Paid for your website's traffic

How does it sound to be paid JUST for the traffic on your website?
I think it sounds great.
Your website is your Capital which produces interests, just being there.
This service goes under the name of PayPerPlay.
It is the newest and fastest growing way of advertising.
How does it work?
You have to submit your website and let a relevant audio (lasting 5 seconds) on it.
The ads play only on the web pages where the website owner has placed the PPP code.
Of course the audio will be related to the text placed on the website.
It will play as soon as the visitor arrives and won't need any action from the visitor.
Of course the PPP ad must be placed in an appropriate web page.
But Net Audio Ads are not all.
What makes this way lucrative is the possibility to join an affiliate program that will last till February 1st, 2008.
After this date, the program will convert into a "Host only".
That means you'll be able to make money just with the revenue from the ads posted on your website.
But if you SIGN UP now, you can still sharing the affiliate revenues also after February 1st, 2008.
With this you can be paid for:
1) Ads on your website
2) Ads on referred websites
3) Ads on indirect referred websites

So, coming to a conclusion, you have to register before February 1st, 2008.
Easy, isn't it?

How to be "green" in spite of using the computer 24 hours a day

We all know that turning off your computer when it’s not in use is a smart way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help fight against the effects of climate change.

In fact, if you leave your computer on 24 hours a day, it could be responsible for releasing up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. The flying-toaster screen saver is cool…but is it that cool?

But if you have to leave your computer on, here's a way you can make up for it: By joining a distributed computing network that models the effects of climate change.

Distributed computing networks harness the unused power of thousands of personal computers to perform complicated tasks.

For instance, climateprediction.net is a distributed network run by Oxford University and other partners that helps climate scientists run climate models on networked computers when those computers are on, but are not running at full capacity.

Once you join the network, you will be asked to download a climate model from the website. It will then run automatically in the background whenever your computer is switched on. When the climate model is finished running, the results are automatically sent back to the site over the Internet for analysis.

Users are invited to watch the climate model process if they like, and are provided with a summary of the model’s results through climateprediction.net. Or you could simply let the model run and never think about it again.

Full Article

Who wouldn't like to pay less for a domain registration?

Let's be honest, sometimes registering a domain is almost like registering a dream.
Never like today was so easy and fast to begin a business, and, since some realize the dream of their life, why shouldn't you.
The first step is registering your own domain, something that can express your business and what you do and what you're aiming at.
Not easy to find something new, which somebody else didn't think before, but that makes it even more interesting.
You can come out with something very unusual, if you just dig a little bit in the dictionary.
Today is even easier and cheaper if you go to the right website, like Pay Less domain registration. As the name says you pay less the domain and you can also enjoy:

24/7 Customer Support
FREE Email Hosting
FREE URL Forwarding
FREE Management Tools
FREE Domain Name Parking
FREE Member Account
FREE Renewal Reminders
FAST Domain Approval

So, it pays off to pay a visit...

"Bionic eyes"

A new contact lens embedded with electronic circuits could be the seed for "bionic eyes" that can see displays overlaid on a person's field of view, researchers say.

The minute circuitry could aid the vision-impaired or could be used to create tiny but discernible readouts offering data such as driving directions or on-the-go Web surfing.

Researchers at the University of Washington created the flexible, biologically safe lens—the first of its kind—using nano-scale manufacturing techniques.

The results were presented January 17 at a meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Tucson, Arizona.

"If it works, it would be fabulous," said Blair MacIntyre, who heads the Georgia Institute of Technology's Augmented Environments Lab.

MacIntyre, who was not involved in the new research, works on so-called augmented reality—techniques to overlay visual data using external devices such as headsets.

But a contact lens, he said, could eliminate the need for these bulkier viewing techniques.

Full Article

Tips to make simpler house cleaning

It’s a rare person among us who looks forward to cleaning the house. I certainly don’t, but a clean house is something I enjoy perhaps too much.

I love a clean, uncluttered house, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

So how does a person like me — a clean freak — get the house nice and clean without too much work? I’m sure you know by now that if I can keep things simple, I’m happy.

I constantly experiment with ways to simplify my house-cleaning routine, and what follows are some options I’ve experimented with or am trying out now. Not all methods will appeal to everyone, but I’m hoping that at least a few of the ideas will have some use to you, and perhaps inspire a simpler routine in your life.

Guiding Rule: Simplify, Simplify
Thoreau, of course, had three simplifys in his famous quote, but I’ve simplified that rule even further. :)

To keep a house clean with minimal effort, the guiding rule is to simplify as much as possible. The less you have, the less you have to keep clean and put away. Some examples:

An uncluttered room, with only furniture on the floor, is extremely easy to clean. See below. But if you have all kinds of stuff in the room, you double or triple your cleaning time (or worse).
Fewer clothes means you have fewer things to put away and to wash. Sure,if you have lots of clothes, you can go longer without having to wash, letting the clothes pile up into a huge Fuji-like mountain. But who wants to face that mountain when you run out of clothes to wear?
Fewer things on your kitchen counter means cleaning the counter is a snap - just give it a quick wipe with a washcloth and you’re done. No straightening things out, cleaning in between or under things, putting things away.

