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How to make a Physical Gmail Notifier
The hardware itself is the popular Arduino board, the tinkerer’s dream device. I’m actually using a Boarduino, but any variant should work (subject to a small but important detail, see below). This might be particularly interesting with a Bluetooth Arduino..
The Arduino talks with your computer over a serial connection, which runs over the normal USB cable you use to communicate with your Arduino.
What is Arduino?: Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.
Related: Awesome Cat Cam - Windmill for Electricity in Malawi - Lego UAV - Rubick’s Cube Solving Lego Mindstorms Robot
An interview with the Managing Director of Texas Instruments, India - How to mould great ‘intrapreneurs’
We also encourage small teams of engineers with an ‘intrapreneurial’ mindset to work on creative ideas and validate these with customers and our worldwide marketing teams. Some of these ideas could lead to potential breakthroughs for the future.
At TI, we also recognise that ‘collaborative innovation’ can have a powerful impact on our customers. This drives us to actively partner with several innovative companies, who develop applications on our platform. Over the last two decades, we have also built an extensive partner network of over 650 reputed Indian Universities - who are working closely with us on many innovative programs.
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I joined TI in 1986, after graduating from IIT, Kharagpur with a B.Tech in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering. While working for TI, I received my Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Kharagpur and also an Executive MBA degree from the University of Texas, Austin
Related: Marissa Mayer on Innovation at Google - Engineer’s Future Prospects - The Future is Engineering - Entrepreneurial Engineers
Webcast - In My Language - about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.
Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know
A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. “If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago,” says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, “I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong.”
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And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn’t give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it’s clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron’s team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper.
And now for another something completely different: Robin Williams Saves the Day at TED When Tech Fails
That’s when a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED
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The crowd by then had realized it was Williams. Encouraged by their reaction, he continued reporting to some unseen BBC anchorman from his seat: “Well, they said they found the wire, but it’s not plugged in.”
Williams was then invited to take the stage and the crowd roared. He spent the next ten minutes or so riffing on Stephen Hawking (who spoke at TED earlier in the day from Cambridge, England) and the end of the universe — which will take place “exactly in one hour,” he said, looking at his watch.
He joked again about the technical glitch, indicating that although the BBC wasn’t working, audience members “with their phones are going, ‘I’m getting all of this!’” And it was true. Dozens of people were capturing the stand-up act on their phones.
He riffed about a new Apple product called the “iWhy?” and a few seconds later said he had just one question about the British royal family: “All that money and no dental plan,” he deadpanned, which got a lot of laughs and a few sympathetic nods toward the BBC presenter sitting behind him (who appeared to have perfectly fine dental hygiene).
He didn’t spare panelist Brin and Google, noting that if you walk into Google you see everyone in front of their computer sitting on exercise balls, “which I think is how they’re hatching new employees.”
Related: Macavity’s a Mystery Cat - Ministry of Silly Walks
Now back to your regularly scheduled science: Your Inner Fish
The top five countries in terms of installed capacity are:
Global capacity was increase by 27% in 2007. Record installations in US, China and Spain:
“We’re on track to meeting our target of saving 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year by 2020”, said Steve Sawyer, “but we need a strong, global signal from governments that they are serious about moving away from fossil fuels and protecting the climate.”
Meeting energy needs using wind power is growing very rapidly, which is a great thing. It is still a small contributor to our overall energy needs but every bit helps.
Related: USA Wind power capacity - Capture Wind Energy with a Tethered Turbine - Wind Power Technology Breakthrough
A novel way to treat cancer has won the top honor at the 2007 Collegiate Inventors Competition, an annual program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation. Ian Cheong of Johns Hopkins University was announced as the grand prize winner, receiving a $25,000 prize, during a ceremony last night on the campus of the California Institute of Technology.
This year’s winners also include John Dolan of the University of California, San Francisco in the graduate category for his work on the Dolognawmeter, a device to measure the effectiveness of painkillers, and Corey Centen and Nilesh Patel of McMaster University in the undergraduate category for their work on creating a CPR assist device. The McMaster team and Dolan each received a $15,000 prize from the competition, which is sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Abbott Fund.
The Collegiate Inventors Competition has recognized and encouraged undergraduate and graduate students on their quest to change the world around them for 17 years. Entries for 2008 are due by 16 May 2008 and must be the original idea and work product of the student/advisor team, and must not have been (1) made available to the public as a commercial product or process or (2) patented or published more than 1 year prior to the date of submission to the competition. The entry submitted must be written in English.
