magazine, Silicon chips, the
building blocks used to construct computers, are always
getting faster. Every few months, manufacturers significantly
improve the performance of CPUs, graphics processors, and
memory chips. And yet, as chips get faster, the electrical
circuits that tie them together remain excruciatingly slow.
Your new Pentium 4 processor may run at 2 GHz and your $300
ATI graphics card may use state-of-the-art silicon, but
motherboard leads that connect the two aren't any faster than
they were a couple of years ago. "Motherboard clock speed is a
bottleneck," says Patrick McCann, professor of electrical
engineering at the University of Oklahoma. "There are growing
problems with chip-to-chip communication."
January
23, 2002 -
Cell Wars - NASA.com, Immune cells vs.
invaders: it's a war going on in every healthy human body.
When the combatants travel to space, say NASA scientists,
curious things happen... When you wake up, maybe you
yawn, switch off your alarm clock, and listen for the perking
of an automatic coffee maker -- a normal morning routine on
Earth. But if you were in orbit, the first thing you'd do is
take a little roll of cotton, swish it around in your mouth,
and then drop it in a tube filled with preservative. The
cotton collects viruses, and the goal of that good-morning
ritual is to help determine why astronaut saliva contains more
viruses in space than it does on the ground...
