Posted on June 30, 2010  Comments (6)

Nice view out my window from my desk today. This wonderful hawk landed on my deck and I was lucky enough to have my camera right next to me. It is so nice to be able to have this view instead of a view like the IT Crowd staff have in their basement IT office.

If you let me know what type of hawk you think this is that would be great – including links to an identification page would be appreciated too. Last time people helped identify a Sharp-shinned Hawk enjoying a meal. Enjoying nature in your back yard is a wonderful thing.

Related: Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – Backyard Wildlife: Fox – Backyard Wildlife: Turtle – Backyard Wildlife: Birds

Posted on June 28, 2010  Comments (2)

Leaving your computer on all night/weekend/break just in case you need to connect remotely is not longer necessary. UC San Diego computer scientists created software that lets you put your computer to sleep without worrying that you’ll have to go into work on just because you suddenly need to access your computer connected to an enterprise network. SleepServer wakes up your sleeping PC remotely when you need it… but it won’t wake up the PC if the PC’s alter ego – a lightweight virtual image – can handle the job. Computers and the internet are great but they are also using a huge amount of energy to keep them going, so efforts to save wasted energy use are important (see more environmentally friendly posts).

That’s the simplest example of how SleepServer helps UC San Diego cut its carbon footprint. But SleepServer does much more. That sleeping computer of yours also remains active on voice over IP/IM/peer-to-peer networks as well thanks to SleepServer.

How is this possible? When you put your computer to sleep, the software activates a lightweight virtual image of your PC which runs on a commodity server, along with hundreds of images of other PCs on your network. That virtual image can do a number of basic things that would otherwise require the actual PC to be awake.

SleepServer reduces energy consumption on enterprise PCs previously running 24/7 by an average of 60 percent, according to a new study presented today at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

Yuvraj Agarwal from UC San Diego is presenting this work on June 25 in Boston at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Learn more

Related: New Server Uses 75% Less Power and Space – Cost of Powering Your PC – Data Center Energy Needs

Posted on June 27, 2010  Comments (6)

Vaccine preventable diseases used to ravage our health. In the USA, we are lucky to live in a society where those before us have taken vaccines and reduced to very low levels the attack vectors for these diseases. If nearly everyone is vaccinated for polio, even if it crops up with one person, most likely it won’t spread. As more people chose to risk the health of others in the society by failing to vaccinate, an infection can spread rapidly. There are some people who can’t be vaccinated for one reason or another (normally dangerous allergies) and vaccines, while very effective are not 100% effective. So any person that fails to vaccinate their kids endangers society and those who cannot be vaccinated.

Six Top Vaccine Myths

See the 2010 Child & Adolescent Immunization Schedules from the CDC and protect your children and society. The suffering caused by preventable diseases like polio and small pox was huge. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that those diseases are not dangerous. They are. We have been protected by all those taking vaccines. If people in the society don’t take vaccines that increases the health risks to the society at large.

Routine smallpox vaccination among the American public stopped in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the United States. The United States government has enough vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency (mainly due to concerns about bio-terrorism).

U.S. Adults Dying of Preventable Diseases

In other parts of the world the danger is not from those who chose not to vaccinate their children but those who are not provided the opportunity to.

Bill Gates’ war on disease, poverty is an uphill battle
Read more

Posted on June 26, 2010  Comments (0)

Related: Capuchin Monkeys Using Stone Tools – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Crow Using a Sequence of Three Tools

Posted on June 24, 2010  Comments (3)

It has long been known that microbes in the gut help to develop a healthy immune system, hence the rise in popularity of probiotic yoghurts that encourage ‘friendly’ bacteria. But new research by Professors Richard Grencis and Ian Roberts shows that larger organisms such as parasitic worms are also essential in maintaining our bodily ‘ecosystem’. “The worms have been with us throughout our evolution and their presence, along with bacteria, in the ecosystem of the gut is important in the development of a functional immune system.”

Parasite Rex is a great book, I have written about previously looking at parasites and their affect on human health.