Full Article

The pill that induces temporary autism

Need to finish that work project, and wish you had the mental intensity to do it? Just take a synapse-regulating inhibitor, induce temporary autism, and you'll want to ignore your friends and do nothing but number-crunching for days. Autism-inducers could become as popular as Provigil among the geek set by 2020. Last night, in fact, a group German researchers announced they'd perfected the method for inducing autism. (They can also cure it.)

Over the past year, researchers have demonstrated several times that they can turn mice autistic by messing with brain chemistry -- and then "cure" them using the same techniques. The discoveries could lead to a scenario similar to the one in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky, where people are given a brain treatment called "focusing" that essentially turns them autistic and makes them obsessive, detail-oriented workers.

It might also lead to recreational autism, where people who want to take a break from having messy emotions about other people decide to unplug and enter a state where human relationships are no more important than inanimate objects.
Autism

In Norway P2P is official

"As one of many ways to reach people with our content we have decided to do an experiment and make one of our most popular television series available through BitTorrent.This technology makes it possible for us to make our content available in a very high quality without having to invest in large server farms and expensive bandwidth."

The very popular series called “Nordkalotten 365″ has been aired on traditional TV in Norway. Over 900 000 of Norway’s 4,6 million watched the show in average, and the marketshare was close to 50%! “Nordkalotten 365″ is now made available for download. In this series the experienced hiker Lars Monsen has traveled alone through the north of Scandinavia for one year. The first episode is already published and the next episodes will be made available as they are encoded.

The files are MPEG4 H.264, 1024×576 25fps, 3 Mbit/s. No DRM.


So far the experiment has been a huge success. After one day roughly 8000 people have downloaded the torrent file. Because of the limited statistics reporting from the Amazon S3 tracker we are using we don’t have exact numbers from the tracker itself. Taking into account that Norway is a small country with only 4,5 million people this number is above expectations. The file has been out there for one day, and at this point only the first episode of the series is available. The bittorrent technology seems to work especially well for completely legal and high quality downloads. People happily seed the file and the download speeds achieved are reported to several megabits/s. The whole 600 MB file downloading in minutes or even seconds for the people with fast connections.

Full Article

LED: the future in energy saving

What is in absolute the cheapest light?
And talking about cheap, less energy consuming, is something everybody is interested in.
But not everybody knows that the cheapest lights are the LEDS lights.
LED (name for light-emitting diode) is a diode that emits narrow spectrum light, forming what is called electroluminescence.
It is a small area source, and it is used mostly as indicator lights on electronic devices, but could be used also in higher power applications.
That means they could be used as regular household light source.
That is a very good news, because they consume very little electricity and saving, when it comes to energy, is never too much...
The colors are dependent from the wavelength of the light emitted, and they have succeeded in making a variety of colors with even shorter wavelengths.
A combination of red, green and blue LEDs can produce the impression of white light, though white LEDs today are rarely used.
One of the widely used application is for Christmas Lights.
That is because they consume 90% less energy, have a long life, and are safer.
At Holidayleds.com you can find a big assortment of beautiful colors and shape.
They are UL and Energy Star Approved ,they have Lifetime warranty, and 30 Day No Questions Asked Return Policy.
They also have a Christmas light recycling program, a new line of wedding lights, and of course precious suggestions about the many uses of their LED lights.

Plants more resistant to stress? A gene is responsible

A University of Saskatchewan team of scientists has isolated a gene that has never before been identified in helping plants to resist stress.
Sponsored Links (Ads by Google)


The study—published this month in the top-ranked plant journal The Plant Cell—could pave the way for development of agricultural and forestry crops that are more tolerant to environmental stresses such as ultra-violet light and other types of radiation.

“Our next step is to see if plant genes we’ve isolated also play a similar role in fighting infections,” said U of S microbiologist Wei Xiao. “In previous research, our team and others have shown that similar genes in human and animal cells play an important role in protection against both viral and bacterial infections.”

In an unusual collaboration, Xiao teamed up with U of S biochemist Hong Wang, two post-doctoral fellows and three graduate students on the study. Doctoral student Rui Wen is the lead author on the paper.

