23 December 2011

Resetting Favicons on Apple Safari Web Browser

safari file menu
      Favicons not changing on Safari (after all your hard work)?
      Here is the solution (hidden in plain sight).
reset safari
Reset/Renew Safari favicons:
      After you click Reset, reload your page and be happy!

08 December 2011

Validate CSS3

Are you using CSS3 and wonder why the CSS even has the standard if they won't validate perfectly legal CSS3 code? All you have to do is hack the badge code.
Here is the code provided by W3C for CSS validation badge:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer
Just add
?profile=css3
so that it looks like this:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?profile=css3

03 December 2011

Pi in Hexidecimal?

Ya, there's (Python) code for that:

def pi():
N = 0
n, d = 0, 1
while True:
xn = (120*N**2 + 151*N + 47)
xd = (512*N**4) + 1024*N**3 +
712*N**2 + 194*N + 15)
n = ((16 * n * xd) + (xn * d)) % (d * xd)
d *= xd
yield 16 * n // d
N += 1

15 November 2011

Science Inside | Lytro

About Living Pictures The way we communicate visually is evolving rapidly, and people's expectations are changing in lockstep. Light field cameras offer astonishing capabilities. They allow both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they're snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views. With these amazing capabilities, pictures become immersive, interactive visual stories that were never before possible – they become living pictures. Take a Deeper Dive Want to learn more? Check out the Lytro Blog. Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO's dissertation

Being amazed is getting ordinary...

02 September 2011

KurzweilAI.net Weekly Newsletter

Some pretty cool stuff on this website. Check it out!Regards, Tom
KurzweilAI | Accelerating Intelligence. Newsletter
 Friday September 2, 2011
Weekly edition  
News and Blog Headlines

UCSB physicists demonstrate ‘quantum von Neumann’ architecture
Digital quantum simulator realized
HPC startup backs into cloud
How Microsoft researchers might invent a holodeck
Cracking cellulose: a step into the biofuels future
Faster diagnostics with cheap, ultra-portable blood testing
The hunt for blood substances that slow brain aging
Study matches brain scans with topics of thoughts
A step toward a saliva test for cancer
Ultrasensitive particles offer new way to find cancer
New survival mechanism for neurons found
Intel forms new supercomputing subsidiary
Researchers report new understanding of role of telomeres in tumor growth
Nanowire solar cells reduce cost
NIST achieves record low error rate for quantum information processing with one qubit
Hubble movies provide unprecedented view of supersonic jets from young stars
New laser microscope sees beneath skin to diagnose melanoma
Language localized in the brain
Alloy and catalyst allow for low-cost generation of hydrogen from water and air-stable, reusable storage
Two chatbots chat to each other — hilarious and weird
Tiny bugs are controlling your mind!
Uncovering the spread of deadly cancer
Controlling cells’ environments: a step toward building much-needed tissues and organs
Astrophysicists report first simulation to create a Milky Way-like galaxy
Unexpected adhesion properties of graphene may lead to new nanotechnology devices
Building crowds of humans into software
A planet made of diamond
A low-cost, low-power DIY cellular data network

Latest News


UCSB physicists demonstrate ‘quantum von Neumann’ architecture
September 2, 2011

UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) physicists have demonstrated a new paradigm in quantum information processing with a quantum integrated circuit that implements a “quantum von Neumann” architecture. In this architecture, a long-lived quantum random access memory can be programmed using a quantum central processing unit, all constructed on a single chip, providing the key components for … more…


Digital quantum simulator realized
September 2, 2011

Quantum Simulation  University of Innsbruck physicists have created a digital quantum simulator that can potentially be programmed to simulate any physical system efficiently. They used a digital approach to quantum simulation in a system of trapped ions. They encoded the desired initial state of the system in qubits and then implemented the operation sets by laser pulses. … more…


HPC startup backs into cloud
September 2, 2011  Source Link: HPCwire

Startup Black Sky claims it can provide everything needed to simplify system management of high performance computing (HPC) and allow bursting into the cloud easily, meeting time-sensitive demands without incurring vast IT headaches. Target markets: rendering artists, bioinformatics professionals, and those in a wide range of other HPC verticals. First, the company set about building … more…


How Microsoft researchers might invent a holodeck
September 2, 2011

Microsoft has an innovative side dedicated to pure research and cutting-edge engineering in areas of computer science that may not have relevance to Microsoft’s bottom line for years, if ever. Wired recently toured Microsoft’s research facilities to see some of the work Microsoft scientists and engineers are doing to invent the computer interfaces of the … more…