Professor Grencis adds: “If you look at the incidence of parasitic worm infection and compare it to the incidence of auto-immune disease and allergy, where the body’s immune system over-reacts and causes damage, they have little overlap. Clean places in the West, where parasites are eradicated, see problems caused by overactive immune systems. In the developing world, there is more parasitic worm infection but less auto-immune and allergic problems.

“We are not suggesting that people deliberately infect themselves with parasitic worms but we are saying that these larger pathogens make things that help our immune system. We have evolved with both the bugs and the worms and there are consequences of that interaction, so they are important to the development of our immune system.”

Whipworm, also known as Trichuris, is a very common type of parasitic worm and infects many species of animals including millions of humans. It has also been with us and animals throughout evolution. The parasites live in the large intestine, the very site containing the bulk of the intestinal bacteria.

Heavy infections of whipworm can cause bloody diarrhoea, with long-standing blood loss leading to iron-deficiency anaemia, and even rectal prolapse. But light infections have relatively few symptoms.
Read more

Posted on June 22, 2010  Comments (4)

This year, 116 medical, dental, and veterinary students from 47 schools across the country will take a break from memorizing molecular metabolism and studying drug interactions to spend a year in a lab doing hands-on research. The break from regular coursework, funded through a $4 million Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) initiative, is intended to give students an opportunity to immerse themselves in science and consider whether they want to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.

Nearly 500 medical students applied for the research year through the HHMI-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medical Research Scholars and HHMI Medical Research Fellows programs. Both efforts seek to strengthen and expand the pool of medically-trained researchers. The funding HHMI provides is a great resource.

“We want medical, dental, and veterinary students to become immersed in the life of academic science for at least a year. And we hope they get so engaged in the process and life of scientific research that they will decide to continue it for the rest of their lives,” says Peter Bruns, HHMI’s vice president for grants and special programs. “We need more doctors who do basic research to improve human health.”

As part of its commitment to fostering the translation of basic research discoveries into improved diagnoses and treatments, HHMI has developed a range of programs to nurture the careers of researchers who bridge the gap between clinical medicine and basic science. In addition to the programs for medical students, the Institute supports medical training for Ph.D. students in the basic sciences and has made specific efforts to fund top physician-scientists as HHMI investigators.

The medical research scholars and fellows programs are open to medical, dental, and veterinary students enrolled in U.S. schools. Most have completed the second or third year of their professional program when they spend a year working in a lab either at the NIH or at an academic medical center or research university they select. During the last 25 years, more than 2,100 students have participated.

The HHMI Medical Research Fellowships program allows medical, dental, and veterinary students to pursue biomedical research at a laboratory anywhere in the United States except the NIH campus in Bethesda. Each student submits a research plan to work in a specific lab with a mentor they have identified. Since 1989, about 1,200 students have participated.

This year, 74 students from 26 medical schools and two veterinary schools were chosen as fellows from a pool of 274. While most students elect to stay at their home institution to do their research, this year 17 fellows will work in labs at a different school. Their research topics include schizophrenia, wound healing, organ development, and many other important biological questions.

The HHMI-NIH Research Scholars program was established in 1985 to encourage medical students to pursue research by allowing them to take a year off from their medical studies. The program has since been expanded to include dental and veterinary students. It has enabled about 1,000 students to work in NIH labs.

Students selected as research scholars often enter the program with only a general idea of what type of research they would like to do. As soon as they are accepted, they begin researching the more than 1,100 laboratories at NIH. They meet with a number potential mentors before finalizing which project to pursue under the guidance of their NIH advisor and HHMI’s staff. The students are sometimes called “cloister scholars” because they live in apartments or dorm-style rooms in a refurbished cloister on the NIH campus in Bethesda.

This year, 42 students from 28 medical schools and one veterinary school were chosen as research scholars. More than 200 students from 93 schools applied.

Related: Directory of Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships – $600 Million for Basic Biomedical Research – HHMI Expands Support of Postdoctoral Scientists – Genomics Course For College Freshman Supported by HHMI at 12 Universities

Posted on June 21, 2010  Comments (2)

All present-day life arose from a single ancestor

Very interesting. Surprising too. As the article points out this doesn’t mean all life ever on Earth evolved from the single ancestor – life that has gone extinct could be from outside this single “tree.”