Full Article

To know the Past and the Present to be able to know the Future

How come there are people, better investors, that no matter how the Market is going, ALWAYS manage to come out with a profit?
Very simple: because they know when to buy and when to sell.
They know when to hurry and when to wait.
In a few words: they know and you don't.
That is why I was quite positively impressed knowing that there is a website where you can to track the activities of professional investment directors down to the minute/share/trade.
And of course that is the best way to learn how to.
Just doing.
And doing it the best way, without risking and with a very good teacher.
In principle knowledge is nothing else than studying what people did before you, learning what to do and what NOT to do.
If you can follow proven investment strategies, see the results and copy them, you have good chances to be successful.
" Being a member of Vestopia has allowed me to manage my portfolio like a seasoned Wall Street veteran - it saves me a whole lot of time, and money."
Not only saving.
You can actually learn how to make profits when most people don't, and see that hard times can also be good times.
"In my opinion, these types of sell-offs, where the good is taken down with the bad offer investors a great opportunity to add to high conviction positions at less expensive prices and to also look in the marketplace for other opportunities which have become attractive. "
That's it. That is the secret most of us would like to know.
When, how and WHAT.
Tell me the future and I'll make you a rich man.
Well, they won't tell you the future, but since "History magistra vitae" it is worth to know about it...

Free and Legal Music Download

The long-delayed but much-anticipated service from Qtrax is finally going to launch - supposedly going live this Sunday at 12:00 am Eastern. Qtrax, in case you haven't heard, is a P2P file sharing network that has been in the works for eight years. However, it's not just any P2P file-sharing network - it's the world's first free and legal P2P file-sharing network that has the support of all four major record labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group).

Why Qtrax?
According to a recent study by Jupiter Research, for each song sold, 100 more were stolen. The study also reported that 94% of online music consumers were unwilling to pay for music. The record labels finally got the hint: the Napster Generation thinks music should be free, and they will find a way to get it for free, despite laws or lawsuits. When the record companies realized all their attempts to make up for lost revenue from CD sales had failed, they knew that they now had no alternative but to offer free music to the online masses.

They call it RDF, I call it brainwashing

I’m OK now, but on January 15h, I got caught up in "Steve Jobs Reality-Distortion Field."

That was the day that Jobs spoke at the Macworld Expo, announcing a new lightweight notebook machine, along with a movie rental service and some updates to the iPhone and iPod touch.

Well-known among Apple watchers, the phrase “reality-distortion field” was first uttered 26 years ago, according to Andy Hertzfield. On Folklore.org, he credits Bud Tribble, Hertzfield's manager at Apple at the time, with creating the phrase in 1981 to describe how Jobs can "convince anyone of practically anything."

The term now has its own acronym, RDF, and a listing on Wikipedia, which defines RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward."

Great Lakes lower water levels

Power plants have been forced to extend pipes that draw in cooling water, former wetlands have dried up, and docks have led to muck rather than water thanks to lower water levels in the Great Lakes. Driving the drying is a decrease in ice cover every winter, according to the Washington Post.

September saw Lake Superior reach its lowest level since record-keeping began in 1926 thanks to ice cover that extends to a thin sheet of ice or a few isolated floes. This, in turn, has led to ships running aground.

Warmer air and water temperatures share the blame for the lack of ice, which is driving the long-term trend of lower lake levels. And because only 1 percent of Great Lakes water is replaced every year, significant lost water may be impossible to replace.

Full Article

Intelligent Cell Phones

Cell phones might soon have the ability to predict when they’ll be plugged in and could even intelligently estimate how many calls a user is likely to make over a period of time, based on findings in a paper[pdf] by researchers at Intel and Rutgers University. They would then use that information to provide better battery life.

The devised system, dubbed CABMAN (for context-aware battery management architecture
for mobile devices*), would be based on three main principles:

- The availability of crucial applications should not be compromised by non-important ones
- Opportunities for charging should be predicted to allow devices to determine how much energy they can expect to have, instead of simply going by the battery level
- Context, such as location information, can be used to predict charging opportunities

CABMAN would predict where it can be charged by learning which towers are nearby when it’s plugged in. Then, by tracking location and processing call logs, the system knows when to alert a user to plug the cell phone in or to stop using battery intensive applications (or not do anything at all if it thinks the phone will be plugged in soon). This, for example, could know when to turn off a phone’s music player on an airplane if the phone won’t be able to make any calls soon.

A prototype was tested using data from another project. The software was on average 12 minutes away from predicting charging opportunities - a great result. The future call time prediction didn’t work as well, so more time is needed to perfect that aspect.

Full Article

Our brains are terrible at assessing modern risks

Is your gym locker room crawling with drug-resistant bacteria? Is the guy with the bulging backpack a suicide bomber? And what about that innocent-looking arugula: Will pesticide residue cause cancer, or do the leaves themselves harbor E. coli? But wait! Not eating enough vegetables is also potentially deadly.

These days, it seems like everything is risky, and worry itself is bad for your health. The more we learn, the less we seem to know—and if anything makes us anxious, it's uncertainty. At the same time, we're living longer, healthier lives. So why does it feel like even the lettuce is out to get us?

