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Researchers have succeeded in combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography and have shown that perfectly secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics. Via Annie Infinite 
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The story begins sometime close to 1921, somewhere between the Sanaga River in Cameroon and the Congo River in the former Belgian Congo. It involves chimps and monkeys, hunters and butchers, “free women” and prostitutes, syringes and plasma-sellers, evil colonial lawmakers and decent colonial doctors with the best of intentions. And a virus that, against all odds, appears to have made it from one ape in the central African jungle to one Haitian bureaucrat leaving Zaire for home and then to a few dozen men in California gay bars before it was even noticed — about 60 years after its journey began.
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Cytoscape is an open source software platform for visualizing complex networks and integrating these with any type of attribute data. A lot of plugins are available for various kinds of problem domains, including bioinformatics, social network analysis, and semantic web.
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Two potent human antibodies that can stop more than 90 percent of known global HIV strains from infecting human cells in the laboratory have been discovered. These antibodies could be used to design improved HIV vaccines, or could be further developed to prevent or treat HIV infection. Moreover, the method used to find these antibodies could be applied to isolate therapeutic antibodies for other infectious diseases as well.
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For decades our options for interacting with the digital world have been limited to keyboards, mice, and joysticks. Now with a new generation of exciting new interfaces in the pipeline our interaction with the digital world will be forever changed. In this post we will look at some amazing demonstrations, mostly videos, that showcase new ways of interacting with the digital world.
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Puzzles have this paradoxical appeal where no matter how much they give the human mind fits, people can’t seem to put them down. Part of this is a testament to the degree in which we pride ourselves as relentless problem-solvers. But for some of life’s most perplexing problems, it’s becoming more apparent that we’re better off handing them off to computers. A recent demonstration of this can be seen in a video released last week in which a smartphone-powered robot solved the legendary Rubik’s cube in 5.352 second flat, beating the world record of 5.66 seconds set by Feliks Zemdegs (a human).
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A new codec (data coding system) called Enhanced Low Delay Advanced Audio Coding (AAC-ELD) developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS has solved a major problem with Skype and other videoconference calls: latency (annoying sound delay between participants).
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Australia’s Tasmanian devil is more beloved now as it faces extinction from an infectious cancer called Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). The devils spread it through fighting and mating. The sore tumors grow so large the animal can no longer eat. As of 2006, it was estimated that the Tasmanian Devil could be extinct between 10 and 20 years, with only aproximately 20,000 to 50,000 left. Since there is no cure, it’s a race to keep healthy ones in captivity as the only means to keep DFTD from spreading. It’s still unnerving because no one wants to see a species become potentially extinct in captivity like the thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) did in 1936.
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For years, scientists believed the vast phenotypic differences between humans and chimpanzees would be easily explained by their genes -- the two species must have significantly different genetic makeups. However, when their genomes were later sequenced, researchers were surprised to learn that the DNA sequences of human and chimpanzee genes are nearly identical. The difference lies in the insertion and deletion of large pieces of DNA near genes which are highly variable between humans and chimpanzees and may account for major differences between the two species.
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Candiru (English and Portuguese) or cañero (Spanish), also known as toothpick or vampire fish, are a number of genera of parasitic freshwater catfish in the Trichomycteridae family. All are native to the Amazon River. Although some candiru species have been known to grow to a size of 40 centimetres (16 inches) in length, others are considerably smaller. These smaller species are known for an alleged tendency to invade and parasitize the human urethra by swimming up the urine stream. However, despite ethnological reports dating back to the late 19th century, the first documented case of the removal of a candiru from a human urethra did not occur until 1997.
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Dozens of butterfly species are endangered or threatened. A handful are shown in this photo gallery, but most don’t even have a picture on the internet. If they disappear, their beauty could be remembered as nothing more than a disembodied name.
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Prize purse of $10 million: A 30-day contest to launch January 2013 to see which laboratory can accurately and economically sequence 100 human genomes has been tweaked to focus on the genetics of people over the age of 100. While quality, speed and accuracy of the testing is improving, the companies involved, including LIFE, Illumina and Complete Genomics, all have their own standards. http://tinyurl.com/7nlvqs2
Videos about Centenarians: http://tinyurl.com/d7ehok7
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DNA barcoding is a technique for characterizing species of organisms using a short DNA sequence from a standard and agreed-upon position in the genome. DNA barcode sequences are very short relative to the entire genome and they can be obtained reasonably quickly and cheaply. The cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 mitochondrial region (COI) is emerging as the standard barcode region for higher animals. It is 648 nucleotide base pairs long in most groups, a very short sequence relative to 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, for example.
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The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is a strictly subterranean, extraordinarily long-lived eusocial mammal. Although it is the size of a mouse, its maximum lifespan exceeds 30 years, making this animal the longest-living rodent. Naked mole rats show negligible senescence, no age-related increase in mortality, and high fecundity until death. In addition to delayed ageing, they are resistant to both spontaneous cancer and experimentally induced tumorigenesis.
