Tech-Science

HTML5

2012-11-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

HTML5

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HTML5
(HyperText Markup Language)

HTML5 official logo, introduced on January 18, 2011.
Filename extension	`*.html`
Internet media type	`text/html`
Type code	TEXT
Uniform Type Identifier	public.html^[1]
Developed by	World Wide Web Consortium and WHATWG
Type of format	Markup language
Extended to	XHTML5^{[citation needed]}
Open format?	Yes
Website	whatwg.org/html www.w3.org/TR/html5

XHTML5
Filename extension	`.xhtml, .html`
Internet media type	`application/xml, application/xhtml+xml`
Developed by	World Wide Web Consortium and WHATWG
Type of format	Markup language
Extended from	XML, HTML5^{[citation needed]}
Open format?	Yes
Website	www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-xhtml-syntax.html

HTML

HTML and HTML5; HTML editor
Dynamic HTML
XHTML
- XHTML Basic (Mobile)
- XHTML Mobile Profile and C-HTML
HTML element
Character encodings; Unicode
Language code
Document Object Model
Browser Object Model
Style sheets and CSS
Font family and Web colors
HTML scripting and JavaScript
W3C, WHATWG, and validator
Quirks mode
HTML Frames
HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, and WebCL
HTML5 Audio and HTML5 video
Web storage
Web browser (layout) engine
Comparison of
- document markup languages
- web browsers
- layout engine support for
  - HTML;　Non-standard HTML
  - XHTML (1.1)
  - HTML5; HTML5 canvas,
    - HTML5 media　(Audio, Video)

HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web and a core technology of the Internet. It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997)^[2] and, as of October 2012, is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well.^[2]
HTML5 is not software that has to be installed but rather a new version of the language HTML. Web browsers must support this new version of HTML in order to correctly display web pages using HTML5 functions. It is upon the developers of browsers to update their software to use HTML5; users simply must allow these updates to be done on their computers, but do not have to install additional software.
Following its immediate predecessors HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web are a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, and the many syntax errors in existing web documents.^[3] It is also an attempt to define a single markup language that can be written in either HTML or XHTML syntax. It includes detailed processing models to encourage more interoperable implementations; it extends, improves and rationalises the markup available for documents, and introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications.^[4] For the same reasons, HTML5 is also a potential candidate for cross-platform mobile applications. Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013.^[5]
In particular, HTML5 adds many new syntactic features. These include the new <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of scalable vector graphics (SVG) content (that replaces the uses of generic <object> tags) and MathML for mathematical formulas. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs. Other new elements, such as <section>, <article>, <header> and <nav>, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents. New attributes have been introduced for the same purpose, while some elements and attributes have been removed. Some elements, such as <a>, <cite> and <menu> have been changed, redefined or standardized. The APIs and document object model (DOM) are no longer afterthoughts, but are fundamental parts of the HTML5 specification.^[4] HTML5 also defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents so that syntax errors will be treated uniformly by all conforming browsers and other user agents.^[6]
^{From--Wikipedia}

2012-11-06T04:23:00.000-08:00

New Analysis Method Discovers Millisecond Pulsar via its Pulsed Gamma Radiation

10/27/2012 10:26:30 AM

The unusual PSR J1311-3430 pulsar system with the first millisecond pulsar discovered solely by its lighthouse-like gamma-ray emissions (magenta). The record-breaking pulsar system is so compact that it would fit completely inside our Sun. This schematic representation shows the Sun, the companion’s orbit, and the companion at its maximum possible size true to scale; the pulsar has been greatly enlarged in contrast. SDO/AIA (sun), AEI
Using a new a new data analysis method, a team of scientists discovered a millisecond pulsar solely via its pulsed gamma radiation.
Pulsars are the compact remnants from explosions of massive stars. Some of them spin around their own axis hundreds of times per second, emitting beams of radiation into space. Until now, they could only be found through their pulsed radio emissions. Now, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Hanover assisted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have discovered a millisecond pulsar solely via its pulsed gamma radiation. A new data analysis method developed by the AEI was crucial for the success. The pulsar is accompanied by an unusual sub-stellar partner, which it is vaporizing, hence the name “black widow”.
Back in 1994, astronomers discovered a source of strong gamma-rays in the constellation of Centaurus. They suspected that a pulsar was the origin of the energetic radiation. Now, a team of scientists led by Holger Pletsch from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) has solved the mystery and identified the culprit: the millisecond gamma-ray pulsar PSR J1311-3430. The development of a new data analysis method by the AEI scientists enabled the discovery, since rapidly spinning pulsars are extremely difficult to find.
To unambiguously identify a gamma-ray pulsar, astronomers must know its properties to very high precision. This includes its position, spin frequency, and how the latter changes over time. If the pulsar is in a binary system, the analysis problem is even more complicated: at least three additional orbital parameters have to be determined as well.
In the case of PSR J1311-3430 astronomers had already observed the companion, which is heated by the radiation from the pulsar, with optical telescopes. They were thus able to partially constrain the orbital parameters and confine the position of the pulsar.

