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Archive for July, 2010

Google raises the prize for Chrome bug discovery to $3000+ – Gadgets Reviews

22 Jul

Product Reviews (blog)

Google raises the prize for Chrome bug discovery to $3000+
Gadgets Reviews
Yesterday, Google announced that it will pay $3133.70 for every single critical security bug discovery in Chrome web ...
Google Chrome: Critical Bug Discovery Reward RaisedProduct Reviews (blog)
Mozilla Patches Firefox for 14 VulnerabilitieseSecurity Planet

all 71 news articles »
 
 

The Star Thrower: sweetly moving comic

21 Jul

I found Jake Parker's short comic "The Star Thrower" to be sweetly moving and well, just lovely. What a nice way to have started my morning.

The Star Thrower (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)



 
 

End Call button for the iPhone 4

21 Jul
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Aaron Draczynski made an "End Call" button for the iPhone 4. (It's not really for sale).

 
 

book art

21 Jul

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it’s all so pretty… I’m kind of obsessed with book art. I dabble a little here and there with folding book but nothing like what’s really possible. Book art in general is fascinating to see the things people come up with. The other day Ellie of Mint (love her blog) tweeted about her latest post featuring artist Jonathan Callan. I made a note to look it up when I had time. Today I searched google images for “book art”.  It blew my mind. I’m highlighting three artists I really enjoyed (there were many) The above image is Cara Barer and below are Jonathan Callan, Georgia Russell.

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Cara Barer

Houston based artist, all started with a yellow pages she found on the street. Since then she has been manipulating or finding manipulated books and photographing them. Beautiful.

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Jonathan Callan

Love the mass of his pieces. They are huge. Very cool.

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Georgia Russell

Okay, here’s where I just decided I absolutely had to post about this… it’s unbelievable. Truly gorgeous work and under glass domes??? Oy!

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Creepy ‘Human Fish’ Can Live 100 Years

21 Jul

The olm, a foot-long salamander nicknamed “the human fish” because of its fleshy skin and tubular shape, is certainly a strange-looking animal. But beneath the surface, they’re even weirder: Olms can live for 100 years, far longer than any other amphibian.

Scientists have no idea why.

“This species raises questions regarding aging processes,” write researchers led by biologist Yann Voituron of France’s Université Claude Bernard in a July 21 Biology Letters study.

The olms studied by Voituron’s team are part of a population established 48 years ago to help conserve the rare amphibian, which is found in caves in Croatia and Slovenia.

When the project began, the olms were about 10 years old, making them nearly 60 now. Yet they “do not show any time of senescence,” write the researchers, who estimate the olm’s average lifespan to be 69 years, with an upper limit at the century mark.

Living in a stable environment without predators has made it possible for olms to have long lives, but the mechanisms underlying their longevity are unknown. In general, long life correlates with a large body size, but the half-pound salamanders are pipsqueaks compared to the next-longest-lived amphibian, the 50-pound Japanese salamander, which clocks in with a 55-year lifespan.

Voituron’s team thought olms might have extremely slow metabolisms, but they proved metabolically similar to other amphibians, including African bullfrogs and European toads that live for about 40 years.

The researchers also wondered if olms might have special tricks for cleaning up oxygen-free radicals, the DNA-damaging molecules produced when cellular mitochondria turn nutrients into energy. Free-radical accumulation is linked to aging, but the olm’s antioxidant activity is nothing special.

“The olm presents a paradox,” wrote the researchers. “Neither its basal metabolic rate nor its antioxidant activity, the two most cited mechanisms that should be involved in enhancing lifespan, differ from species with a more reduced lifespan.”

Voituron is now testing whether the olm might have extra-efficient mitochondria that emit fewer free radicals to begin with. “If you manage to produce more energy with less free-radical production, then you can avoid aging and increase lifespan,” he said.

Image: Olivier Guillaume.