The human brain is exquisitely adapted to respond to risk—uncertainty about the outcome of actions. Faced with a precipice or a predator, the brain is biased to make certain decisions. Our biases reflect the choices that kept our ancestors alive. But we have yet to evolve similarly effective responses to statistics, media coverage, and fear-mongering politicians. For most of human existence, 24-hour news channels didn't exist, so we don't have cognitive shortcuts to deal with novel uncertainties.

Still, uncertainty unbalances us, pitching us into anxiety and producing an array of cognitive distortions. Even minor dilemmas like deciding whether to get a cell phone (brain cancer vs. dying on the road because you can't call for help?) can be intolerable for some people. And though emotions are themselves critical to making rational decisions, they were designed for a world in which dangers took the form of predators, not pollutants. Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible—but may not be anymore.


Full Article

House Plans

Who never dreamed to own a Log House?
May be one of those handcrafted, with logs that have been peeled but are essentially unchanged from their original natural appearance?
A stylish, beautiful home? May be with a nice big loft, a huge kitchen where to dine with all the family, with beamed ceiling, wall of windows and a fireplace?
The dream can become reality with the right Log Home Plans.
Or do you dream about a Ranch home, like those Spanish-American style homes of the 19th century?
Also for that you can find beautiful Ranch house plans.
They can faithfully reproduce the vaulted great living room with the big fireplace, a covered porch with the breakfast area, and look exactly like the original.
Or do you prefer the simpler bungalow style?
Also for this you can have detailed bungalow house Plans.
They are simple, but with an artistic touch, with the living room at the center of the house, giving a touch of warmth and coziness.
For every dream there is a reality around the corner, better, on the House Plans And More.com website.

How Indirect Web Links Could Get You Investigated -- or Worse

Just to prove yet again that witch hunts in the U.S.
aren't restricted to 1692 Salem, we have the sophomoric story of a Florida Middle School resource officer under police and state attorney general investigation because "friends" linked from his MySpace page had themselves linked to pornographic sites. The details are illuminating, and more than a little distressing for anyone who cares about free speech.

And golly, it looks like the school involved has its own indirect link contents problems, too. Gulf Middle School's "Resources"
page links to a variety of clip art sites, and they link to ...
well ... let's just say that the entire Internet opens up at
that stage.

I'm curious as to why the authorities in Florida are so quick to investigate a school employee for indirect link contents, while obviously the school itself -- which has a "We can accept no responsibility for content on any pages linked" notice on their resources page -- presumably feels that it should be immune to such investigations related to their own official Web site.

If authorities start applying "safe for children" standards to everyone whose Web page links to other pages that themselves at some point and in some fashion link to "inappropriate" material, the entire Internet will be on the chopping block in a "degrees of separation" accusation orgy.

Lauren Weinstein

School Site Shut Down Due to Porn Link

Yesterday I discussed the case of a Florida Middle School resource officer who was under dual investigations due to his MySpace page being linked to "friends" who in some cases themselves were found to be linked to porn sites.

I expressed strong concerns regarding this sort of indirect responsibility being implied. After all, you can only control your own site, and directly linked pages can change without your knowledge or control at any time. When we're talking about indirect (links to links) pages, the situation is even more ludicrous.

I also noted yesterday that the school's own Resources page was problematic when viewed from the standpoint of indirect links, and suggested that a double standard was perhaps being applied.

Today comes word that the school's Web site has apparently been shut down (and as I type this, it continues to be inaccessible), reportedly due to the presence of a direct gay porn link on their resources page.

I'm told that the school currently has no explanation for this link.

However, even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they were hacked in some manner, this incident certainly emphasizes the dangerous folly of trying to assign responsibility to a Web site or its author for linked pages that aren't their own, and the even more gross insanity of trying to extend such responsibility to indirectly linked pages.

Employing the usually dubious concept of "guilt by association" when evaluating Web links -- particularly indirect ones -- is a sure fire way not only to drag the Internet into a litigation firestorm, but also to decimate the concepts of justice and free speech on the Net.

Lauren Weinstein

Danger from the Sky

Defunct Spy Satellite Falling From Orbit

Could the "hazardous materials" be plutonium? It has been used to power space devices in lieu of solar.
The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret.

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
"Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."

He would not comment on whether it is possible for the satellite to be perhaps shot down by a missile. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss any specifics at this time.

A senior government official said that lawmakers and other nations are being kept apprised of the situation.

Eileen Sullivan

Reached 10 Million Peers

Today, The Pirate Bay reached another milestone, as they broke the 1 million torrents and 10 million peers barrier. The largest BitTorrent tracker just keeps growing and growing, and there is no sign that this will be put to a halt soon.

