Prime Stream
thescian | February 21, 2007Being sick helps you survive says Sharon Moalem, author of Survival of the Sickest. A condition where the body stores a lot of iron may have led to the the survival of a large number of people after the years of Black Death, the author describes in a New Scientist article.
"Iron overload was once thought a very rare condition - a medical curiosity. But since the first genetic mutations for haemochromatosis were discovered in 1996, it has turned out to be much more common than we realised among those whose ancestors come from north or west Europe. The current estimate is that 1 in 200 of this…
thescian | February 13, 2007Flashing giant squids at the beebs. The video is scary.
Enormous deep-sea squid emit blinding flashes of light as they attack their prey, research shows.
Taningia danae's spectacular light show was revealed in video footage taken in deep waters off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific.
Japanese scientists believe the creatures use the bright flashes to disorientate potential victims.
thescian | February 13, 2007A 25 million dollar prize is open for an invention that can eat substantial amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. News at Nature.
"The winner must be able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric, greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects," state the written rules of the competition. It must "contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate".
The winning entry could be anything from manufacturing bacteria to install in industrial emissions pipes, to creating a…
thescian | February 13, 2007Sean at Cosmic Variance points out the disingenuity of oil industry which encourages skeptics among climate scientists.
thescian | February 8, 2007 There was a few inches of snow today in Amersham. I didn't venture out on wheels. Instead we went for a walk. A good number of people had come out. Some cars skidded by to hug the trees on the roadsides. A gentleman pulling his young daughter on a red plastic sled. A tiny puppy rushed to them, wagging its tail vigorously in excitement. I think it wanted to pee on the gentleman's wellies. We - the wife and I - made a snowball and rolled it along with us. I quickly learnt the lesson: a rolling snow ball gathers lot of flakes. That reminds me. Is it "a rolling stone gathers no moss" - the…
thescian | February 6, 2007It's going to rain satellites on us quite soon. A New York Times article on space junk and the impending disaster accompanied by a nifty interactive presentation.
thescian | February 6, 2007Microsoft on Monday rebuffed a public appeal by Mikhail Gorbachev for its chairman, Bill Gates, to intervene on behalf of a Russian school principal charged with software piracy. -IHT
Many may have noticed this case where Gorbachev asked and Bill Gates declined.
It bears repeating. Personal computers do not need proprietary software. There are excellent alternatives like Ubuntu and a host of useful applications that come with it (read my story). Whatever machine you buy or acquire, you can wipe the harddrive and install free software alternatives. There are numerous local linux groups that…
thescian | February 5, 2007Once again the perennially aggravating subject of Indian marriages is in the news at the beebs. The reporter sez
No Indian wedding can even begin without a visit to the astrologer, who for centuries, read the charts and mapped the planetary alignments to pick the best matches.
Now, even they have had to adapt.
"Many of my clients have very specific requests," says NS Murthy, one of the city's top astrologers.
"Last year, I saw more than 6,000 horoscopes. My clients want to know about the prospects for the future, their prosperity, happiness, the number of children they'll have, and even their…
thescian | January 31, 2007How I wish! It ain't I but a Volcano that's gonna get it.
Indonesian geophysicists hope to stem the flow of a destructive mud volcano on East Java by dropping chains of concrete balls into its mouth.
The mud eruption began on 29 May last year in the middle of a rice paddy in the village of Porong, 30 kilometres south of Surabaya, the provincial capital. Since then, the volcano has spewed out up to 126,000 cubic metres of mud a day, flooding an area of more than 4 square kilometres.
(via /.)
If you read the article you'd realize how uncretain the whole experiment is. Crazy as it is, even…
thescian | January 31, 2007Sir Richard Branson offers this fabulous deal. Am unhelpful sidenote on the news page chirps thus:
"The chance of an individual using personal cord blood for a blood cell disorder before the age of 20 is estimated to be between 1/20,000 to 1/37,000"
Dang! But then, with the population of aged shooting over the roof in the UK, the chances of using the stem cells collected when you were born would improve quite a bit in the future I would think.
A scifi novel read a few weeks ago is relevant in this context. Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire. The novel is set in the near future when life extension…
thescian | January 30, 2007A discussion at Dr.Katte's blog that is worth your time. It may not make much sense to you if you are not aware of the religious marking that hindus, particularly those in south India wear (not all). I applaud both Dr.Katte and the student for conducting the discussion openly.
Marking oneself ritualistically is not something that's confined to religion alone. There is also a wide degree of variability based on culture, personality and whetever-else-there-is. Some are severe (Link not for the squeamish). Some really funny. And many not worth bothering at all.
thescian | January 30, 2007From Peceptive Pixel. The technology is now part of Apple and iPhone uses it.Some background.
thescian | January 29, 2007An Edge essay by V S Ramachandran on What is self?
It has recently been shown that if a
conscious awake human patient has his parietal lobe stimulated during
neurosurgery, he will sometimes have an "out of body" experience -- as
if he was a detached entity watching his own body from up near the
ceiling. I suggest that this arises because of a dysfunction in the
mirror neuron system in the parieto-occipital junction caused by the
stimulating electrode. These neurons are ordinarily activated when we
temporarily "adopt" another's view of our body and mind (as outlined
earlier in this essay).…
thescian | January 27, 2007Here's some serious fun with the desktop metaphor. Bumptop is a Desktop UI. [via] The Tube video below. Nifty.
thescian | January 25, 2007Life goes on but what a loss.(thanks Ramya) I was in Bhuj after the quake. We passed through village after village and saw not a single structure standing. It was devastation on a scale I've never seen before. One of my friend said that it was like a curse. If you were a believer that is a succint description of the carnage.
I am sure Bhuj people have recovered. I saw how resourceful they were.
This is also the day India was constituted and came into existence as a soverign secular socialist democratic republic nation. Have a thoughtful day.
thescian | January 23, 2007Vindaloo and tandoori, of course. A comprehensive summary of current scientific research about the medical properties of turmeric.
thescian | January 22, 2007"Got milk?", asks Sunil. A delicious post on lactose intolerance in humans and how evolution has herded (so to speak) our silly genes into overcoming it.
thescian | January 22, 2007
One small capsule in the ocean, a giant leap for ISRO.
In a pathbreaking event heralding its arrival as a space power with capability to recover an orbiting satellite, India today successfully brought back a spacecraft to earth, giving a new impetus to the proposed manned mission to space in the next decade.
A 550-kg recoverable space capsule that was launched by a home-built rocket on January 10 returned to earth's atmosphere, splashing down in the Bay of Bengal, about 140 km east of Sriharikota coast at 9.46 am, as planned, Indian Space Research Organisation officials said.-The Hindu (…
thescian | January 22, 2007The magnificient Sombrero galaxy in infrared taken by Spitzer. A suitable hat for that wandering one-eyed turtle, perhaps.