Related: Viruses and What is Life – Evolution is Fundamental to Science – Bacteria “Feed” on Earth’s Ocean-Bottom Crust

Posted on June 19, 2010  Comments (7)

The Droid Incredible really is a great gadget. I am too cheap to get it but if I were to use a cell phone much I think this is the one I would get. I personally prefer more open software like Android (which the Droid Incredible uses) to Apple (though Apple’s user experience is great, I admit).

The Droid Incredible by HTC features a body design that measures 4.63 x 2.3 x 0.47 inches (HxWxD), making it easy to slip into your pocket. A large, 3.7-inch HD screen with 480×800 resolution graces the front of the device. The responsive OLED touch screen features rich colors and is easy to use.

With a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal flash memory, the Droid Incredible delivers incredible performance, letting you run multiple applications. It includes an 8-megapixel camera with auto focus and 2x power LED flash, and also Google Maps Navigation, which provides GPS-based turn-by-turn voice guidance to get you where you need to go.

Related: more Curious Cat gadget posts – Apple’s iPad – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT – Cell phone Microscope

Posted on June 14, 2010  Comments (1)

SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

Related: Google Server Hardware Design – Data Center Energy Needs – Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium

Posted on June 13, 2010  Comments (1)

Variation on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousands of DNA’s smallest pieces – large swaths varying in length or location or even showing up in reverse order – appeared 4,205 times in a comparison of DNA from just four people.

Those structural differences popped into clear view through computer analysis of more than 500 linear feet of DNA molecules analyzed by the powerful genome mapping system developed over nearly two decades by David C. Schwartz, professor of chemistry and genetics at UW-Madison.

“We probably have the most comprehensive view of the human genome ever,” Schwartz says. “And the variation we’re seeing in the human genome is something we’ve known was there and important for many years, but we haven’t been able to fully study it.”

To get a better picture of those structural variations, Schwartz and his team developed the Optical Mapping System, a wholly new type of genome analysis that directly examines millions of individual DNA molecules.

“Our newer genome analysis systems, if commercialized, promise genome analysis in one hour, at under $1,000,” Schwartz says. “And we require that high speed and low cost to power the new field of personal genomics.”

Read full press release

Related: New Understanding of Human DNA – Opossum Genome Shows ‘Junk’ DNA is Not Junk – Bacteria Can Transfer Genes to Other Bacteria – Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle

Posted on June 12, 2010  Comments (3)

NASA will launch the first human-like robot to space later this year to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station. Robonaut 2, or R2, was developed jointly by NASA and General Motors under a cooperative agreement to develop a robotic assistant that can work alongside humans, whether they be astronauts in space or workers at GM manufacturing plants on Earth.

The 300-pound R2 consists of a head and a torso with two arms and two hands and will launch on space shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-133 mission planned for September. Once aboard the station, engineers will monitor how the robot operates in weightlessness. R2 joins another station robot, known as Dextre. That robot, built by the Canadian Space Agency, consists of two, long arms to perform tasks that normally require spacewalking astronauts to complete.

While Dextre is located on the station’s exterior, R2 will be confined to operations in the station’s Destiny laboratory. However, future enhancements could allow it to move more freely around the station’s interior, and it could one day be modified to operate outside the complex.

“The use of R2 on the space station is just the beginning of a quickening pace between human and robotic exploration of space,” said John Olson, director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Integration Office. “The partnership of humans and robots will be critical to opening up the solar system and will allow us to go farther and achieve more than we can probably even imagine today.”

The dexterous humanoid robot not only looks like a human, it is designed to work like one. With human-like hands and arms, R2 is able to use the same tools that station crew members use. In the future, the greatest benefit of humanoid robots in space may be as an assistant or stand-in for astronauts during spacewalks or for tasks too difficult or dangerous for humans. For now, R2 is still a prototype and lacks adequate protection needed to exist outside the space station in the extreme temperatures of space.

Related: Awesome Robot: uBot-5 – RoboCup German Open 2008 – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – The Robotic Dog