Neuroscience News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Data mining, forecasting and bioinformatics competitions on Kaggle. Frans Lanting | LIFE A Journey Through Time. Scientists engineer nanoscale vaults to encapsulate 'nanodisks' for drug delivery. There's no question, drugs work in treating disease. But can they work better, and safer? In recent years, researchers have grappled with the challenge of administering therapeutics in a way that boosts their effectiveness by targeting specific cells in the body while minimizing their potential damage to healthy tissue.
The development of new methods that use engineered nanomaterials to transport drugs and release them directly into cells holds great potential in this area. And while several such drug-delivery systems — including some that use dendrimers, liposomes or polyethylene glycol — have won approval for clinical use, they have been hampered by size limitations and ineffectiveness in accurately targeting tissues. Now, researchers at UCLA have developed a new and potentially far more effective means of targeted drug delivery using nanotechnology. The UCLA research team was led by Leonard H. "Vaults can have a broad nanosystems application as malleable nanocapsules," Rome added. TheRSAorg's Channel. Scientists Create World's 1st Practical Artificial Leaf, 10X as... - StumbleUpon.
PowerCursor - Design Interfaces you can Touch. HeadWize - Project: Build These Noise-Canceling Headphones by Jules Ryckebusch. In today’s hectic and noisy world, we are all searching for a little peace and quiet. Well, you might not be able to slip off to a tranquil forest for an hour or two, but you can block out background noise with the Noise-Canceling Headphones. The theory behind this project is that by picking up ambient sound with a microphone and reproducing it out of phase, we can actively cancel or "null" out background noise. In fact, several commercially available devices perform the same function. However, by building your own headset, you can add features not otherwise available and have fun while doing it!
Along with noise-features, the Active Noise-Canceling Headphones let you mix in an auxiliary line-level signal from a CD or tape player. . The schematic diagram in Fig. 1 shows the design of the electronics portion of the project. The signals from the microphone then go to ICl-a. an NE5532 set up as a standard non-inverting pre-amp. . Check your work often while building the circuit. . . . 1.
Supercomputer predicts revolution. 9 September 2011Last updated at 15:57 Sentiment mining showed a sharp change in tone around Egypt ahead of President Mubarak's ousting Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research. A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt. While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.
The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden's location. Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois' Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday. Mood and location The study's information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre and BBC Monitoring, both of which monitor local media output around the world. Predicting trouble Continue reading the main story. New alloy could split water to make fuel. A team of Kentucky scientists has found a way to 'tweak' an inexpensive semiconductor to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight. Through theoretical computations, they've demonstrated that an alloy formed by a two percent substitution of antimony in gallium nitride has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting.
When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken, allowing the hydrogen to be collected. "Previous research on PEC has focused on complex materials. We decided to go against the conventional wisdom and start with some easy-to-produce materials, even if they lacked the right arrangement of electrons to meet PEC criteria," says Professor Madhu Menon of the University of Kentucky. "Hydrogen production now involves a large amount of CO2 emissions," Sunkara said. High-dose ascorbic acid increases intercourse freq... [Biol Psychiatry.... 20 most impressive science fair projects of all time | MNN - Mother Nature... While science fair projects still typically consist of papier mache volcanoes, LEGO robots, and crystals grown in a jar, many students these days are going above and beyond the staples, taking on projects that would even be awe-inspiring as a college thesis.
From exploring the effectiveness of cancer treatments to revolutionizing the disposal of plastics, these students prove you don't have to be an adult to have amazing, world-changing ideas about science. Take a look at these 20 amazing science fair projects we've listed here. They may just inspire you to step up your game in your own college-level science courses. 1. With a budget of only $3,500, Michigan high school student Thiago Olsen built a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage when he was only 15 years old. 2. Working as a team at West Philadelphia High School, students constructed a diesel-hybrid race car that can go from zero to 60 in just four seconds. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Whos Who In Human Evolution. By Peter Tyson Posted 11.01.08 NOVA Despite a fragmentary fossil record, paleoanthropologists have assembled a solid general picture of human evolution.
They have traced hominins–that is, species that are bipedal and that are more closely related to humans than to other apes–back more than six million years. In this clickable illustration, follow the trajectory of hominin development from the earliest known species right up to our own kind, Homo sapiens. Note: The illustration, adapted with permission from the Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins by Carl Zimmer (Smithsonian Books, 2005, p. 41), does not include all hominin species that experts have proposed but rather offers a representative sample. Credits Design Tyler Howe Programming Alan Kwan Images (diagram) from Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins by Carl Zimmer, HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
The Singularity (HUNGRY BEAST) Wired Science . Video: Body Builders. MIT. Richard Dawkins, The Enemies Of Reason Part 1. Alchemy - Open Source AI. 20 WebGL sites that will blow your mind | Feature | .net magazine. Almost all modern computers and most smartphones have powerful GPUs, graphics processors that often have more number-crunching power than the CPU.
But until recently web pages and mobile websites couldn't use them - meaning slow, low-quality graphics, almost always in 2D. That all changed when WebGL was released in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. WebGL, based on the well-known OpenGL 3D graphics standard, gives JavaScript plugin-free access to the graphics hardware, via the HTML5 canvas element - making realtime 3D graphics in web pages possible. Tech support Apple are supporting the standard too, so we can (hopefully!)
Expect to see it cropping up in Safari on Macs, iPhones and iPads sometime (though probably not soon) - and Opera are testing their own version, so the only holdout is Microsoft. So sit back, crank up your latest browser, and check out these demos - if you think you can do better, go for it: there are some hints and tips on how at the end. 01. 3 Dreams of Black. PC AI sucks at Civilization, reads manual, starts kicking ass. The Massachusetts institute of technology have been experimenting with their computers' AI.