Cracking cellulose: a step into the biofuels future
September 2, 2011

University of York scientists have found a method to convert cellulose efficiently into bioethanol. The researchers identified the molecular mechanism behind an enzyme found in fungi that can degrade the cellulose chains of plant cell walls to release shorter sugars for biofuels, using the copper-dependent TaGH61 enzyme to overcome the chemical inertness of cellulose. Current global … more…


Faster diagnostics with cheap, ultra-portable blood testing
September 2, 2011

blood protein sensing  University of Toledo researchers have developed a low-cost, portable technique that can quickly and reliably detect specific proteins in a sample of human blood. The researchers chose thrombin and thrombin-binding aptamers (short strands of nucleic acid that mimic antibodies) to latch onto free-floating proteins in the blood. Thrombin is a naturally occurring protein in humans that plays a … more…


The hunt for blood substances that slow brain aging
September 2, 2011

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have found substances in the blood of old mice that make young brains act older. The researchers connected the circulatory systems of pairs of old and young mice via a surgical procedure, which produced brain changes in  areas critical to memory and learning (like the hippocampus) in both type … more…


Study matches brain scans with topics of thoughts
September 1, 2011

(Credit: iStockphoto)  Princeton researchers have for the first time matched images of brain activity with categories of words related to the concepts a person is thinking about. The research may lead to a better understanding of how people consider meaning and context when reading or thinking. The researchers worked from fMRI images of brain activity. For those scans, … more…


A step toward a saliva test for cancer
September 1, 2011

A new saliva test developed by researchers at National Chung Cheng University (NCCU) in Taiwan that can measure the amount of potential carcinogens stuck to a person’s DNA was reported during the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Denver. “The test measures the amount of damaged DNA [DNA adducts] … more…


Ultrasensitive particles offer new way to find cancer
September 1, 2011

MIT chemical engineers have designed particles that can detect microRNA inside living cells (Image source: Stephen Clifford Chapin)  MIT researchers have engineered a way to detect abnormal microRNA levels in the blood of cancer patients, raising the possibility of developing a simple blood test to diagnose or monitor the disease. The technology consists of an array of tiny particles, each designed to latch onto a specific type of microRNA. By exposing blood samples to … more…


New survival mechanism for neurons found
September 1, 2011

Johns Hopkins researchers have clarified the workings of the microtubule network inside of axons and the mechanisms of retrograde transport of key neuronal survival signals. Using mouse neurons from ganglia that line the spinal column, the scientists figured out the signal known as nerve growth factor (NGF) travels along the axon to the command center of … more…


Intel forms new supercomputing subsidiary
September 1, 2011

Intel Corporation has announced the formation of a wholly owned subsidiary, Intel Federal LLC, to provide strategic focus to better address new opportunities in working with the U.S. government. “Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government,” said Kirk … more…


Researchers report new understanding of role of telomeres in tumor growth
September 1, 2011

Researchers at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have reported the first observation of the presence of “alternative lengthening of telomeres” (ALT) in cancers arising from the bladder, cervix, endometrium, esophagus, gallbladder, liver, and lung. The presence of ALT in carcinomas can be used as a diagnostic marker and has implications for the development of … more…


Nanowire solar cells reduce cost
September 1, 2011

Schematic shows how to make core/shell nanowire solar cell starting from left with a CdS nanowire (green) that is dipped in CuCl where cation exchange reaction creates a Cu2S shell coating (brown). Metal contacts are then deposited on the CdS core and Cu2S shell (credit: Image courtesy of Yang, et. al)  A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated that solar cells can be made from inexpensive elements using low-cost, less-energy-intensive processing chemistry — increasing the possibility of efficiently and cost-competitively converting sunlight into electricity. The researchers developed a technique for fabricating core/shell nanowire solar cells using … more…


NIST achieves record low error rate for quantum information processing with one qubit
September 1, 2011

Micrograph of NIST ion trap with red dot indicating where a beryllium ion hovers above the chip. The horizontal and vertical lines separate gold electrodes, which are tuned to hold the ion and generate microwave pulses to manipulate it. The chip was used in experiments demonstrating record-low error rates in quantum information processing with a single quantum bit (credit: NIST)  Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved a record low probability of error in quantum information processing with a single quantum bit (qubit): 1 per 50,000 logic operations. This is the first published error rate small enough to meet theoretical requirements for building viable quantum computers. The NIST experiment with … more…


Hubble movies provide unprecedented view of supersonic jets from young stars
August 31, 2011