A map of the gamma-ray sky as seen by the Large Area Telescope on board NASA’s Fermi satellite over the course of four years. The color coding from blue via red to yellow displays the intensity of the detected gamma radiation from a sector of the sky measuring 200 by 100 Moon diameters in galactic coordinates. The gamma radiation from the plane of the Milky Way can be seen as a horizontal band. The newly discovered radio pulsar J1311-3430 can be clearly seen as a strong gamma-ray source. AEI

“We developed a particularly efficient method to search the data from NASA’s Fermi satellite for gamma-ray millisecond pulsars, including those in binary systems. Only this method enabled us to probe the wide parameter ranges,” says Holger Pletsch, lead author of the article published in Science. The new analysis method enables scientists to conduct a ‘blind search’ for gamma-ray millisecond pulsars for the first time – right up to very high spinning frequencies.
The scientists analyzed the Fermi data on the Atlas computer cluster at the AEI. “Our search used data collected by the gamma-ray satellite over a total of four years. Very soon after we started running the analysis, a clear signal showed up in the results. What we saw was very exciting,” says Pletsch.
PSR J1311-3430 spins 390 times per second, emitting gamma-ray photons into space in the form of a beam, similar to a lighthouse. In roughly one in a million revolutions of the pulsar, a single photon reaches the detector on board Fermi.
The gamma-ray signal also reveals much about the companion to the astronomers: the orbital motion of the binary system modulates the photon arrival times, yielding information about the partner star. “The companion object is small and unusually dense,” says AEI Director Bruce Allen. “It is at least eight times as massive as the planet Jupiter, but has at most 60 percent the planet’s radius.”
From this information, the researchers calculated the density of the companion, which turned out to be unusually high; it is around 30 times as dense as the Sun. Presumably, the small companion is the compact remnant of a star which has been orbiting the pulsar since earlier times. Over time, the pulsar accreted matter from the star, thereby accelerating its rotation. Pulsar and companion moved closer and closer together.
“At present, the remaining stellar core, which presumably consists mainly of helium, is heated by the radiation from the pulsar and literally evaporated,” says Holger Pletsch. Astronomers call this type of pulsar a ‘black widow’, in analogy with a species of spider which kills the smaller male after mating. In the distant future, PSR J1311-4330 might possibly completely vaporize its companion and from then on travel through space alone.
And that’s not all: “Our discovery is not only a first, it also sets several new records,” explains Bruce Allen. Currently, the odd couple is orbiting its common center of mass on an almost perfect circular trajectory in only 93 minutes. This is the shortest known orbital period of all pulsars in binary systems.

This computer graphic shows the structure of NASA’s Fermi satellite. The central, box-shaped instrumentation platform lies between the solar panels. The Large Area Telescope, whose data the astronomers evaluated, is hidden beneath the black cover visible on the top. NASA

At a distance of only 1.4 Earth-Moon separations, the binary system is the closest one known to date with a pulsar. The pulsar is speeding along its circular orbit with at least 13,000 kilometers per hour. Its light-weight companion is even faster, at up to 2.8 million kilometers per hour.
Holger Pletsch and his colleagues also had a close look at older observations with the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, but were unable to find the fast pulsar here. “Apparently, the cloud of vaporized material from the companion absorbs most of the radio wave emissions from the pulsar and possibly makes it invisible to radio telescopes,” says Lucas Guillemot from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, co-author of the publication. The scientists are already planning further observations at higher radio frequencies. They hope to use them to accurately determine the object’s distance from Earth, for example.
Systems like this provide astronomers with new insights into the evolution of very close binary systems, which are as yet still incompletely understood. PSR J1311-3430 could also shed new light on the generation of the gamma-ray photons and radio emissions in the strong magnetic field of pulsars. The pulsar may just be the tip of the iceberg: many other unidentified gamma-ray sources may harbor similarly unusual systems. Thirty years after the discovery of the first millisecond pulsar in the radio range, the novel analysis method of the Max Planck researchers at the AEI has opened a new door to the easier identification of these elusive celestial objects.

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Critique of technoscience

10/27/2012 10:15:41 AM

A primary critique of technoscience is that it targets a 'straw man' construction of science. That is, contemporary philosophy of science typically takes a pragmatic and instrumental view of objectivity. From this perspective, what is objective is what can be measured, transfers to other contexts, and can be used to make predictions. This is not different from the performative view of objectivity preferred by technoscience, leaving technoscience with a critique of a naive view of science that many, if not most, contemporary scientists would not agree with.
The concept of material networks is also ontologically unclear and somewhat archaic, depending upon a material/ideal dichotomy that has largely been abandoned, by both scientists and philosophers, during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Finally, the boundaries separating traditional scientific areas have also been increasingly blurred in scientific practice during the course of the twentieth century, with many knowledge fields now being fundamentally trans-disciplinary. Many traditional areas of science, such as biology, zoology and botany, have been superseded by more systemic conceptions, such as eco-sciences and approaches that integrate older conceptions of nature with conceptions in which relationships between human activity (production, economics, politics, etc.) and non-human biology are in focus. Today, multi-disciplinary approaches are often a condition for research funding.
These considerations question the current relevance of technoscience, seeing its critique as belonging perhaps to a 1970s view of science, its philosophical foundations having been superseded by post-structuralism, and its vision as merely descriptive of what most contemporary scientists and technologists take for granted.

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Conceptual levels of technoscience

10/26/2012 12:39:30 PM

We look at the concept of technoscience by considering three levels: a descriptive-analytic level, a deconstructivist level, and a visionary level.
On a descriptive-analytic level, technoscientific studies examine the decisive role of science and technology in how knowledge is being developed. What is the role played by large research labs in which experiments on organisms are undertaken, when it comes to a certain way of looking at the things surrounding us? To what extent do such investigations, experiments and insights shape the view on ‘nature’, and on ‘our’ bodies? How do these insights link to the concept of living organisms as biofacts? To what extent do such insights inform technological innovation? Can the laboratory be understood as a metaphor for social structures in their entirety?
On a deconstructive level, theoretical work is being undertaken on technoscience to address scientific practices critically, e.g. by Bruno Latour (Sociology), by Donna Haraway (History of science), and by Karen Barad (Theoretical physics). It is pointed out that scientific descriptions may be only allegedly objective; that descriptions are of a performative character, and that there are ways to de-mystify them. Likewise, new forms of representing those involved in research are being sought.
On a visionary level, the concept of technoscience comprises a number of social, literary, artistic and material technologies from western cultures in the third millennium. This is undertaken in order to focus on the interplay of hitherto separated areas and to question traditional boundary-drawing: this concerns the boundaries drawn between scientific disciplines as well as those commonly upheld for instance between research, technology, the arts and politics. One aim is to broaden the term ‘technology’ (which by the Greek etymology of ‘techné’ connotes all of the following: arts, handicraft, and skill) so as to negotiate possibilities of participation in the production of knowledge and to reflect on strategic alliances. Technoscience can be juxtaposed with a number of other innovative interdisciplinary areas of scholarship which have surfaced in these recent years such as technoetic, technoethics and technocriticism.