The invention, a reduced-to-practice idea or workable model, must be the work of a student or team of students with his or her university advisor. If it is a machine, it must be operable. If it is a chemical, it must be complete with evidence of successful application of the idea. If it is a new plant, color photographs or slides must be included in the submission. If a new or original ornamental design for an article of manufacture is submitted, the entire design must be included in the application. In addition, the invention should be reproducible.
Related: Inventor TV Shows - Engineering a Better Blood Alcohol Sensor - Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge - Schoofs Prize for Creativity
Ian Cheong, 33, arrived at Johns Hopkins University from his native Singapore prepared to focus on cancer therapy. Drugs used in cancer treatment routinely kill the healthy cells as well as the cancer cells because they are potent but nonspecific. Cheong took on the task of finding a way to make the cancer drugs more specific. He injected bacterial spores into the subject which made their way to oxygen-poor areas within cancerous tumors. Then, Cheong put a cancerfighting drug in lipid particles and injected those liposomes into a subject. The germinated bacterial spores also secrete a protein that makes liposomes fall apart when the drug-containing liposomes are in the proximity of the tumors, and the drug is released only in those specific areas. Cheong, originally educated as a lawyer, received his Ph.D. in cell and molecular medicine from Johns Hopkins and is currently working on postdoctoral research. His advisor, Bert Vogelstein, receives a $15,000 prize.
The idea for this post was submitted through our post suggestion page.
Engineer Roy Choudhury wins NSF Early Career Award
“Security and privacy are additional advantages of antenna-aware protocols”, said Roy Choudhury. “By focusing your beams intelligently, you may prevent eavesdroppers form listening to your conversation, and even jam them selectively. Such capabilities have obvious implications for national security.”
Through his NSF CAREER project, named Spotlight, Roy Choudhury plans to develop the theoretical basis for antenna-aware networking, design distributed protocols, and implement them on an experimental testbed.
You can get the press releases on CAREER on nsf.gov for 1996-2000? Do they know it is 2008?
Here are some more awardees from this year: Worcester Polytechnic Institute Professor Wenjing Lou - Clarkson University Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Narayanan Neithalath - Engineering’s Ghosh Wins NSF Award for Novel Transistor Research at the Nanoscale - Shengquan Wang is an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn - Dr. Glen Jackson, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Bio Chemistry at Ohio University - Dr. C. Heath Turner, Reichhold-Shumaker assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at The University of Alabama
Related: Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2006) - 2005 MacArthur Fellows - Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (2007)
Sea reptile is biggest on record
Related: Fossils of Another Sea Monster (found in Argentina) - As I was Saying… More Dinosaur Discoveries - Over 100 Dinosaur Eggs Discovered
The hunt for the God particle by Joel Achenbach
Previous posts on CERN and the Higgs boson: The god of small things - CERN Prepares for LHC Operations - CERN Pressure Test Failure - The New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
Google, Gates, Indian Diaspora Bet on Children by Andy Mukherjee
Born into a poor, illiterate family in the western Indian state of Gujarat, Patel was lucky to break free of the poverty trap. Several people from his community had prospered in East Africa. They supported his studies.
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at 30 U.S. cents per child per year, the basic math, reading and writing skills required to help young learners retain their interest in education and keep them from dropping out of school are ridiculously cheap. It’s also critical enough to have caught the attention not just of wealthy Indian communities overseas but also of the Menlo Park, California-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Together, the two charities offered to help 10 million students for three years by pledging $9 million last year to Read India, an initiative of Pratham, a Mumbai-based not-for- profit organization for which Patel is a fund-raiser. Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc., chipped in last month with a $2 million grant to help fund Pratham’s annual survey of the qualitative aspects of primary education in India.
Related: Make the World Better - Using Capitalism to Help People - What Kids can Learn
Cheap, ’safe’ drug kills most cancers
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.
DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.
Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died
The University of Alberta is raising funds to further the research. Some look at this and indite a funding system that does not support research for human health unless there is profit to be made. Much of the blame seems to go to profit focused drug companies. I can see room for some criticism. But really I think the criticism is misplaced.
The organizations for which curing cancer is the partial aim (rather than making money) say government (partial aim or public health…), public universities (partial aim of science research or medical research…), foundations, cancer societies, private universities… should fund such efforts, if they have merit. Universities have huge research budgets. Unfortunately many see profit as their objective and research as the means to the objective (based on their actions not their claims). These entities with supposedly noble purposes are the entities I blame most, not profit focused companies (though yes, if they claim an aim of health care they I would blame them too).