The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown in these NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images are the signposts of star birth. Ejected episodically by young stars like cannon salvos, the blobby material zips along at more than 700 000 kilometres per hour. The speedy jets are confined to narrow beams by the powerful stellar magnetic field. Called Herbig-Haro or HH objects, these outflows have a bumpy ride through space. When fast-moving blobs collide with slower-moving gas, bow shocks arise as the material heats up. Bow shocks are glowing waves of material similar to waves produced by the bow of a ship ploughing through water. In HH 2, at lower right, several bow shocks can be seen where several fast-moving clumps have bunched up like cars in a traffic jam. In HH 34, at lower left, a grouping of merged bow shocks reveals regions that brighten and fade over time as the heated material cools where the shocks intersect. In HH 47, at top, the blobs of material look like a string of cars on a crowded motorway, which ends in a chain-reaction accident. The smash up creates the bow shock, left. These images are part of a series of time-lapse movies astronomers have made showing the outflows’ motion over time. The movies were stitched together from images taken over a 14-year period by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Hubble followed the jets over three epochs: HH 2 from 1994, 1997, and 2007; HH 34 from 1994, 1998, and 2007; and HH 47 from 1994, 1999, and 2008. The outflows are roughly 1350 light-years from Earth. HH 34 and HH 2 reside near the Orion Nebula, in the northern sky. HH 47 is located in the southern constellation of Vela (credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Hartigan (Rice University))  An international team of scientists led by Rice University has combined two decades of Hubble observations to make unprecedented high-resolution, time-lapse movies revealing never-before-seen details of young jets, the birth pangs of new stars. The movies reveal the motion of the speedy outflows as they tear through the interstellar environments. Never-before-seen details in the jets’ … more…


New laser microscope sees beneath skin to diagnose melanoma
August 31, 2011

Laser microscope (credit: CNR)  Physicists from Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Rome have developed a new type of laser-scanning confocal microscope (LSCM) that holds the promise of diagnosing skin cancer. The new device is able to gather spectrographic information at a wide range of wavelengths of reflected light, from 500nm (blue) to about 2.4um (infrared), for every point … more…


Language localized in the brain
August 31, 2011

language_task_mri  MIT researchers have found that there are parts of our brain dedicated only to language, a finding that marks a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions. Functional specificity refers to the idea that discrete parts of the brain handle distinct tasks. Scientists have long known that functional specificity … more…

05 August 2011

Zapping the Brain to get Insights (not joking)

Flash of fresh insight by electrical brain stimulation

February 3, 2011 
by Editor
[+]

An illustration of the insight problems used (PLoS)

Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney have found that participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. 

According to the researchers, our propensity to rigidly apply strategies and insights that have had previous success is a major bottleneck to making creative leaps in solving new problems. There is normally a cognitive tradeoff between the necessity of being fast at the familiar on one hand and being receptive to novelty on the other.

Chi and Snyder argue that we can modulate this tradeoff to our advantage by applying transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a safe, non-invasive technique that temporarily increases or decreases excitability of populations of neurons. In particular, tDCS can be used to manipulate the competition between the left and right hemisphere by inhibiting and/or disinhibiting certain networks. Their findings are consistent with evidence that the right anterior temporal lobe is associated with insight or novel meaning and that inhibition of the left anterior temporal lobe can induce a cognitive style that is less top-down, less influenced by preconceptions.

While further studies involving brain stimulation in combination with neuroimaging are needed to elucidate the exact mechanisms leading to insight, Chi and Snyder can imagine a future when non-invasive brain stimulation is briefly employed for solving problems that have evaded traditional cognitive approaches.

Ref.: “Facilitate Insight by Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation,”PLoS ONE 6(2): e16655 (open access)

Adapted from materials provided by the University of Sydney

Topics: Biotech | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

 

 

Related articles
Zemanta helped me add links & pictures to this email. It can do it for you too.

31 July 2011

New graphene discovery brings practical devices closer | KurzweilAI

Graphene Electrons

Graphene's band dispersion and low energy Dirac cone in a monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice (credit: University of Manchester)

Interactions between electrons significantly enhance the already high velocity of electrons in graphene, researchers at The University of Manchester have found.

They anticipate their findings will accelerate building graphene-based devices such as touchscreens, ultrafast transistors, and photodetectors.

The researchers used extremely high-quality graphene devices, prepared by suspending sheets of graphene in a vacuum. This eliminated most of the unwanted scattering mechanisms for electrons in graphene, enhancing the effect of electron-on-electron interaction.

This is the first effect of its kind where the interactions between electrons in graphene could be clearly seen.

The electrons in graphene behave like massless Dirac particles that appear in the electronic band structure as gapless excitations with a linear dispersion.

“The exciting physics which we have found in this particular experiment may have an immediate implementation in practical electronic devices,” said University of Manchester professor Kostya Novoselov.

Novoselov, together with Professor Francisco Guinea from Madrid, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for “groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” They used Scotch tape to peel away layers of carbon from a piece of graphite, and were left with a single-atom-thick, two-dimensional film of carbon — graphene.