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Science and technology

10/25/2012 12:40:18 PM

Science and technology is a term of art used to encompass the relationship between science and technology. It frequently appears within titles of academic disciplines (science and technology studies) and government offices.
Technoscience or technological science is a concept widely used in the interdisciplinary community of science and technology studies to designate the technological and social context of science. The notion indicates a common recognition that scientific knowledge is not only socially coded and historically situated but sustained and made durable by material (non-human) networks.
"Technoscience" is a term coined by Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois in the late 1970s.v

2012-10-27T23:46:00.000-07:00

What exactly is cloning?

Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. This means that every single bit of DNA is the same between the two!

You might not believe it, but there are human clones among us right now. They weren't made in a lab, though: they're identical twins, created naturally. Below, we'll see how natural identical twins relate to modern cloning technologies.

How is cloning done?

You may have first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997. Cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.
How does one go about making an exact genetic copy of an organism? There are a couple of ways to do this: artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. How do these processes differ?

1. Artificial Embryo Twinning

Artificial embryo twinning is the relatively low-tech version of cloning. As the name suggests, this technology mimics the natural process of creating identical twins.

Open large version

In nature, twins occur just after fertilization of an egg cell by a sperm cell. In rare cases, when the resulting fertilized egg, called a zygote, tries to divide into a two-celled embryo, the two cells separate. Each cell continues dividing on its own, ultimately developing into a separate individual within the mother. Since the two cells came from the same zygote, the resulting individuals are genetically identical.
Artificial embryo twinning uses the same approach, but it occurs in a Petri dish instead of in the mother's body. This is accomplished by manually separating a very early embryo into individual cells, and then allowing each cell to divide and develop on its own. The resulting embryos are placed into a surrogate mother, where they are carried to term and delivered. Again, since all the embryos came from the same zygote, they are genetically identical.

2. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

Somatic cell nuclear transfer, (SCNT) uses a different approach than artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact clone, or genetic copy, of an individual. This was the method used to create Dolly the Sheep.
What does SCNT mean? Let's take it apart:
Somatic cell: A somatic cell is any cell in the body other than the two types of reproductive cells, sperm and egg. Sperm and egg are also called germ cells. In mammals, every somatic cell has two complete sets of chromosomes, whereas the germ cells only have one complete set.
Nuclear: The nucleus is like the cell's brain. It's an enclosed compartment that contains all the information that cells need to form an organism. This information comes in the form of DNA. It's the differences in our DNA that make each of us unique.
Transfer: Moving an object from one place to another.
To make Dolly, researchers isolated a somatic cell from an adult female sheep. Next, they transferred the nucleus from that cell to an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. After a couple of chemical tweaks, the egg cell, with its new nucleus, was behaving just like a freshly fertilized zygote. It developed into an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to term.
The lamb, Dolly, was an exact genetic replica of the adult female sheep that donated the somatic cell nucleus to the egg. She was the first-ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.

How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?

Open large version

The fertilization of an egg by a sperm and the SCNT cloning method both result in the same thing: a dividing ball of cells, called an embryo. So what exactly is the difference between these methods?
An embryo is composed of cells that contain two complete sets of chromosomes. The difference between fertilization and SCNT lies in where those two sets originated.
In fertilization, the sperm and egg both contain one set of chromosomes. When the sperm and egg join, the resulting zygote ends up with two sets - one from the father (sperm) and one from the mother (egg).
In SCNT, the egg cell's single set of chromosomes is removed. It is replaced by the nucleus from a somatic cell, which already contains two complete sets of chromosomes. Therefore, in the resulting embryo, both sets of chromosomes come from the somatic cell.
Supported by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) [No. 1 R25 RR16291-01] from the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services. The contents provided here are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NCRR or NIH.

What exactly is cloning?

Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. This means that every single bit of DNA is the same between the two!

How is cloning done?

1. Artificial Embryo Twinning

Artificial embryo twinning is the relatively low-tech version of cloning. As the name suggests, this technology mimics the natural process of creating identical twins.

Open large version

2. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?

Open large version

2012-10-26T00:14:00.000-07:00

FROM----Forbes

BM Now Has The World's Fastest Supercomputer

The IBM Sequoia system. (Credit: IBM)

Last year, Fujitsu’s K Computer took the crown as the world’s fastest supercomputer by demonstrating it could perform at 8.162 petaflop/s – which is 8.162 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. That was nearly four times faster than the Chinese Tianhe-1A, which took the number two slot. In November, Fujitsu reported that the K computer had become the first supercomputer to break the 10 petaflop/s barrier.
But it’s already only second place.
Today, the International Supercomputing Conference will announce that IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer is the fastest supercomputer in the world. It’s LINPACK benchmark rating is 16.32 petaflop/s. That’s 55% faster than the Fujitsu K computer, which benchmarked at 10.51 petaflop/s. Taking the number 3 spot is another IBM computer, the Mira supercomputer, an IBM BlueGene/Q system at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which benchmarked at 8.15 petaflop/s.
In fact, IBM supercomputers comprise 4 out of the top 10 fastest supercomputers on the current list, and 213 out of the top 500 supercomputers. You can read the whole list here.
In addition to being 55% faster than the K Computer, the IBM Sequoia also has the distinction of being 150% more energy efficient. Which is impressive when you consider that has 1,572,864 CPU cores. (By way of comparison, I’m writing this article on a computer with 4 cores.)
Last year, I made the mistake of predicting that the K Computer would be on top for a long while. This year, I shall make no such predictions. The increase in computing speeds in supercomputers is incredible. Last year’s second fastest supercomputer nearly doubled its performance and still fell to the number five slot on the list.

