The Marie Curie Actions program is funding science research in Europe:

The Marie Curie Actions provide research training, career development and mobility schemes allowing researchers to be truly mobile both internationally and between commercial and non-commercial sectors. There are opportunities for researchers at any career stage and of any nationality.

To explain their position, they have produced this video called CHEMICAL PARTY:

Also, if you haven’t seen it, here is an awesome ad for the Eppendorf EpMotion Pipetting Robot. This video was shot at Crissy Field:

Filed under: science, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: EU , funny , wtf???

• Lonesome George is the last known Pinta Island Tortoise. There may never be another tortoise of his subspeices after George. However, George has recently mated with a female of a similar species of Galápagos Tortoise. If the eggs hatch, the offspring would be ‘intergrades’. (via mefi)
• Certain forms of cancer are contagious and can be transmitted from animal to animal:
  

  Cancer is not an infectious disease. And the axiom is (usually) correct. But there are exceptions. Those exceptions point toward a broader reality that scientists have begun to explore: Cancers, like species, evolve. And one way they can evolve is toward the capacity to be transmitted between individuals.

  (via bb)

• The Berkeley Pit, one of the largest Superfund sites, is an abandoned copper mine in Montana that has flooded and become extremely acidic. No plants or animals were thought to be able to live in it, but single-celled algae was found living in the pit in 1995. Since then, more than 160 species of extremophiles have been discovered in the pit. From the wiki:
  

  New fungal and bacterial species have been found to have adapted to the harsh conditions inside the pit. Intense competition for the limited resources caused these species to evolve the production of highly toxic compounds to improve survivability; natural products such as Berkeleydione, berkeleytrione and Berkeley acid have been isolated from these organisms which show selective activity against cancer cell lines.

• Fraternal twins can have multiple fathers. This is known as heteropaternal superfecundation and is rare in humans, but more common in other animals. Dogs and cats can have ‘multiple-sired litters’. (via Jess)
• Viruses can infect other viruses. This supports the idea that viruses are alive. (via ./)
• Bonus random thing: A wholphin is a hybrid between a bottlenose dolphin and a ‘false killer whale’, which is also a species of dolphin. Wholphin is also the name of McSweeney’s DVD Magazine of Unseen Films. We’ve been watching these on KenFlix, and they are awesome. I love the ’secret’ films hidden in the DVD title animations.
  

Filed under: bobslobster, science | 2 Comments
Tagged: 5randomthings , cancer , LonsomeGeorge , tortoise , virus , wholphin

I’ve been totally hooked on Chromatron, a set of four freeware games for Mac and Windows. This game has everything: lasers, reflectors, beam splitters, prisms, frequency pumps, and all kinds of other nerdy gadgets that you can use to bend photons to your will. Yay lasers!

Filed under: science | 1 Comment
Tagged: chromatron , lasers , software

I hacked up a front end to google charts api using jquery. You can play with it at TikiChart.com. It’s GPLed, so please help make it better!

Filed under: code code, science | 2 Comments
Tagged: GoogleCharts , GPL , javascript , jquery , opensource , TikiChart

Trish just published a paper in Nature! Even the abstract is over my head, but the press release is much less daunting:

Examining data from 19 locations in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, researchers led by graduate student Patricia Gregg have found that “transform” faults are not developing or behaving as theories of plate tectonics say they should. Rather than stretching as long, continuous fault lines across the seafloor, the faults are often segmented and show signs of recent or ongoing volcanism. Both phenomena appear to prevent earthquakes from spreading across the seafloor, thus reducing their magnitude and impact.

Congrats Trish!

Filed under: science | 0 Comments

Our friend Dr. John Johnson and his team have discovered some new planets!

John Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues presented the findings here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Astronomers don’t directly spot extrasolar planets, but rather look for stellar wobbles caused by orbiting planets. The planet’s size and distance from the parent star affect how strong or weak of a wobble, and more sophisticated techniques for measuring the stellar wobbles has led to an ever-lengthening list of such outer planets. Now they can detect wobbles of a meter per second compared with the 10-meter limit just 15 years ago.

Previously, JJ found a planet with a 2.1 day orbit!

Filed under: science | 0 Comments

OK, we can now add LASER to the list of coffee-prep methods that we need for our taste test..

Filed under: science, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: coffee

As noted a few weeks ago I went to an awesome seminar by Dr Clyde Wilson about nutrition for endurance athletes. Though I’m not much of an endurance athlete myself, I found this material pretty useful for day to day life. I’m typing up my three pages of notes so I can recycle the paper.

Energy Storage. We can store:

• about 2,000 Calories in our muscles. Muscles can absorb only glucose sugar. Maltodextrin is broken down to glucose in our saliva and is the only sugar form that can go directly to muscle.
• about 500 Calories in the liver. Liver breaks down larger sugars like fructose into glucose.
• about 200 Calories in our blood/circulatory system. Blood sugar is down to about 80% after waking up in the morning.