Last month we reported that The Pirate Bay had doubled the number of torrents and peers on their tracker in 2007. Brokep, one of the co-founders of the popular BitTorrent tracker told us at the time that he expected the tracker to hit 10 million peers during the next big holiday.

It turns out that they didn’t even need a holiday, because the number of peers jumped from 8 million to 10 million in little over a month. The Bay now now tracks over a million torrents and 10 million peers at any given point in time.

Brokep told TorrentFreak that the statistics reported on the frontpage may fluctuate a bit because one of the trackers is too loaded to report its share. However, he assured us that The Pirate Bay indeed tracks over 10 million peers, and more than a million torrents.

In order to keep up with the continuous growth, The Pirate Bay has been upgrading hardware over the past few months. In addition, they moved from Anakata’s Hypercube to the open source Opentracker software, to improve the performance of their trackers.

Full Article

Less Global Warming Less Atlantic Hurricanes

Global warming could reduce how many hurricanes hit the United States, according to a new federal study that clashes with other research.

The new study is the latest in a contentious scientific debate over how man-made global warming may affect the intensity and number of hurricanes.

In it, researchers link warming waters, especially in the Indian and Pacific oceans, to increased vertical wind shear in the Atlantic Ocean near the United States.

Wind shear — a change in wind speed or direction — makes it hard for hurricanes to form, strengthen and stay alive.

So that means "global warming may decrease the likelihood of hurricanes making landfall in the United States," according to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Miami Lab and the University of Miami.

With every degree Celsius that the oceans warm, the wind shear increases by up to 10 mph, weakening storm formation, said study author Chunzai Wang, a research oceanographer at NOAA.

Winds forming over the Pacific and Indian oceans have global effects, much like El Nino does, he said.

Wang said he based his study on observations instead of computer models and records of landfall hurricanes through more than 100 years.

His study is to be published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters.

Critics say Wang's study is based on poor data that was rejected by scientists on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Full Article

Electric pickup truck built by 16 year-old

We all know the major manufacturers are saying it can’t be done, so I guess it’s up to the youth!

Andrew Angelloti, an Ecomodder forum member, converted his very own 1988 Mazda pickup to run on electricity last year, using $6,000 he had saved up from his part time job as a life guard. He built his truck using 20 flooded lead acid batteries to create 120 volts, which he couples to a 60 HP 9” electric motor.

How does it perform? Reaches a top speed of 55mph, has an acceleration of “not too bad…,” and can get up to 40 miles on a charge (which is more than enough to get him to work and back, and coincidentally, will be something similar to what the Chevy Volt is supposed to be able to do).

What’s even more amazing is that Andrew is now working on a second EV conversion. This time he’s doing the same with a 1992 Toyota Tercel, but with a much bigger motor for a lot more speed. He’s hoping to use a 120HP motor to have the top speed up to 80 MPH with a bit of sacrifice of the range.

I wish Andrew the best of luck, as he is certainly going out there and doing it on his own, without waiting for the major manufacturers to do it for him.

For more information on both of the conversions, please visitAndrew’s blog.

U.S. government’s belief in its ownership of the world

Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On January 15, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. In the first part of this two-part interview, Chomsky also discussed how the U.S. government’s belief in its ownership of the world shapes its foreign policy.

Michael Shank: Is the leading Democrats’ policy vis-à-vis Iraq at all different from the Bush administration’s policy?

Noam Chomsky: It’s somewhat different. The situation is very similar to Vietnam. The opposition to the war today in elite sectors, including every viable candidate, is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled: “If we can get away with it, it’s fine. If it costs us too much, it’s bad.” That’s the way the Vietnam opposition was in the elite sectors.

Take, say, Anthony Lewis, who’s about as far to the critical extreme as you can find in the media. In his final words evaluating the war in The New York Times in 1975, he said the war began with “blundering efforts to do good” but by 1969, namely a year after the American business community had turned against the war, it was clear that the United States “could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself,” so therefore it was a “disastrous mistake.” Nazi generals could have said the same thing after Stalingrad and probably did. That’s the extreme position in the left liberal spectrum. Or take the distinguished historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger. When the war was going sour under LBJ, he wrote that “we all pray” that the hawks are right and that more troops will lead to victory. And he knew what victory meant. He said we’re leaving “a land of ruin and wreck,” but “we all pray” that escalation will succeed and if it does “we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government.” But probably the hawks are wrong, so escalation is a bad idea.

You can translate the rhetoric almost word by word into the elite, including political elite, opposition to the Iraq war.

It’s based on two principles. The first principle is: “we totally reject American ideals.” The only people who accept American ideals are Iraqis. The United States totally rejects them. What American ideals? The principles of the Nuremburg decision. The Nuremburg tribunal, which is basically American, expressed high ideals, which we profess. Namely, of all the war crimes, aggression is the supreme international crime, which encompasses within it all of the evil that follows. It’s obvious that the Iraq invasion is a pure case of aggression and therefore, according to our ideals, it encompasses all the evil that follows, like sectarian warfare, al-Qaeda Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and everything else.