2012-10-21T22:31:00.001-07:00

The reason why rocket thrusters work in space is because rocket thrusters don’t need the atmosphere.
A jet engine needs the atmosphere to operate because the atmosphere provides the oxygen that the jet’s fuel needs to burn. See How Gas Turbine Engines Work for details.
On the other hand, a rocket carries both the fuel and the oxygen that the fuel needs to burn. If it is a liquid fuel rocket, the oxygen is stored in the liquid oxygen tank. If it is a solid fuel rocket, an oxidizer chemical is mixed with the fuel chemical.

The rocket engine isn’t “pushing” against anything. A rocket is a reaction engine. All the chemicals that burn in the engine have weight, even after they turn into fiery exhaust. “Burning” fuel does not eliminate its weight – it simply turns it from a solid or a liquid into a hot gas. As the hot gas exits the engine, the engine responds in a “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” way. So the hot, fiery, high-speed, heavy exhaust shoots out of the engine in one direction, and the “equal and opposite reaction” occurs in the rocket, which goes in the other direction. See How Rocket Engines Work for details.

2012-10-20T05:57:00.001-07:00

The Miraculous NASA Breakthrough That Could Save Millions of Lives (UPDATED)

There are no hospitals in space. The closest E.R. is back on Earth, and astronauts can't exactly jump in a cab to get there. So what happens if the sun burps out a massive blast of radiation while an astronaut is space-amblin' by?

The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to "diagnose" and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there's something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it'll work on Earth, too.
Out of all the amazing things we saw during our NASA visits, nothing blew our minds as much as this tiny little bundle of carbon. The Space Biosciences Division at NASA Ames creates medical technology for astronauts. They essentially provide healthcare for outer space. Dr. David Loftus is the man who invented the NASA Biocapsule and has been awarded a patent for it.
Picture this: An astronaut is going to Mars. The round-trip journey will take between two and three years. During that time, the astronaut will not have access to a doctor, and there's a lot that can go wrong with the human body in space. So, prior to launch, the astronaut is implanted with a number of NASA Biocapsules. A very small incision is made in the astronaut's skin for each Biocapsule (probably in the thigh), which is implanted subcutaneously. It's outpatient surgery that requires only local anesthetic and a stitch or two to close the wound. But after it's complete, the astronaut's body is equipped to deal with a whole host of problems on its own.
One of the primary threats in space is exposure to high levels of radiation. When astronauts travel beyond Low Earth Orbit (i.e., to the Moon or Mars), they are at risk of acute radiation exposure from "solar particle events," sudden releases of intense radiation from the sun, which can damage bone marrow and wipe out someone's immune system. That's where the NASA Biocapsule kicks in: It could be filled with cells that sense the increased levels of radiation and automatically disperse medicine to help the body compensate.
This isn't science fiction. We already use a hormone called G-CSF (Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor) to treat cancer patients who are receiving radiation treatment. So it was a very small jump to put these cells in a capsule. Without G-CSF, an astronaut's immune system might not recover; he or she could die of a massive infection.
The Biocapsules aren't one-shot deals. Each capsule could be capable of delivering many metred doses over a period of years. There is no "shelf-life" to the Biocapsules. They are extremely resilient, and there is currently no known enzyme that can break down their nanostructures. And because the nanostructures are inert, they are extremely well-tolerated by the body. The capsules' porous natures allow medication to pass through their walls, but the nanostructures are strong enough to keep the cells in one place. Once all of the cells are expended, the Biocapsule stays in the body, stable and unnoticed, until it is eventually removed by a doctor back on Earth.
While the treatment of radiation-effects in space is NASA's no. 1 application for the Biocapsule, different capsules will be created to combat different threats. Heat, exhaustion, and sleep-deprivation are serious risks on an EVA (a "spacewalk"), and astronauts are usually on a very tight schedule. Different capsules can be created that contain unique triggers and treatments for different stress-factors. Naturally, DARPA has expressed a huge interest in the Biocapsules for potential military applications. But there are far loftier things planned for us Earthlings.
On our home planet, the NASA Biocapsule's primary target is diabetes—specifically, patients who need insulin. Says Dr. Loftus:

The capsule would contain pancreatic islet cells (from animals) or would contain engineered cells designed to behave like pancreatic islet cells, with both glucose-sensing and insulin secretion function. Patients with low-insulin requirement might benefit from implantation of a single capsule (containing perhaps a million to 10 million cells); patients with higher insulin requirement might require implantation of more than one capsule.

In other words, diabetes patients might never need to give themselves another shot. They wouldn't have to worry about remembering to bring medicine everywhere, and they might even be free of having to constantly monitor their blood-sugar levels. Plus, many diabetes patients lapse into comas or die during sleep because that's eight hours every day when they can't monitor their levels. The NASA Biocapsules would work automatically, regardless of whether you're awake or not. As of 2010 there were an estimated 285 million people living with diabetes, so saying that this invention could potentially save millions of lives is not an exaggeration.
Secondary "terrestrial" applications include cancer treatment (especially brain cancer). A Biocapsule implanted directly into a tumor bed could deliver very high doses of chemotherapy right to the area where it is needed—and it would greatly reduce side effects by minimizing the amount of medication that gets to other sites in the body. There are also important applications in gene therapy.