Specifically the way they deal with the meaning of words. You might think that the best way to analyse this kind of thing would be with a human to PC conversation, like in Short Circuit. That's not the case. Instead, the boffins handed over PC classic, Civilization, and let the AI get on with it. They sucked - winning a mere 46 per cent of the time. Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a "machine-learning system so it could use a player's manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy. " Associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, Regina Barzilay, offered insight into why they used a game manual to prove their point.
Civ was picked because it's a really fun game, and they didn't want the computers to get bored during the testing. Not really. These kind of systems could make developer's jobs a lot easier. (via Reddit) Why the Big Bang is Wrong. Undefined John Kierein The Big Bang theory of the universe is wrong because the cosmological red shift is due to the Compton effect rather than the Doppler effect. See The Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe by Grote Reber and Hubble's Constant in Terms of the Compton Effect by John Kierein. The latter describes how the Compton effect cosmological red shift accelerates with increasing distance. Reber showed that the Compton effect was the cause of the red shift in order to explain the observations of bright, very long wavelength, extragalactic radio waves. Kierein used the Compton effect explanation to explain quasars and the red shift on the sun.
Quasars may be much closer than their red shift would indicate if they have an "intrinsic" red shift due to being surrounded by a 'fuzzy' atmosphere containing free electrons and other material. Some such quasars may be double stars, with one member being an ordinary star and the other exhibiting a large red shift and being labeled as a quasar. The Complexity and Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems. NEXT WORLD - Intel Claytronics (Programmable Matter) Bionic Eye by 2020. 11.19.2007 - New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living... UC Berkeley Press Release New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living cell for the first time By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | 19 November 2007 BERKELEY – Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules' dynamic reactions in a single living cell.
By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell. The technique, described in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature Methods, could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics. Open Mind. An Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos. Top 10 Most Extreme Substances, page 1. John Holland, Emergence. The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland Addison-Wesley, 1997 Game Rules, or, Emergence according to Holland, or, Confessions of a Creative Reductionist John Holland was one of the world's first Ph.D.s in computer science, and even before that one of the first workers in machine learning.
He is most famous for the invention of genetic algorithms, which some silly people have described as "teaching computers how to have sex. " One of the things Holland has been thinking about for a long time is the puzzle of building blocks, of re-usable categorical parts. The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking --- and half the trouble with it is that everything we say about it is only rough --- the flip side of the problem of building blocks. This is not, usually, what people have in mind when they attack reductionism; they are thinking, rather, of one of two impostors. Xiv + 258 pp., list of suggested readings, index. Rapid Cell Regeneration. Computer learns language by playing games. Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web.
But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin? One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results. Starting from scratch “Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” says Branavan, who was first author on both ACL papers. “Every action that you take in the game doesn’t have a predetermined outcome, because the game or the opponent can randomly react to what you do. Proof of concept. A Drug That Could Give You Perfect Visual Memory - io9.
Give Ps a chance - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University School... A Nobelist’s quest to open our eyes to the next DNA. It’s called Poly P By SPYROS ANDREOPOULOS For the past 15 years, Arthur Kornberg, MD, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist at Stanford, has been deepening his relationship with one of biology’s wallflowers: a molecule he has nicknamed poly P.
While most other biochemists ignore the omnipresent molecule (it shows up in every living cell on Earth) Kornberg, 89, can’t pull himself away. He’s convinced poly P is one of life’s great behind-the-scenes power players. “It’s more important than I am,” he says, with a smile. It’s not just his love of a good biochemical mystery that keeps the emeritus professor working in the lab — though that’s certainly part of what drives him. Inorganic polyphosphate, the molecule Kornberg calls poly P, is older than the hills — literally. What exactly is poly P? Kornberg became fascinated by poly P in the 1950s. This underscored for him that the stationary phase of a microbial “bug” is anything but stationary. Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes. Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos. Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos All these pictures are from the book 'Microcosmos,' created by Brandon Brill from London.
This book includes many scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of insects, humanbody parts and household items. These are the most amazing images of what is too small tosee with the naked eye. 2-2-11 An ant, Formica fusca, holding a microchip Surface of an Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory silicon microchip Eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin The surface of a strawberry Bacteria on the surface of a human tongue Human sperm (spermatozoa) Nylon hooks and loops of Velcro Household dust: includes long hairs of cat fur, twisted synthetic and woolen fibers, serrated insect scales, a pollen grain, and plant and insect remains The weave of nylon stocking fibers The head of a mosquito Head louse clinging to a human hair Eight eyes (two groups of four) on the head of a tarantula Cut human hairs and shaving foam between two razor blades Mushrooms spores.
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials. Advertisment: In 2006 I joined Google. We are growing a Google Pittsburgh office on CMU's campus. We are hiring creative computer scientists who love programming, and Machine Learning is one the focus areas of the office. We're also currently accepting resumes for Fall 2008 intenships. If you might be interested, feel welcome to send me email: awm@google.com . The following links point to a set of tutorials on many aspects of statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine learning and data mining algorithms.
These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. They include regression algorithms such as multivariate polynomial regression, MARS, Locally Weighted Regression, GMDH and neural nets. List of unsolved problems in physics. Eric Weisstein's World of Physics. Nice Robots Finish First: Simulation Shows How Altruism Can Evolve | 80beats. Play framework - Home. Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything. Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky. National STEM Centre. Try Haskell! An interactive tutorial in your browser. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Lectures. Physicists Slow Speed of Light. Computing Channel.