Ref.: D. C. Elias, et al., Dirac cones reshaped by interaction effects in suspended graphene, Nature Physics, 2011; [DOI:10.1038/nphys2049]

27 June 2011

AMP HDR camera reveals reality as never before [video] - Holy Kaw!

 

Media_httpfarm4static_pboze

 

For the first time, the public will be able to get their hands on a video camera that takes incredibly realistic footage thanks to three sensors that collect light and then create an image without having to choose between the over- and under-exposed portions of the picture. Unfortunately, only those who signed up on AMP’s waiting list will be getting the camera when it’s released later this summer, but just to whet your appetite, here’s some video showing its impressive capabilities.

 

Full story at Engadget.

So real you can almost touch it.

 

AMP Digital Video from Mike Tocci on Vimeo.

13 May 2011

DIOXINS

Map of Energy consumption (kcal/person/day) pe...

Image via Wikipedia

DIOXINS 
Although dioxins are environmental contaminants, most dioxin exposure occurs through the diet, with over 95% coming through dietary intake of animal fats. Small amounts come from breathing air containing trace amounts of dioxins on particles and in vapor form, from inadvertent ingestion of soil containing dioxins, and from absorption through the skin that is in contact with air, soil, or water containing minute levels of dioxins.

22 April 2011

Ecardlets only on AT&T

Ever heard of ecardlets.com, a site for producing an ecard for an iPhone user that looks great on the iPhone.

Well forget it if your loved one or friend is on any network besides AT&T:

ecardcrapola.gif

18 April 2011

Prevent Google Translate from translating some words

Google Translate -http://translate.google.com/translate_tools


If you would prefer your web page not be translated by Google Translate, just insert the following meta tag into your HTML file: 

If you don't mind your web page being translated by Google Translate, except for a particular section (like an email address, for example), just add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example: Email us at sales at example dot com

06 April 2011

Sebastian Thrun: Google's driverless car | Video on TED.com

Sebastian Thrun: Google's driverless car | Video on TED.com



"
Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.
"

20 March 2011

Say goodbye to your telephone company?

Photo1

-Sent from my iPhone.

Amazing: The Hyperwords Project

Hyperwords 6.0 for Firefox Menu Screenshot.Image via Wikipedia
Ok, so this guy is perhaps a bit more excited than your average bear, but my reaction was similar, if not quite as, well as he says, "crazy!"

I have written Frode a few times to congratulate him on this fine piece of software. I usually conclude with "Frode for Emperor!", which pretty much shows how I feel about Hyperwords.



17 March 2011

LRO Update

http://twitter.com/LRO_nasa
A *very* exciting day today! MESSENGER goes into orbit around Mercury! Live webcast starts 7:30pm EDT, orbit... http://fb.me/vtKIVLyr
About the NASA App: http://www.nasa.gov/nasaapp

-Sent from my iPhone.

10 March 2011

What Is Novell Vibe Cloud?

Multiple User Profiles in Google Chrome for Mac

Creating multiple Google Chrome profiles is fairly easy on a PC, there's even a program for doing all the legwork for you. Not so for the Mac. I could not for the life of me find a decent tutorial on the web for creating multiple user profiles for Google Chrome on OSX, so hopefully this will help. We'll basically be writing a small shell script, which will act like an application for initializing a new Chrome profile and acting like a Windows shortcut thereafter. Here are the steps:

First, open Script Editor (Command Space > Script Editor)

Now, lets say we want to add a new chrome profile for somebody named Susan. Paste the following code into the Script Editor, replace the name "susan" with the profile name you want to use.

do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --user-data-dir=/Users/$USER/Library/Application\\ Support/Google/susan > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

Next, save the Script (File > Save As) in your Application directory. Name it something like "Google Chrome Susan" (replacing Susan with your profile name). Also, make sure to choose "Application" from the File Format drop-down list.

Now you should see a new .app in your Applications folder with the name you gave to the shell script. You can run this application and it should initialize a new profile. Everything should be working now.

If you want to make the new Script/App look a little prettier, you can copy the normal chrome icon to the new .app. To do this first select the regular Chrome Application and select Command I (for Get Info).

See the icon in the top left hand corner of the Info window. Click the icon and select Command C (for Copy). Now go to the new Script/App and Get Info. Now select the icon in the top left and select Command V (for Paste). The icon should change.

Now just close both Info windows, and the app should have a new pretty Chrome icon.

After waiting for Spotlight to index the new app you should be able to search for it without a hitch!

The most helpful contributing source to this post was a Chromium support page: http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/user-data-directory. I also learned about changing application icons from a post on this wiki page: http://wiki.unto.net/google-chrome-profiles-on-osx. Hope this helps.