Some children are born missing a gene, or are born with a defective gene. As a result, they can't make a needed protein. Hemophilia is a classic example. These patients are missing an important blood coagulation protein. The biocapsule could be used to implant cells that are engineered to release the missing protein. Successful therapy would mean that the patients are spared the need to receive periodic injections. Patients would be safely protected by the protein released from the capsule, and they would be able to lead more normal lives.

During our visit, we asked Dr. Loftus if there could be applications for severe allergy sufferers. Many people have potentially deadly allergies (to bees, to nuts, etc.) that could send them into anaphylactic shock, and they have to carry a shot of epinephrine (an "EpiPen") in case of exposure. He said that was very much a possibility, and implementing that technology into the biocapsule would be relatively very simple. He even credited us with coming up with the idea, so in the future when you get stung by a bee and don't die, you're welcome, from Gizmodo.
Given all of these applications (and there are many more), it's not a stretch to say that the NASA Biocapsule could change the face of medicine forever. They are inexpensive and (as you can see in the video) extremely easy to create. The vacuum sucks carbon nanotubes into the mold, you slide the capsule off the mold, you fill it with cells, and then you cap it off either using more nanotubes or a protein glue. Easy as pie. They are scheduled to begin animal trials this year and next, and human trials would begin shortly after that. If all goes well we would likely see these implanted in International Space Station astronauts sometime this decade, and while it's always a wild guess, Dr. Loftus thinks we could realistically see wildspread usage on Earth within 10 to 15 years.
The NASA Biocapsule I made now sits proudly on a shelf above my desk. It is almost certainly the coolest physical thing I have ever made. An artifact from the future. Every time I look at it I feel like I'm looking through a window into another time. Twenty years from now these capsules may be commonplace. We may all have them under our skin, keeping us safe on Earth—or maybe on Mars.
UPDATE: I reached out to Dr. Loftus with some of the questions I saw coming up in the comments (yes, we do read them). Here are a couple extra details from the man himself.
People asked how the cells get released from the capsule:
"The cells don't get released from the capsule. The cells inside the capsule secrete therapeutic molecules (proteins, peptides), and these agents exit the capsule by diffusion across the capsule wall."
People asked what fuels the cells, and how they survive within the capsule:
"The energy needed to produce the therapeutic molecules come from the cells' own metabolism. The cells have access to nutrients that enter the capsule by diffusion (across the pores of the capsule wall), and these nutrients (including dissolved oxygen) support the metabolism of the cells. The lifetime of the cells could be months to years."
I've reached out to him with a few more questions, and will update if I get more information.
Huge thanks to Dr. Loftus for being so generous with his time. On tomorrow's Space Camp, we'll take you inside "The Center of the Universe."

Space Camp is all about the under-explored side of NASA. From robotics to medicine to deep-space telescopes to art. For these couple of weeks we'll be coming at you direct from NASA JPL and NASA Ames, shedding a light on this amazing world. You can follow the whole series here.
Video shot by Bill Bowles, edited by Woody Jang.
Special thanks to Mark Rober, Jessica Culler, Dan Goods, Val Bunnell, and everybody at NASA JPL and NASA Ames for making this happen. The list of thank yous would take up pages, but for giving us access, and for being so generous with their time, we are extremely grateful to everyone there.
Space Camp® is a registered trademark/service of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. This article and subsequent postings have not been written or endorsed by the U.S. Space & Rocket Center or Space Camp®. To visit the official space camp website, click here.
FROM----GIZMODO.com

2012-10-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say.
This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic.
While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea ice hit a record 7.51 million square miles in September. That happened just days after reports of the biggest loss of Arctic sea ice on record.
Climate change skeptics have seized on the Antarctic ice to argue that the globe isn't warming and that scientists are ignoring the southern continent because it's not convenient. But scientists say the skeptics are misinterpreting what's happening and why.
Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarctic this time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.
"A warming world can have complex and sometimes surprising consequences," researcher Ted Maksym said this week from an Australian research vessel surrounded by Antarctic sea ice. He is with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Many experts agree. Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado adds: "It sounds counterintuitive, but the Antarctic is part of the warming as well."
And on a third continent, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey says that yes, what's happening in Antarctica bears the fingerprints of man-made climate change.
"Scientifically the change is nowhere near as substantial as what we see in the Arctic," says NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an ice expert. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention to it and shouldn't be talking about it."
Sea ice is always melting near one pole while growing around the other. But the overall trend year to year is dramatically less ice in the Arctic and slightly more in the Antarctic.
It's most noticeable in September, when northern ice is at its lowest and southern ice at its highest. For over 30 years, the Arctic in September has been losing an average of 5.7 square miles of sea ice for every square mile gained in Antarctica.
Loss of sea ice in the Arctic can affect people in the Northern Hemisphere, causing such things as a higher risk of extreme weather in the U.S. through changes to the jet stream, scientists say. Antarctica's weather peculiarities, on the other hand, don't have much effect on civilization.
At well past midnight in Antarctica, where it's about 3 degrees, Maksym describes in a rare ship-to-shore telephone call from the R.V. Aurora Australis what this extra ice means in terms of climate change. And what it's like to be out studying it for two months, with the nearest city 1,500 miles away.
"It's only you and the penguins," he says. "It's really a strikingly beautiful and stark landscape. Sometimes it's even an eerie kind of landscape."
While the Arctic is open ocean encircled by land, the Antarctic — about 1.5 times the size of the U.S. — is land circled by ocean, leaving more room for sea ice to spread. That geography makes a dramatic difference in the two polar climates.
The Arctic ice responds more directly to warmth. In the Antarctic, the main driver is wind, Maksym and other scientists say. Changes in the strength and motion of winds are now pushing the ice farther north, extending its reach.