Naked mole rats pose a challenge to the theories that link ageing, cancer and redox homeostasis. Although characterized by significant oxidative stress, the naked mole rat proteome does not show age-related susceptibility to oxidative damage or increased ubiquitination. Naked mole rats naturally reside in large colonies with a single breeding female, the ‘queen’, who suppresses the sexual maturity of her subordinates. They also live in full darkness, at low oxygen and high carbon dioxide concentrations, and are unable to sustain thermogenesis nor feel certain types of pain. Full genome sequencing and analysis of the naked mole rat genome reveals unique genome features and molecular adaptations consistent with cancer resistance, poikilothermy, hairlessness and insensitivity to low oxygen, and altered visual function, circadian rythms and taste sensing.
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Researchers recently compared 29 genomes of different mammals in an effort to understand our own genomic mysteries. By looking across species, they have cast new light on the molecular components of all life and have taken an important step toward decrypting the information locked in our own DNA.
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When a female fruit fly makes an egg, she packs it full of everything a developing embryo needs for the earliest stages of its life: a yolk to feed it, and proteins and RNAs to drive its vital cellular processes. Fueled by these maternally deposited molecules, development begins with a series of rapid cell divisions during which there is little, if any, activation of the embryo’s own genome. However, within a few hours, after around 14 cell divisions, the fertilized egg breaks free of its mother’s influence, at a period known as the maternal-to-zygotic transition (MZT). In Drosophila, the MZT is preceded by the transcription of a small number of genes that initiate sex determination, patterning, and other early developmental processes; and the zinc-finger protein Zelda (ZLD) plays a central role in their transcriptional activation.
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"Most mathematicians did not just take up math as a "job"...(most) get more pleasure out of mathematics than almost any other activity. And they often discovered this pleasure when they were young". While most people would agree that "math people" are not like "non-math people", it's not always easy for non-mathematical minds to recognize (and appropriately nurture) mathematical ones.
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Today's groundbreaking entry into the Uncanny Valley is a pair of mechanical, robot legs that are propelled entirely by their own weight: they can walk with a human-like gait without motors or external control.
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3D printing will be commonplace sooner than most think, says one expert. And kids like these eighth graders are already leading the charge. Via Sakis Koukouvis
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.Water is one of the planet's weirdest liquids, and many of its most bizarre features make it life-giving. Unlike many liquids, it takes a lot of heat to warm water up even a little, a quality that allows mammals to regulate their body temperature. Researchers recently found that the hydrogen-oxygen bonds are slightly longer than deuterium-oxygen ones, which is what you would expect if quantum uncertainty was affecting water's structure (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.107.145501).
We are used to the idea that the cosmos's physical constants are fine-tuned for life. Now it seems water's quantum forces can be added to this "just right" list.
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A superconducting object in a magnetic field levitates because it is trapped in place.
When a single crystal sapphire wafer coated with a ~1µm thick yttrium barium copper oxide is cooled below -185ºC the ceramic layer becomes a superconductor. Due to the Meissner effect, the superconductor will attempt to expel all the magnetic field from inside. As the superconductor is extremely thin, the magnetic field penetrates in discrete quantities called flux tubes. Inside each magnetic flux tube superconductivity is locally destroyed. The superconductor will try to keep the magnetic tubes pinned in weak areas (e.g. grain boundaries). Any spatial movement of the superconductor will cause the flux tubes to move. The resistance to movement offsets the force of gravity and traps the superconductor in place.
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The hagfish looks like an easy meal. Its sinuous, eel-like body has no obvious defences, but any predator that moves in for a bite is in for a nasty surprise. The hagfish releases a quick-setting slime that clogs up the predator’s gills, causing it to gag, choke and flee. Scientists have known about this repulsive defence for decades, but Vincent Zintzen has finally filmed it in the wild. His videos also prove that hagfish, generally thought to be scavengers of the abyss, are also active hunters that can drag tiny fish from their burrows.
Hagfish are sometimes classed as fish although that’s in dispute, for they lack both backbones and jaws. Instead, their mouths contain a wide plate of cartilage, armed with two rows of horny teeth. It uses these to rasp away at carcasses that sink from above. Watch a dying whale settle on the ocean floor, and it will soon be covered in writhing hagfishes.
They are disgusting feeders. They burrow deep into corpses and eat their way out, and can even absorb nutrients through their skin. And if they’re threatened or provoked, they produce slime – lots of slime, oozing from the hundreds of pores that line their bodies. The slime consists of large mucus proteins called mucins, linked together by longer protein threads. When it mixes with seawater, it massively expands, becoming almost a thousand times more dilute than other animal mucus.
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Looking at tiny structures through a fancy microscope is part of nanotechnologists' recent accomplishments. However, it has so far been difficult to observe atomic structures inside individual organic molecules. However, a novel method has been developed recently, which enables researchers to take an "X-ray view" inside individual molecules. The method may facilitate the analysis of organic semiconductors and many biomolecules such as proteins.
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Medical textbooks are brought to life in 2012 by interactive graphs and figures, customized quizzes, beautiful multimedia, social media integration, and an innovative user interface.
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Wind energy continues to be an important part of renewable resources. However, other promising forms of renewable energy exist. Coastal states have a potential source of renewable energy in waves and tidal currents. Snohomish PUD is evaluating the use of tidal energy as a renewable energy source and detailed studies have been performed at seven locations in and around Puget Sound for tidal generators. These devices are similar to windmills but generate energy by using tidal currents to drive turbines located on the seabed.
Collection of videos on tidal energy: http://tinyurl.com/dxc2b7p
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