See Also:

Citation: “Extreme lifespan of the human fish (Proteus anguinus): a challenge for ageing mechanisms.” By Yann Voituron, Michelle de Fraipont, Julien Issartel, Olivier Guillaume Jean Clobert. Biology Letters, online publication, July 21, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

 
 

Tom the Dancing Bug: God-Man in “Slave Trade”

21 Jul


 
 

Telescope Images Most Massive Stars Ever Found

21 Jul

Images from the Very Large Telescope in Chile capture the most massive stars ever found, including one twice as large as the current accepted limit for stellar birth weights. This supermassive star, called R136a1, is 265 times the mass of the sun, and was as much as 320 times the mass of the sun when it was born.

This book-of-records-worthy star was found in the young stellar cluster RMC 136a, colloquially known as R136. It is located 165,000 light-years away inside the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star is already a little over a million years old, and has spent most of its life shedding material through powerful stellar winds and outflows of gas. It has lost a fifth of its initial mass.

Astronomers had previously believed that the upper limit on stars’ masses at birth was 150 solar masses, but four stars in the cluster had birth weights well above that limit. Although the cluster houses more than 100,000 stars, those four giants account for nearly half the wind and radiation power of the entire group.

This trio of images shows a visible-light image of the Tarantula nebula as seen with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope (left) along with a zoomed-in visible-light image from the Very Large Telescope (middle). A new image of the R136 cluster, taken with a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope, is shown in the right-hand panel, with the cluster itself at the lower right.

Below, an artist’s conception shows the relative sizes of stars, from red dwarfs of about 0.1 solar masses, yellow dwarfs like the sun, blue dwarfs weighing eight solar masses, and the approximately 300-solar-mass R136a1.

Images: 1) ESO/P. Crowther/C.J. Evans. 2) ESO/M. Kornmesser

See Also:

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

 
 

Teenage Uses Craigslist to Swap Cell Phone for Porsche

20 Jul

Steven Ortiz, a 17-year old boy, used Craigslist to trade his old cell phone for an iPod Touch. He traded that gadget for something better, which he then traded for something even better. After a total of fourteen trades, starting with a cell phone, he had a Porsche Boxster:

Steven started his lucrative journey when his friend gave him an old cell phone – the sort most people would throw away or shove into a junk drawer.

He traded that phone for a better phone, which he then traded for an i-Pod touch. He traded that for a series of dirt bikes, a MacBook Pro, and a 1987 Toyota 4Runner.

At the time, Steven was just 15 and unable to drive his new acquisition. So he quickly swapped it out for a souped-up off-road golf
cart, another more valuable dirt bike, a streetbike, then a series of cars ending with a 1975 Ford Bronco. He spent a few months enjoying each acquisition before determining he was looking for something else.

It was that Bronco that got him the Porsche. Because some older Broncos are considered collectibles, Steven estimated his was worth $15,000.

He got offered all manner of trades – including a locksmith business – for the Bronco. The Porsche, worth about $9,000, was actually a trade down.

Link via Jalopnik | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user The Car Spy used under Creative Commons license

 
 

Twitter Strangers

20 Jul

Over at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson makes a convincing argument for adding random strangers to your twitter feed:

I realized most of my Twitter friends are like me: white dorks. So I picked out my new friend and started to pay attention.

She’s a Christian, but isn’t afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she’s not afraid of them, either. She’s very proud of her fiscal responsibility. She looks lovely in her faux modeling shots, although I am surprised how much her style aligns with what I consider mall fashion when she’s a grown woman in her twenties. Her home is Detroit and she’s finding the process of buying a new car totally frustrating. She spends an embarrassing amount of time tweeting responses to the Kardashian family.

One of the best things about Twitter is that, once you’ve populated it with friends genuine or aspirational, it feels like a slow-burn house party you can pop into whenever you like. Yet even though adding random people on Twitter is just a one-click action, most of us prune our follow list very judiciously to prevent tedious or random tweets to pollute our streams. Understandable! But don’t discount the joy of discovery that can come by weaving a stranger’s life into your own.

I’d argue that the benefits of these twitter strangers extend beyond the fleeting pleasures of electronic eavesdropping. Instead, being exposed to a constant stream of unexpected tweets – even when the tweets seem wrong, or nonsensical, or just plain silly – can actually expand our creative potential.

The explanation returns us to the banal predictability of the human imagination. In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word “blue,” chances are your first answer will be “sky”. Your next answer will probably be “ocean,” followed by “green” and, if you’re feeling creative, a noun like “jeans”. The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches.