Those changes in wind are tied in a complicated way to climate change from greenhouse gases, Maksym and Scambos say. Climate change has created essentially a wall of wind that keeps cool weather bottled up in Antarctica, NASA's Abdalati says.
And the wind works in combination with the ozone hole, the huge gap in Earth's protective ozone layer that usually appears over the South Pole. It's bigger than North America.
It's caused by man-made pollutants chlorine and bromine, which are different from the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming. The hole makes Antarctica even cooler this time of year because the ozone layer usually absorbs solar radiation, working like a blanket to keep the Earth warm.
And that cooling effect makes the winds near the ground stronger and steadier, pushing the ice outward, Scambos says.
University of Colorado researcher Katherine Leonard, who is on board the ship with Maksym, says in an email that the Antarctic sea ice is also getting snowier because climate change has allowed the air to carry more moisture.
Winter sea ice has grown by about 1 percent a decade in Antarctica. If that sounds small, it's because it's an average. Because the continent is so large, it's a little like lumping together the temperatures of the Maine and California coasts, Vaughan says.
Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center, says computer models have long predicted that Antarctica would not respond as quickly to global warming as other places. Since 1960, the Arctic has warmed the most of the world's regions, and Antarctica has warmed the least, according to NASA data.
Scientists on the cruise with Maksym are spending eight to 12 hours a day on the ice bundled up against the fierce wind with boots that look like Bugs Bunny's feet. It's dangerous work. Cracks in sea ice can form at any time. Just the other day a sudden fissure stranded a team of scientists until an inflatable bridge rescued them.
"It's a treacherous landscape," Vaughan says.
© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. From--newsmax.com

From----Above Written

2012-10-12T05:50:00.001-07:00

In "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a remake of the 1951 science-fiction classic, an alien named Klaatu (played by Keanu Reeves, right) visits Earth to save us humans from ourselves. The story is a work of science fiction, with the emphasis on fiction, says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and a technical adviser on the film. For example, to be able to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and come save us from global warming, an alien that could travel at light speed would have to reside no more than about 50 light-years away. "I doubt that there are any aliens that close," Shostak says. And even if there are, "they might not care about our problems."
Scientific accuracy aside, Shostak says the film could hook a new generation on space science, just as the original film helped direct his career, which is dedicated to the search for E.T. As kids stumble out of the theater, they might ask, do aliens exist?
Click the "Next" arrow above to explore the evidence, from the scientifically plausible to the incredible.
With so many stars, alien life is probable

NASA

Shostak notes that there is no direct proof for any life beyond Earth, but the universe is home to a lot of stars. And as research over the past decade has shown, perhaps at least 50 percent of those stars harbor planets. Shostak estimates there are 1 trillion planets in the Milky Way alone. "Surely some of them have undergone what Earth has undergone and developed life, and eventually what we call sentient life," he says. The argument, he notes, is simply one of probability. "If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, or for that matter in the universe, then we are truly a miracle," he says. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a cluster of young stars in the Milky Way.
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Water worlds abound in our solar system

NASA/jpl/space Science Institute

Water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. And liquid water, it turns out, is fairly common in our local solar system. For example, evidence is mounting that liquid water may flow underneath the surface of Mars. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, appears to have a liquid ocean. So too might the Jovian moons Callisto and Ganymede. Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, shown here, may be watery. Even Venus might have a bit of liquid water in its atmosphere. "There you already have seven other worlds that might have liquid water, just in our backyard. So that's kind of encouraging news," Shostak says.
Life evolved 'quickly' on Earth

Abigail Allwood

Scientists estimate that planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The earliest evidence for life comes from 3.4 billion-year-old mats of bacteria called stromatolites in Australia. Since even bacteria are biologically complex, scientists think they arose from life forms that got a foothold on Earth even earlier. "That suggests it wasn't terribly improbable, the evolution of life, because it happened very quickly," Shostak says. The caveat, of course, is that Earth could have won the evolutionary equivalent of the lottery, and no place else is quite so lucky.
Life thrives in extreme environments

G. Wanger / JCVI / G. Southam /

Almost everywhere scientists go on Earth, they find life: the cold, dark depths of the oceans; snuggled up to piping-hot hydrothermal vents; buried under the Antarctic ice; and in South America's parched Atacama Desert. "Life can adapt to really tough conditions and, of course, most of the universe is going to be filled with habitats that are tough," Shostak says. For example, Mars is a harsh environment, but some of the microbes found on Earth, including the one shown here found deep in a mine, could survive beneath the surface of the Red Planet, he notes. These findings of so-called extremophiles have allowed scientists to scale back their list of requirements for extraterrestrial life. "We just say it has to have some liquid water, and maybe that's it," Shostak says.
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E.T. might be calling from afar

Courtesy of Jerry Ehman / Bigear

Shostak and his colleagues at the SETI Institute frequently harness some of the world's largest radio telescopes to home in on distant stars for a telltale signal of alien communications. Although their searches have raised a few alarms, the signals have been dismissed as human-caused interference, such as noise from a passing satellite. Contact remains elusive. Undaunted, the scientists keep searching. Meanwhile, a signal detected on Aug. 15, 1977, during a search with Ohio State University's Big Ear Observatory, continues to pique interest because it has never been explained. "It was impressive enough to encourage the astronomer who found it to write 'Wow!' on the printout," says Shostak. Follow-up experiments to detect it again, however, have failed. "You can say it was E.T. and then he went off the air. You may never know," Shostak says. "But it is not science to say it was E.T."
Some see evidence that 'aliens' have visited

