The Texas state Senate yesterday gave preliminary approval to a state budget that includes a provision forbidding government agencies from upgrading to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista without written consent of the legislature.
Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from McAllen and vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because "of the many reports of problems with Vista."
"We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide," Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider Wednesday evening (starting at 4:42 of this RealMedia video stream). "And the XP operating system is working very well."
Science & Technology
With the help of a common virus, scientists have built a battery that rivals the state-of-the-art rechargeable models now powering personal electronics and hybrid vehicles. The hope is to replace the costly, toxic electrodes currently used in lithium-ion batteries.
The researchers modified the M13 virus, which infects only bacteria, to grow proteins on its surface that attract amorphous iron phosphate. The result: Wires just nanometers thick of the material, which is cheaper and environmentally friendlier than ones currently used to make electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.
The researchers modified the M13 virus, which infects only bacteria, to grow proteins on its surface that attract amorphous iron phosphate. The result: Wires just nanometers thick of the material, which is cheaper and environmentally friendlier than ones currently used to make electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.
London
- Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.
Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
© Reuters/Aberystwyth University/Handout
The robot scientist Adam.
The robot scientist Adam.
Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that could reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own, marking a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence.
Such robo-scientists could be put to work unraveling complex biological systems, designing new drugs, modeling the world's climate or understanding the cosmos.
For the moment, though, they are performing more humble tasks.
At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment.
Planetary scientists are all set to turn noise from the data obtained by NASA/ESA LISA satellites' mission into useful information about the mass of near-Earth asteroids.
LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves - a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.
Slated for launch no earlier than 2018, LISA will include three satellites connected by laser beams. The distance between the satellites should change as a gravitational wave passes.
LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves - a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.
Slated for launch no earlier than 2018, LISA will include three satellites connected by laser beams. The distance between the satellites should change as a gravitational wave passes.
© Ken Thomas
Prum and Dufresne discovered that the nanostructures that produce some birds’ brightly colored plumage, such as the blue feathers of the male Eastern Bluebird, have a sponge-like structure. (Photo:
Prum and Dufresne discovered that the nanostructures that produce some birds’ brightly colored plumage, such as the blue feathers of the male Eastern Bluebird, have a sponge-like structure. (Photo:
Most colors in nature - from the color of our skin to the green of trees - are produced by pigments. But the bright blue feathers found in many birds, such as Bluebirds and Blue Jays, are instead produced by nanostructures. Under an electron microscope, these structures look like sponges with air bubbles.
Now an interdisciplinary team of Yale engineers, physicists and evolutionary biologists has taken a step toward uncovering how these structures form. They compared the nanostructures to examples of materials undergoing phase separation, in which mixtures of different substances become unstable and separate from one another, such as the carbon-dioxide bubbles that form when the top is popped off a bubbly drink. They found that the color-producing structures in feathers appear to self-assemble in much the same manner. Bubbles of water form in a protein-rich soup inside the living cell and are replaced with air as the feather grows.
© Masafumi Nozawa, Penn State (Adapted from Yokoyama et al. 2008 PNAS
The image depicts the structure of the bovine rhodopsin protein. The blue circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through experiments, while the red circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through statistical analyses.
The image depicts the structure of the bovine rhodopsin protein. The blue circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through experiments, while the red circles represent amino acid sites that have undergone natural selection as determined through statistical analyses.
"Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team's leader. The team's results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday 3 April 2009 and also in the journal's print edition at a later date.
Nei said that many scientists who examine human evolution have used faulty statistical methods in their studies and, as a result, their conclusions could be wrong. For example, in one published study the scientists used a statistical method to demonstrate pervasive natural selection during human evolution. "This group documented adaptive evolution in many genes expressed in the brain, thyroid, and placenta, which are assumed to be important for human evolution," said Masafumi Nozawa, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and one of the paper's authors. "But if the statistical method that they used is not reliable, then their results also might not be reliable," added Nei. "Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences," he said.
The yeast-based fuel cell produces around 40 nanowatts of power, compared to the microwatt a typical wristwatch battery might produce, Chaio says. That might be enough power for some devices if it were coupled with a capacitor to allow energy to be stored. The yeast could also be genetically engineered to boost its power output.
The batteries are designed for use in pacemakers and other implantable medical devices. A small colony of yeast lives inside each battery, and this living core of the fuel cell can draw energy from glucose (sugar) in blood flowing around it.
© Unknown
Geoglyphs can be found in a number of locations across the States, but those that rival the intricacies found at Nazca most closely are near Blythe and Bouse, where allegedly over 600 exist - though far fewer - and only the largest - can be located today. The intaglios are found east of the Big Maria Mountains, about 15 miles north of downtown Blythe just west of U.S. Highway 95 near the Colorado River, where it defines the border between Arizona and California.
Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said. But a few years ago a study of a sample of entries compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with that of the unquestionably prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia was at least as accurate, in some cases more.
They may look like low dunes, but the cresting ridges on Argentina's Puna Plateau are the world's largest "megaripples". Geological features of this size had been thought impossible on Earth.
Wind-formed ripples are not the same as dunes because they are shaped by the airflow less than 2 metres above the ground. The key factor for dunes is air fluctuations as high as 4 kilometres up.
Most such ripples are no bigger than those created by waves on a beach. Given high winds, light grains and geologic timescales, however, they can grow.
Comment: Interesting. Using statistical models appears to have been a hidden weakness in genetics research. Yet we are expected to take the statistical models proving 'global warming' as ironclad. This article ought to serve as a warning against such dogmatism. As this article says; Or maybe it might squash a beautiful (profitable) theory with ugly facts.