How do we escape these cliches? Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, has found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of “yellow,” or a blue slide would lead to a reply of “green”. After a few minutes, the group was then asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: Groups in the “dissent condition” – these were the people exposed to inaccurate descriptions – came up with much more original associations. Instead of saying that “blue” reminded them of “sky,” or that “green” made them think of “grass,” they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that “blue” might trigger thoughts of “Miles Davis” and “smurfs” and “pie”. The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that a similar strategy can also lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks, such as free-associating on ways to improve traffic in the Bay Area.

The power of such “dissent” is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer – this is the shock of hearing blue called “green” – we start to reconsider the meaning of the color. We try to understand this strange reply, which leads us to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so our comfortable associations – the easy association of blue and sky – gets left behind. Our imagination has been stretched by an encounter that we didn’t expect.

And this is why we should all follow strangers on Twitter. We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us. (While waiting in line for my cappuccino this weekend, I was ready to punch myself in the face, as I realized that everyone in line was wearing the exact same uniform: artfully frayed jeans, quirky printed t-shirts, flannel shirts, messy hair, etc. And we were all staring at the same gadget, and probably reading the same damn website. In other words, our pose of idiosyncratic uniqueness was a big charade. Self-loathing alert!) While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable – strangers can say such strange things – it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

And this is why following someone unexpected on Twitter can be a small step towards a more open mind. Because not everybody reacts to the same thing in the same way. Sometimes, it takes a confederate in an experiment to remind us of that. And sometimes, all it takes is a stranger on the internet, exposing us to a new way of thinking about God, Detroit and the Kardashians.

 
 

Nigerian Couple Stuns Genetic Experts, Give Birth To White Baby Girl

20 Jul

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This is quite interesting. A Nigerian couple living in London gave birth to a blue-eyed and blonde haired white (not albino) baby girl. Pop it for the full story.

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Blue-eyed blonde Nmachi, whose name means “Beauty of God” in the Nigerian couple’s homeland, has baffled genetics experts because neither Ben nor wife Angela have ANY mixed-race family history. Pale genes skipping generations before cropping up again could have explained the baby’s appearance. Ben also stressed: “My wife is true to me. Even if she hadn’t been, the baby still wouldn’t look like that. “We both just sat there after the birth staring at her for ages – not saying anything.” Doctors at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup – where Angela, from nearby Woolwich, gave birth – have told the parents Nmachi is definitely no albino.

Ben, who came to Britain with his wife five years ago and works for South Eastern Trains, said: “She doesn’t look like an albino child anyway – not like the ones I’ve seen back in Nigeria or in books. She just looks like a healthy white baby.” “But we don’t know of any white ancestry. We wondered if it was a genetic twist. “But even then, what is with the long curly blonde hair?” Professor Bryan Sykes, head of Human Genetics at Oxford University and Britain’s leading expert, yesterday called the birth “extraordinary”. He said: “In mixed race humans, the lighter variant of skin tone may come out in a child – and this can sometimes be startlingly different to the skin of the parents.

“This might be the case where there is a lot of genetic mixing, as in Afro-Caribbean populations. But in Nigeria there is little mixing.” Prof Sykes said BOTH parents would have needed “some form of white ancestry” for a pale version of their genes to be passed on. But he added: “The hair is extremely unusual. Even many blonde children don’t have blonde hair like this at birth.” The expert said some unknown mutation was the most likely explanation. He admitted: “The rules of genetics are complex and we still don’t understand what happens in many cases.”

“She’s beautiful and I love her. Her colour doesn’t matter. She’s a miracle baby. “But still, what on earth happened here?” Her husband told how their son Chisom, four, was even more confused than them by his new sister. Ben said: “Our other daughter Dumebi is only two so she’s too young to understand.
“But our boy keeps coming to look at his sister and then sits down looking puzzled.

“We’re a black family. Suddenly he has a white sister.” Ben continued: “Of course, we are baffled too and want to know what’s happened. But we understand life is very strange.

“All that matters is that she’s healthy and that we love her. She’s a proud British Nigerian.”

Wow. We bet their son is confused like some sh*t! This is wild. Peep the video of the couple below:

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