Now I don’t know what category this particular research falls into. Extremely promising or a decent risk that might work just like hundreds or thousands of other possibilities. But lets look at several possibilities. Some others thoughts on where it falls: Dichloroacetate to enter clinical trials in cancer patients, from a previous post here - Not a Cancer Cure Yet, The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle, CBC’s ‘The Current’ on dichloroacetate (DCA), Dichloroacetate (DCA) Phase II Trial To Begin (”Like hundreds (if not, thousands) of compounds being tested to treat cancer, DCA was shown by Michelakis’ group earlier this year to slow the growth of human lung tumors in a preclinical rodent model.”).
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Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. A great piece from the University of Chicago, Fish out of Water, provides a good preview to the book:
Two of my more controversial posts have been: Evolution is Fundamental to Science and Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country. Evolution is not controversial scientifically. Just as gravity is not. Obviously this understanding is far from universal however.
But it is just a matter of time: similar to Galileo Galilei and heliocentric cosmology. See: Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens - Copernican System - Galileo). We now sit maybe 100 years after Galileo’s death (based on the evidence available in support of each scientific theory). At some point the evidence is accepted and life continues. Though I must admit it, I find it a bit disappointing how long it is taking for some people to accept the evidence of evolution. But I probably need to learn to be more patient - I have been told that more than once. All I can do is try to help present some small amount of the great work so many scientists have done to advance our knowledge. And here I am talking about evolution - for the 28% of those in the USA that couldn’t provide the answer that earth revolves around the sun, in 1998, well, they need much more help than I can provide.
Millions of users around the globe could not access YouTube for a couple hours yesterday. Why?
Well to understand, we need to start with how you normally connect to a web site. You click on a link to youtube.com. Your ISP looks up the internet address for youtube.com by looking at internet routing tables. Each domain has a name server that provides the IP address for where it should be found (for example, an IP address that shows youtube.com is 208.65.153.238).
Well what happened in this case is Pakistan decided to prevent anyone in Pakistan from accessing YouTube because the government didn’t like some video. The way Pakistan decided to accomplish this was to update their routing table to just direct all traffic that was meant to go to YouTube to a phony address which would then return nothing.
Why did many outside of Pakistan lose access to YouTube? Well their version of the routing table leaked out of Pakistan through PCCW (large internet provider), Then other internet providers adopted the incorrect information, until many around the globe were being directed to the wrong place.
You might find it amazing the routing system could allow such a thing to happen - it doesn’t seem very secure. You are right, that it doesn’t seem very sensible. When the internet was created some protocols were established that made sense then but don’t necessarily make sense for what the internet has become.
The problem was fixed when Google’s YouTube engineers contacted PCCW to inform them of the problem and have them correct it. I think if it was my site instead, I would have had difficulty figure out what was going on 
Once PCCW corrected their routing tables the fixed flowed through the system and everyone was able to see the great stuff like Marissa Mayer discussing Innovation at Google.
I would imagine Internet2 (well on its way to a computer near you) and IPv6 will take not be so venerable to such a mistake.
Related: Insecure routing redirects YouTube to Pakistan - YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan - YouTube Censorship Sheds Light on Internet Trust - The Web is 15 Years Old - Internet Undersea Cables - Harvard Course: Understanding Computers and the Internet - Net Neutrality - The Next Generation Internet - The Journey of Internet Packets - mistake proofing (the opposite of the current setup)
From page 115 of Good Gems, Bad Germs:
Related: Blocking Bacteria From Passing Genes to Other Bacteria - Bacteria generous with their genes - Disrupting the Replication of Bacteria - articles on the overuse of anti-biotics - Raised Without Antibiotics
Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car is making that a reality. The car is powered by compressed air which certainly seems like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production:
The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car.
The air car was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of the 2007.
Five-seat concept car runs on air
Related: The History of Compressed Air Vehicles - Car Elevator (for parking) - Electric Automobiles - VW Phaeton manufacturing plant
Yale Lab Engineers Virus That Can Kill Deadly Brain Tumors
Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.
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“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”
Pretty cool. Too bad these press releases never quite live up to the initial promise. Still this one is very cool, if it can succeed in helping even a small percentage of people it will be a great breakthrough. It is also just cool - using a virus to kill tumors - how cool is that?
Related: What are viruses? - Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells - Cancer Cure, Not so Fast - Cancer cell ‘executioner’ found - Cancer Deaths not a Declining Trend - Using Viruses to Construct Electrodes and More
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