Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Back in 2006, you might have seen the story of the genetically altered pigs that glowed green under a fluorescent light. The pigs were transgenic, that is they were created by combining genetic material from two different organisms. In this case genes from a jellyfish were added to a normal pig embryo. The jellyfish, provided the genes that made the body parts of the pig glow green.

Now those same altered pigs have passed those genes on to their offspring. The scientists mated a genetically altered pig, with a normal pig. Of the 11 piglets that were the result, 2 inherited the genes for the green glow.

The scientists claim this is a big breakthrough and could lead to specially bred pigs for human organs or other medical uses.

Via PhysOrg: Fluorescent Chinese pig passes on trait to offspring

Io9, a new blog that I’ve been reading lately, posted a very interesting story about a new device that is being developed. The device is a synaesthesia machine.

“Synesthesia (also spelled synaesthesia), is a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.”
Wikipedia

Basically it means that one sense, such as taste or sight, can be stimulated by another sense, like hearing or smell. This new device artificially duplicates this type of sense, by hooking a camera and a cell phone vibrator to your fingers. Allowing them to feel things that are seen by the tiny cameras attached to your fingers. So you can feel things like the doorknobs across the room. This is really cool technology. And I think it would be really fun to try out. For more info, read the technical paper. Fingersight: Fingertip Visual Haptic Sensing and Control

Via Io9: Fully-Functioning Synaesthesia Machine

This is a post for those of you who read this site but never comment. I know you read this blog, because I see the hits, but I rarely get any comments or feedback. Comment! Tell me what you think. I really want to know. If you think a post is good, bad, cool, stupid, interesting, or funny, let me know. Comments and feedback would give me a much better idea of what people think of this blog. So if you don’t mind, please comment.

I’ll be on vacation next week. So posts may be a little less regular. In fact, I may not have much in the way of Internet access. But I’ll be back on the 9th.
So TTYL

Sorry I didn’t get any updates in yesterday. I was home sick all day. Not that that means I didn’t touch the computer. On the contrary. I spent all day playing Heroes Of Might and Magic 5. But needless to say, I didn’t read the news, check email, or update my blog yesterday. Sorry about that. Today I’m back on track.

I went and saw Breach last night. It was actually a pretty good movie. Breach is based on the true story of Robert Hanssen. Hanssen is an FBI agent that started spying for the Russians in 1985. He was caught in 2001 and is currently serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. His story is actually pretty interesting, and the movie was pretty good.
Check out his story on Wikipedia, and check out a CNN news release about it.

The mars rovers just recently got an update to their software that should allow them to keep from getting confused by large rocks that are in the way. Since the lag time between earth and mars is about 20 minutes, the rovers often have to act in a semi-independent fashion. The scientists will tell the rover to go towards a certain location, but if the rover has any issues in following that command, it will have to deal with them itself. Previously, if the rover found a large object in it’s path, it could get confused and require input from NASA before it could get around it. This was due to the limited planning abilities when it was choosing a route. Now it can plan and map out a path up to 50 meters ahead.

You can read about the problem and the update here.

I ran across this interesting site that sells Metal art sculptures. I’m really not sure how to describe them. Look at the picture I posted and you will see what I mean. The cool thing about these art pieces is that they are all designed using a computer and complex math. Pretty cool stuff. Check out his site for a lot more pieces. Also, the art is all for sale at pretty reasonable prices. If my house had been decorated in a different style, I would probably get a few of these for display. Sadly, most of these pieces won’t go with the decor in my house.

Interesting metallic sculptures.

Check out this article. It looks like a concert pianist passed off recordings from other pianists as her own recordings and no one found out for years. Itunes does a bunch of calculations on CDs when it plays them to try to find a match in its database. It does that so that it can display track information, artist info and graphics to you while it plays the CD. Itunes identified the CDs from this atrist as being recorded by other Pianists. Which made a music magazine editor suspicious. He went and had them checked out. It turns out that all of her CDs are other peoples CDs.

Check the article out here

As more and more media becomes digital, this kind of thing is probably going to get more common. Just a few months ago, there were some articles about using Google’s book search to find plagiarism in older well established books. So if you copied someone else’s work and think you got away with it because you did it years ago and no one found out, you might be getting a wake up call. I wonder if there is any kind of statute of limitations on things like violating copyright? Probably not.

Found this article about an experiment that some scientists did with data storage. Basically they stored data in the DNA of a particular form of bacteria and then read that data back out.
That isn’t really anything new. People have written data into DNA and read it back out before. There was even a prototype computer a few years back that used DNA.
What’s new about this experiment is that they stored the data in a living bacteria culture. Then they caused the bacteria to grow for 100 generations. Taking the youngest generation, they then extracted the data out of the DNA of that generation. So the data they introduced into the DNA of the original bacteria was inherited by its descendants and was able to be read back after 100 generations. That is a pretty significant accomplishment that could lead to living growing computers and storage systems.

You can check out the original article here.