Full Article

Ethanol for $1 a Gallon

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now," said Wes Bolsen, the company's vice president of business development.

The discovery underscores the rapid innovation under way in the race to make cellulosic ethanol cheaply. With the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requiring an almost five-fold increase in ethanol production to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022, scientists are working quickly to reach that breakthrough.

"It signals just how hot the competition is right now," said David Friedman, research director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "There are a lot of people diving into this right now, trying to figure out how to crack the nut. This increases my confidence that someone will do it."

Besides cutting production costs to fire sale prices, the process avoids some key drawbacks of making ethanol from corn, company officials said. It wouldn't impact the food supply, and its net energy balance is high because the technique works almost anywhere using almost anything with great efficiency. The end result will be E85 sold at the pump for about a dollar cheaper per gallon than gasoline, according to the company.

Full Article

Estonia's war against Russian's cyber war

A 20-year-old ethnic Russian man is the first person to be convicted for taking part in a "cyber war" against Estonia.

Dmitri Galushkevich was fined 17,500 kroons (£830) for an attack which blocked the website of the Reform Party of Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.

The assault, between 25 April and 4 May 2007, was one of a series by hackers on Estonian institutions and businesses.

At the time, Estonia accused the Russian government of orchestrating the attacks. Moscow denied any involvement.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC in May 2007 that the allegations were "completely untrue".

Minority attacks

The attacks took place against a backdrop of riots by ethnic Russian Estonians prompted by the removal of a Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn.

Pirate message which appeared on Estonian Reform Party's website (image: Russian news website lenta.ru)


During the unrest, one person was killed and more than 150 injured.

Moving the so-called Bronze Soldier was seen as an affront to the memory of Russian soldiers who died during World War II.

Prosecutors said Mr Galushkevich, a student, had claimed the attack was an act of protest against Mr Ansip, who became a hate figure for Estonia's Russian minority.

Ethnic Russians make up about a quarter of Estonia's population of 1.3 million.

Full Article

NANO Future

Could nanotechnology help squeeze more oil and gas out of the ground? That's the hope of a consortium of energy companies that is putting millions of dollars into the development of new micro- and nanosensor technologies.

The seven companies that make up the Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC), which includes Halliburton Energy Services, BP America, and ConocoPhilips, will put up $21 million in total to fund the research. The aim is to develop subsurface sensors that can be used to improve both the discovery and the recovery of hydrocarbons.

"It's been a long time coming," says Wade Adams, director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University, in Houston, a technical partner to the consortium. "It's the first time the energy companies have got together to fund this kind of research, so it really is a big deal," he says.

Currently, even with the most advanced recovery techniques, only about 40 percent of the oil and gas in reservoirs can be recovered. The hope is that by injecting novel sensors into these reservoirs, it will be possible to more accurately map them in 3-D, increase the amount of fuel extracted, and minimize the environmental impact.

The financial investment--equivalent to $1 million per year from each company for three years--is "a very good sign," says Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent several years developing distributed sensors known as smart dust. It means that the energy companies now understand the potential of small-scale distributed-sensors technologies, he says.

"There is good reason to suspect that this technology could help," says Pister. Distributed wireless sensor technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and now even have their own wireless standard: the highway addressable remote transducer, or HART.

Right now, the only way to find these reservoirs and gauge their precise size and capacity is through seismic means, or by simply drilling down. "But you don't get much information," says Adams. Surface and down-hole seismic techniques have limited resolution, while drilling can only take readings for the two-foot region surrounding the drill bore, he says.

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The computer is 35,000 year old

The history of computing spans thousands of years - from the primitive notched bones found in Africa, to the invention of abacus in 2400 BC, to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1883, to the rise of the popularity of Personal Computers (PCs) in the 1970s. For the most part, this timeline is marked by devices that bear little or no resemblance to present-day machines both in form and capabilities.

We’ve had many posts on Neatorama about the newest and greatest in computers and technology. But for this article, let’s go back - way back - and take a look at the wonderful world of early computing.
Lebombo and Ishango Bones

The Lebombo bone is a 35,000-year-old baboon fibula discovered in a cave in the Lebombo mountains in Swaziland. The bone has a series of 29 notches that were deliberately cut to help ancient bushmen calculate numbers and perhaps also measure the passage of time. It is considered the oldest known mathematical artifact.
he unusual groupings of the notches on the Ishango bone (see above), discovered in what was then the Belgian Congo, suggested that it was some sort of a stone age calculation tool. The 20,000-year-old bone revealed that early civilization had mastered arithmetic series and even the concept of prime numbers.
Abacus

Today, abacus is mostly synonymous with the Chinese suanpan version, but in actuality it had been used in Babylon as early as 2400 BC. The abacus was also found in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even the Aztecs had their own version.

