Again, SICA (Sorry, I Couldn’t Resist).
An MIT group has found a way to use carbon nanotubes to measure blood glucose levels in diabetics - this would preclude the need for the often lamented finger prick that is currently necessary in most treatment.
The nanotube based "tatoo" would last about six months before needing to be "refreshed".
What!? It’s a sugar molecule - it’s directly from the article!
- Original Article on MIT site -
More precisely, it’s an RNA trail, but let’s not split strands, shall we? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist).
The linked article discusses "real" nano-bots - actual functioning "machines" that exist at a molecular scale; in this case, approximately 4 nanometers wide - (about 1/2000 the diameter of a human red blood cell), and they actually use a DNA/RNA strand as their "track"!
This is nothing like the appearance of the nano-bots discussed in the article, but apparently the publishers thought it was a cool picture anyway.
This is what the nanobot actually looks like (left) - this is a scanning electron micrograph of the actual nanobot!
- Original article on DailyMail.co.uk -
I’ve run into this many times - I’m looking for something very specific but I keep getting results that have little to do with my topic because of it’s specificity.
Now there’s Scirus - new search engine that excels at finding very precise science / technical info!
I tried a search on the exact phrase "emergent patterns" with "colony" and "insect" and got 374 relevant hits!
If you’ve been looking for a precision search engine for highly specific searches, Scirus is like striking gold!
The searches work similar to, but not identical to, Google’s. This search says that I want documents that contain the exact phrase "emergent behavior" and also contain the words "colony" and "insects".
Emergent Behavior in biological systems is a current topic of interest to many areas of software development - basically, it models living colony animals (like ants or termites) to solve complex problems.
After my search returned, Scirus even provided me ways of refining my search (they don’t look like it, but all of those bulleted phrases are clickable).
A study done by The Archives of Internal Medicine has discovered something I find pretty incredible!
To summarize, a group of average television watchers was asked to do one thing - cut their TV time in half. This single change (no requirements as to what to do instead) changed their daily habits to the degree of burning as many calories as walking eight miles a week!
See the article for more detail.
Okay, so it’s not the greatest picture we’ve ever shown - what the heck could I show for this besides the pic on the article?
It took 162 years to finally be built.
This is the first (and second, they built two) complete production.
The engine weighs 5 tons and has 8,000 parts working together to provide an accurate results to complex and tedious mathematics.
While there isn’t much need for a giant, multi-million dollar, hand-cranked calculator today, if it had been built in Babbage’s time, it could have saved lives, ships, and their cargo.
Few believed in Babbage’s work during his life, but his genius has finally been proven.
Looking (appropriately) like something out of a SteamPunk setting, the Babbage Difference Engine is truly a miracle of Steam-Age technology (though it is actually hand-cranked)!
When his money for building the difference engine ran out, the machine was dismantled and sold for scrap. Fortunately, the original plans and designs remain and were used to build the final, working difference engine.
POTRTP: Picture Of The Random Time Period
Enjoy!
So where is the Butter Cream Frosting element?
< Other Image Sizes available >
< Here >
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition has come a long way since it was first attempted. What used to be possible (poorly) only on custom, very expensive equipment, can now be done (better) with a $50 software.
And now it can be done shockingly well at no cost on the web!
I put OnlineOCR.net through it’s paces, and I was pretty impressed!
If you have a news article you would like to convert to text, this may be your best option!
As you can see, I specifically chose an image that had a lot of traditional OCR problems - low resolution, non-white background, some italic, inline images, multi-column, etc.
Considering all of the problems mentioned above that make OCR difficult in this case, the accuracy I got was remarkable! The yellow areas are the mistakes that were made - all three have pretty obvious reasons for having "misread" the text!
The Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) site puts up striking, intriguing, or beautiful astronomy shots daily (and I’ve featured at least one of them before).
Today’s image really caught my attention because
A) there’s an ongoing feel of mystery behind Rapa Nui ("Easter Island"), and
B) A very good friend of mine (who reads 86Words) really digs the statues (though, in my opinion, they look nothing like him).
The visual definition of "Ominous"
- Original Image on APOD -
( Click the image after the jump for the full sized version )
- Current APOD Image -
( If you use this link today, it will take you to the same image, but the image at this link changes daily )
From APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day)
Enjoy!
An artists rendition of a view near the accretion disk of a rapidly rotating black hole
- Original can be found HERE on APOD -
(Note that your browser may shrink the DISPLAY to fit on screen, the actual image, if saved to your hard drive, will be full sized)
[Hey George, can Helen get me one of these?]
Apparently they’re not quite sure what caused the mutation, but this piglet was born with 2 snouts, 2 mouths, and 3 eyes.
I’ve found numerous references to the story on the web, but the only reliable news source that I could find that carried it is Ananova, an online news center in the U.K.
Now I have to talk to my wife about getting one - they’re so cute!
This not Photo-Shopped it’s for real (well, at least the new story claims it is).