Justin Norton / AP

Somewhere around half the people in the U.S. believe that aliens have already visited us. To back their claims, witnesses have presented snapshots of flying saucers and debris from crash landings. None of the evidence, however, convinces Shostak. Nor does he buy into theories that the world's governments are coordinated and efficient enough to collectively keep what would be the world's biggest secret. "That's hard for me to believe," he says. Such doubt does little to stop the tide of tourists coming to places such as Roswell, N.M., the site of a purported UFO crash more than 60 years ago. This fake alien at a museum is a commonly photographed attraction.
from---msn...com

Nobel prize For BreakThroughs In Quantum Physics

2012-10-10T05:43:00.000-07:00

(Oct. 9, 2012) — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2012 to Serge Haroche Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and David J. Wineland National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems."

Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland have independently invented and developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.
The Nobel Laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them. For single particles of light or matter the laws of classical physics cease to apply and quantum physics takes over. But single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding environment and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside world. Thus many seemingly bizarre phenomena predicted by quantum physics could not be directly observed, and researchers could only carry out thought experiments that might in principle manifest these bizarre phenomena.
Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland together with their research groups have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation. The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles.
Their methods have many things in common. David Wineland traps electrically charged atoms, or ions, controlling and measuring them with light, or photons.
Serge Haroche takes the opposite approach: he controls and measures trapped photons, or particles of light, by sending atoms through a trap.
Both Laureates work in the field of quantum optics studying the fundamental interaction between light and matter, a field which has seen considerable progress since the mid-1980s. Their ground-breaking methods have enabled this field of research to take the very first steps towards building a new type of super fast computer based on quantum physics. Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century. The research has also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks.

fROM--sCIENCEDAILY.COM

2012-10-04T05:31:00.002-07:00

graphene's Future Applications

Graphene As The Silicon Chip Alternative

Graphene. If you’ve never heard about it, don’t worry, a lot of people haven’t, because it’s really only been “discovered” relatively recently, and most of the truly interesting news about it has been in the last year. The amazing thing is that we’ve actually been using it for centuries, in the form of the common pencil. Graphene is a form of carbon, much like carbon nanotubes and other fullerenes, with one major difference. While fullerenes are 3D structures of carbon atoms, graphene is a flat sheet. It’s a 2D lattice of carbon with bonds as strong as diamond. It’s this sheetlike nature that makes it so useful in a pencil. As you write, individual planes of graphite are sheared off the end and deposited on the paper. Those individual planes are pure graphene.
By now, most of you are familiar with carbon nanotubes, a.k.a. CNTs, and their potential for computers. Graphene has equally amazing properties, including some that might make it far more readily usable than CNTs. First, like CNTs, graphene is capable of conducting electricity with much less resistance than copper. That alone makes it useful, but graphene has even more interesting properties. As New Scientist reports bending graphene creates strains between atoms that can create isolated pathways which then act as nanoribbons — wires — within the still connected sheet. In other words, the morphology of graphene affects its electrical properties: change the flat sheet by bending parts of it, and you change how electricity flows through it.
But that isn’t all. The pattern of carbon bonds has effects as well. Graphene is a hexagonal grid of carbon, much like a roll of chicken wire. Remove one random atom from the pattern every so often, and graphene can exhibit magnetic behavior without needing the presence of magnetic metals. Adding hydrogen into the mix creates graphene’s non-conductive cousin, graphane. Taking precisely defined patterns of atoms out of the sheet can create well-defined circuits, creating wires that are almost superconducting.
All of these properties make graphene a very important material for the future of electronics. It has already been used to create field effect transistors, the primary component of a computer processor. When you combine this with the other features above, you have a single material that could be used for the majority of the components in every electronic device we currently have… with one major difference: speed. Current silicon based chips have a limited speed at which they can run at room temperature without overheating and malfunctioning. Go much over 3GHz without some major cooling and chips melt down. But replace those chips with graphene equivalents — without having made any other changes to the circuits -—and you can raise that limit much higher. Potentially 100 to 1000 times higher.
Let’s think about that for a moment. That’s 300GHz to 3000GHz or 3Terahertz.
That’s a jump of two or three orders of magnitude up the exponential curve, my friends, especially when you combine it with the advances in multi-core technology and parallel computing. We’re talking about that smartphone in your pocket having a thousand times the computing power of your desktop PC, but using no more power than it does right now. The resistance of graphene at room temperature is so much lower than copper and silicon that even though it’s running at 1000 times the speed, it’s not using any more current, or wasting any more energy as heat than an identical silicon device, and that’s without considering any other possible advances in the field of electronics design.

We’re talking about that smartphone in your pocket having a thousand times the computing power of your desktop PC, but using no more power.