The Roman pocket abacus was the first portable calculating device, presumably invented to help tax collectors do math while on the go!


Antikythera Mechanism

In 1900, a Greek sponge diver spotted a shipwreck off the coast of the tiny island of Antikythera. Little did he know that amongst the jewelry and statues recovered from the wreck, the most precious item would be a lump of green rock with gears sticking out of it.
The "rock" turned out to be the earliest example of analog computer: an intricate mechanism with more than 30 gears and writings that scientists thought was used to calculate the motion of the sun and the moon against a background of fixed stars.

The Antikythera Mechanism, as the device was named, was dated from around 100 BC. It would take about another 1,000 years for the appearance of similar levels of technical sophistication in the West. Who built the machine and why the technology was lost remained a mystery.
Napier’s Bones

In 1614, Scottish mathematician John Napier proposed a radical idea called logarithm that made calculations by hand much easier and quicker. (That wasn’t his only contribution to math: Napier was a big proponent of the decimal point, which wasn’t much in use until he came around.)

He also created a device, called Napier’s bones, that let people perform multiplications by doing a series of additions (which was a lot easier to do) and divisions as a series of subtraction. It could even do square and cube roots! This invention may seem trivial to you and me, but it
was a significant advancement in computing at the time.
Wilhelm Schickard’s Calculating Clock

In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tübingen, Württemberg (now part of Germany), invented the first mechanical calculator. Schickard’s contemporaries called the machine the Speeding Clock or the Calculating Clock.

Schickard’s calculator, which was built 20 years before Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz’s machines, could add and subtract six-digit numbers (with a bell as an overflow alarm!). This invention was used by his friend, astronomer Johannes Kepler, to calculate astronomical tables, which was a big leap for astronomy at the time. For this, Wilhelm Schickard was considered by some to be the "Father of Computer Age."

Wilhelm Schickard died of the Bubonic Plague in 1635, thirteen years after inventing the world’s first mechanical calculator. The prototype and plans for the calculator was lost to history until the 20th century, when the machine’s design was discovered among Kepler’s papers.

In 1960, mathematician Bruno Von Freytag constructed a working model of Schickard Calculator from the plans. (Image: Institut für Astronomie und Astrophysik, Universität Tübingen)
Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline

The second mechanical calculator, called the Pascaline or the Arithmetique, was invented in 1645 by Blaise Pascal. Pascal started working on his calculator when he was just 19 years old, out of boredom. He created a device to help his father, a tax collector, to crunch numbers.

In 1649, Pascal received a Royal Privilege giving him the exclusive right to make and sell calculating machines in France. However, because of the complexity of his machine and its limitation (the Pascaline could only add and subtract, and frequently jammed), he managed to sell just a little over a dozen.
The basic mechanism of the Pascaline is a series of gears - when the first gear with ten teeth made one rotation (one to ten), it shifts a second gear until it rotated ten times (one hundred). The second gear shifted a third one (thousands) and so on. This mechanism is still in use today in car odometers, electricity meters and at the gas pumps.

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How to achieve a blessed sleep

Blessed sleep -- the holy grail of health. Lack of sleep can send your blood sugar levels skyrocketing, contribute to weight gain, lead to depression, put you at risk for diabetes, and cause brain damage.

That's just the warm-up. Sleep deprivation can alter your levels of thyroid and stress hormones, potentially affecting everything from your memory to your immune system, heart, and metabolism. Of course, lack of sleep can kill you instantly -- as when you run your car off the road because you've dozed at the wheel (an estimated 71,000 people are injured in fall-asleep crashes each year). In fact, studies find that if you've been awake through the night, it's as if you had a performance impairment equal to .10 percent blood alcohol content, more than enough to get you arrested for drunk driving in most states.

Given the evidence, you'd think we'd all be hitting the pillow as soon as the sun dropped below the horizon. Ha! Today Americans get 25 percent less sleep than they did a century ago. Nearly 4 out of 10 don't get the minimum 7 hours of sleep necessary for optimal health and daytime functioning, while 15 percent get less than 6 hours most nights.

Since we're all in agreement that a good night's sleep is one of the best things you can do for your health and mood, pick three of these tips to follow each night until you get the night's sleep you so desperately crave.

1. Create a transition routine. This is something you do every night before bed. It could be as simple as letting the cat out, turning out the lights, turning down the heat, washing your face, and brushing your teeth. Or it could be a series of yoga or meditation exercises. Regardless, it should be consistent to the point that you do it without even thinking about it. As you begin to move into your "nightly routine," your mind will get the signal that it's time to chill out and tune down, dialing down stress hormones and physiologically preparing you for sleep.

2. Figure out your body cycle. Ever find that you get really sleepy at 10 p.m., that the sleepiness passes, and that by the time the late news comes on, you're wide-awake? Some experts believe sleepiness comes in cycles. Push past a period of sleepiness and you likely won't be able to fall asleep very easily for a while. If you've noticed these kinds of rhythms in your own body clock, use them to your advantage. When sleepiness comes, get to bed. Otherwise, it might be a long time until you are ready to fall asleep again.

3. Sprinkle just-washed sheets and pillowcases with lavender water and iron them before making up your bed. The scent is scientifically proven to promote relaxation, and the repetition and mindlessness of ironing will soothe you. Or, instead of ironing your sheets, do the next best thing: Put lavender water in a perfume atomizer and spray above your bed just before climbing in.

4. Hide your clock under your bed or on the bottom shelf of your night stand, where its glow won't disturb you. That way, if you do wake in the middle of the night or have problems sleeping, you won't fret over how late it is and how much sleep you're missing.

5. Switch your pillow. If you're constantly pounding it, turning it over and upside down, the poor pillow deserves a break. Find a fresh new pillow from the linen closet, put a sweet-smelling case on it, and try again.

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DNA display telepathy

DNA molecules can display what almost seems like telepathy, research now reveals.

Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules, scientists find. Previously, under the classic understanding of DNA, scientists had no reason to suspect that double helixes of the molecule could sort themselves by type, let alone seek each other out.

The spiraling structure of DNA includes strings of molecules called bases. Each of its four bases, commonly known by the letters A, T, C and G, is chemically attracted to a specific partner — A likes binding to T, and C to G. The scheme binds paired strands of DNA into the double helix the molecule is famous for.

Scientists investigated double-stranded DNA tagged with fluorescent compounds. These molecules were placed in saltwater that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment or help the DNA molecules communicate.

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"To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit."

What do I mean if I say I miss you?
I feel an empty space close to me.
I need to see you, I need to talk to you, I need somebody to live my everyday life for and with.
I miss a big part of my world, the part that makes my every thought, action, care, worth of.
What is life if you do not share it?
What is a happy moment if you cannot live it with someone else, if you have nobody to tell, to explain, to live it with?
Life is communication, life is sharing, life is loving.
What is the most romantic thought?
I used to love reading Shakespeare's sonnets.
He is the one who can really explain what love is.
My favorite is the one that ends:

"O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit."

Yes, to hear with eyes is the essence of love.

The new fronteer of transplant: No anti-rejection drugs

In what's being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.
The treatment involved weakening the patient's immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ. In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later.

"There's reason to hope these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives," said Dr. David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the research published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Since the world's first transplant more than 50 years ago, scientists have searched for ways to trick the body to accept a foreign organ as its own. Immune-suppressing drugs that prevent organ rejection came into wide use in the 1980s. But they raise the risk of cancer, kidney failure and many other problems. And they have unpleasant side effects such as excessive hair growth, bloating and tremors.

Eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs is "a huge advance," said Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, a University of Louisville immunology specialist who had no role in the work.

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Special Marijuana Vending Machines

Holy crap, what country is LA in? I mean, last time I was there I was surprised enough at the billboards offering medicinal marijuana cards, but this is insane. Starting on Monday, people who have medical conditions such as glaucoma, cancer, and the deadly not-stoned-enough virus can start getting their fat buds from special "AVMs."

These electronic drug dealers won't be out on the street next to a Pepsi machine, of course. No, they'll be "housed in standalone rooms, abutting two dispensaries and protected by round-the-clock security guards." To use them, you'll need to go with a prescription in hand, get fingerprinted and get a prepaid credit card that's loaded up with your dosage and what strain of weed you want. Yeah, no joke, the pharmacists in LA give you a choice between OG Kush and Granddaddy Purple. In the future, the machines may also be outfitted to sell other popular drugs such as Viagra, Vicodin and Propecia. Combine all four for a really interesting night that'll also slowly grow your hair back!

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What recession really looks like

As the US economy inches ever closer to a recession, it might provide a little perspective to look at what a real economic crisis looks like. Plagued by hyperinflation of over 50,000% a year, Zimbabwe's central bank recently decided to issue $10 million notes-- believed to be the highest denomination of currency in the world today. The bill, worth less than US$4, is barely enough to purchase a hamburger. One writer illustrates the rampant inflation:

"The bill is exactly the same color, layout and design as a $20 bill I've been carrying in my wallet since my trip to Zimbabwe 15 months ago... When I wrote about that $20, it was worth about $0.025 USD - a silly amount of money to represent with a bill, but still a functional piece of currency. At the moment, that bill is worth $0.00000005 cents, or 5 hundred-millionths of a cent."

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