That big a leap in processing speed will simplify a lot of extremely complex tasks that require extensive amounts of data. From SETI searches for extraterrestrial intelligence to the search for all the ways a protein can fold, scientists use millions of processors in parallel to speed up research. A thousand-fold increase in computer speed could cut months to years off the time needed for their projects. The same goes for DNA sequencing, data mining, and a host of other areas.
And science will not be the sole benefactor. Most smartphones these days have the ability to use their cameras to create virtual overlays on the images that they see, a technique called Augmented Reality. AR has advanced to the point that it’s possible to create virtual characters in photos on your phone using nothing more than a 2D patterned target on the ground, or to create interactive “virtual assistants” in projected video that are capable of interacting with real world objects. Ultrafast computers will be essential for ushering in the age of Virtual Reality.
A massive increase in computer speeds is likely to benefit other complex computing tasks as well, such as real-time speech language translation. Right now, it is difficult to make these programs run quickly enough to be useful. A thousand-fold increase in computer speed could make brute force approaches a practical solution, enabling computers to crunch through entire dictionaries in milliseconds. It could make possible the elusive conversational interface that so many people believe will be the next step in operating systems. That speed will also be useful in the next generation of robotics, quite possibly bringing us a step closer to the kind of robots seen in movies like I, Robot or Star Wars. Ultrafast computers would enable a major reduction in the size of the computers needed to run some of the most complex robots we currently have, bringing the day of Rosie the Robot maid that much closer.
Obviously, ultrafast computers are going to have a very far-reaching effect on the way we do things, as well as how we interact with each other and our world, so the real questions are how practical is it to make graphene chips, and how soon can they be made? The answer is probably going to surprise you. Graphene has already been proven to be usable in current chip manufacturing processes with only minimal retooling needed. In fact, IBM has already created working 30GHz test devices using graphene transistors. In other words, graphene could begin making its way into computers as early as 2012 to 2015, and almost certainly by 2020.
Graphene, that same single-atom-thick layer of carbon that is a part of every pencil mark, is going to make all of this possible. Not bad for the humble Number 2, huh?
From---http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/05/03/graphene-next/

2012-10-03T06:03:00.002-07:00

The Higgs Particle and Your Free Guide to the Higgs Boson

The ATLAS detector at CERN. The 27km long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) passes through the centre.

The search for the Higgs Particle (or Higgs Boson) was the main motivation for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the Swiss/French border, which is arguably the biggest (and most expensive) physics experiment in history.
The Higgs Particle (or Higgs Boson) is a suspected but as-yet undiscovered particle which could fill a significant gap in our knowledge of why the universe is the way it is, and why some particles, such as electrons and quarks, have “mass” .

From--http://quantumwavepublishing.com/landing-pages/higgs2/

Nano-Tech

2012-09-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Amazing Applications of Nanotechnology

Marvels From nanotechnology exist in both sides. It is wonderful as much as it is dangerous. Researches on the negative effect of the nano materials are taken into prime considerations before approving a technology. A few disadvantages are:

by ADMIN

The field of science which looks forward a boom every day is definitely, nanotechnology. It deals with particles that are very small in size( about 10^-9 m).The main idea upon which nanotechnology relies is that the original properties (either physical or chemical) of a substance gets changed when the size of the substance is reduced to nanoscale. Below given are a few interesting applications of nanotechnology…

• When water is simply allowed to flow through copper nanotubes, an emf is generated along the surface of the tubes( thereby generating current). The current produced is directly proportional to the speed of the water.

• Gold and silicon nanoparticles are red but their original colour in bulk state is yellow and grey respectively. These elements have their melting points 4 times while being in the nanoscale.

• Nanocrystals made of metals and semiconductors exhibit superior chemical, electric, optical, magnetic and mechanical properties.

• Photovoltaic cells (which generate current from solar energy), made up of nanoparticles absorb more energy than the thin film sheets of normal semiconductors.

• Within the polymer matrices of plastics, clay nanoparticles are embedded for additional strength (extra 100%) and reinforcements.

Smaller than a RBC

• Dendrimers are nano materials made with the structure of a bacterium (E.Coli). Its flagellum is used for quicker transportations through fluids and so dendrimers are used in the Smart Drug Delivery System in our body.

• Transistors made of semiconductors in nanoscale provide higher dielectric constant and electron mobility making them more efficient. Nanoelectronics is based upon such transistors and other devices.

• Recently, a programmable molecular computing made of enzymes and DNA molecules is been invented. It doesn’t use any of the semiconductor devices.

• High surface to volume ratio makes almost all nanoparticles highly reactive. And so, it is very doubtful that all reactions can be controlled to the required level.

• Certain nanoparticles in air can penetrate cells and tissues and can cause severe biochemical damage in functioning organs.

• Hydrocarbon nanoparticles (from pollution) can damage cardiovascular system.

• Nanoparticles of oxides and dioxides of metals cause DNA damage which may affect one’s descendants (a heredity disease).

On enjoying the benefits of this immensely powerful technology, we must not let loose about the precautions we must take or follow. This doesn’t mean research interest over nanoscience should reduce. Just that all factors are to be considered at an optimum level to gain most profits and least losses from it…

Must See Video-----

Source-internet

2012-09-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome To My 27th Post
I Want To DEDICATE THIS POST To make ll of U Know About The latest Tech -Science Innovations Around the World In Just One Site (Blog).....Rahul Bhandari..........RB................Stay Tuned.......................

Tech-Science

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New Analysis Method Discovers Millisecond Pulsar via its Pulsed Gamma Radiation

New Analysis Method Discovers Millisecond Pulsar via its Pulsed Gamma Radiation

Critique of technoscience

Conceptual levels of technoscience

What exactly is cloning?

How is cloning done?

1. Artificial Embryo Twinning

2. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?

What exactly is cloning?

How is cloning done?

1. Artificial Embryo Twinning

2. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer

How does SCNT differ from the natural way of making an embryo?

BM Now Has The World's Fastest Supercomputer

The Miraculous NASA Breakthrough That Could Save Millions of Lives (UPDATED)

Nobel prize For BreakThroughs In Quantum Physics

Graphene As The Silicon Chip Alternative

See Also

The Higgs Particle and Your Free Guide to the Higgs Boson

Nano-Tech

Amazing Applications of Nanotechnology

Smaller than a RBC

Must See Video-----