Burning Fuel

• Before training, stock muscle with Calories
• Muscle can burn up to 1,000 Cal/hour (intense running) but can only absorb 250 Cal/hour
• Proper hydration is critical for digestion and converting glucose into energy. Sugars need to be surrounded by layers of H20 molecules.
• The rate at which fuel enters the body is critical. Even eating the proper foods, if it is eaten all at one sitting in a day whatever cannot be converted to glucose immediately will go into fat storage.
• Body burns fat at 1/3 the rate for sugars: up to 4 Cal/minute from fat
• Compare with 10 Cal/minute for maltodextrin (direct to muscle) + sucrose (liver, then parallel delivery)
• Taking in Calories too fast will cause upset stomach.
• 250 Cal/hour works out to 4 Cal/minute. Consuming 40 Cal and then waiting 10 minutes is close enough.
• Every 1% of dehydration is a 5% decrease in performance.
• 50% of glycogen is gone from muscle after a workout

For Peak Performance

• stable blood sugar (no spikes, corresponding insulin spike will put you to sleep)
• stable fatty acid levels
• muscles fully stocked with glycogen

General diet

• We must eat protein, body can’t make it (doesn’t have to be meat though)
• Only need to eat protein 1-2x per day
• Caloric absorbtion rate: excess Calories are directed to abdominal fat (vs. subcutaneous).
• monounsaturated fats send 20% more Calories to muscle (vs saturated?)
• Fiber helps slow down digestion, this is the key to rate-limiting Caloric intake
• Spiking blood sugar -> Insulin rises to suck blood sugar out of bloodstream
• consume unsaturated fats
• consume (moderate amounts of) protein
• eat whole grain starches -> direct to muscle
• eat fruits + vegetables -> liver, then muscle
• 1/3 of Calories should come from (mostly unsaturated) fats
• dried fruit is better than nothing, but take advantage of fresh fruit whenever possible
• cook vegetables a bit to soften cellulose etc, but just a bit they should still be crunchy
• bananas are great in the AM, but get small ones or eat only half (see insulin, above)
• primary ingredient in a sports drink should be maltodextrin
• optimum is 3:2 ratio of maltodextrin to sucrose

Post Workout

• Best to take in Calories within 15 minutes after exercise
• recovery window is very important
• It takes a lot of water to digest food
• We need 1 Liter of water for 1,000 Calories
• We sweat 0.5 - 2.0 Liters / hour when training
• Need about 1/4 teaspoon salt per Liter of water
• sleep is very poor if you are dehydrated (neurons)
• Omega-3 fats, highest concentration is at synapse
• get your DRI for Omega-3 (1.5 grams/day), limiting factor for recover is the nervous system
• breakfast should have as much fiber as sugar (grams)

phew! Ideally our dietary economy and/or my cell phone would keep track of all of this stuff for me. Until then, I find Clyde’s tip sheets to be extremely helpful. Using them enables me to get relatively close to the above without thinking too much.

Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s Blog
Link to Dr Clyde Wilson’s website (check the downloads)

Filed under: cycling, food, science | 1 Comment

Filed under: science, video | 3 Comments

This beautiful map of relationships between scientific paradigms was made by datamining citations in 800,000 scientific papers. It reminds me of the visual complexity site that May posted. Check out the *huge* 5.3MB jpeg. (via reddit)

Filed under: science | 0 Comments

I got my FlyTech Dragonfly today. I had forgotten I ordered it … opening the box was a brief flash of genuine excitement … A dragonfly!!!!!!

Co-workers were as shocked at the $50 purchase as I was shocked that they couldn’t understand how cool this was … an RC dragonfly that flies by flapping its wings? … dude …. it has blue LEDs for eyes!!!

I found the FlyTech Dragonfly is tough to navigate in the two indoor spaces I tried: my open floor plan office and my apartment. They recommend 16×16 feet minimum for indoor flight, but I found even that to be too little. The ‘fly has large swings of pitch and yaw that I find difficult to control in small spaces. On the other hand, the ‘fly crashes into walls just like a real bug crashes into windows ;-) SMACK!!

But I had a great time just now taking the dragonfly out to the local park. His wings got wet from the dew on the grass. The ‘fly has about 10x more charm than an RC airplane or helicopter. Zipping by, close in, it felt more like a friend swinging by than a drone airplane.

Like the iPod, the ‘fly itself seems to have a non-replaceable internal battery. Interestingly, the way it works is you put 6 AA batteries in the remote control, and then you connect a cord to recharge the dragonfly’s internal recharchable battery. Charging takes about 20 minutes … flight time seems to be about 5-10 minutes. Never enough.

I think with some practice I will be able to launch Dragonfly from my 4th story balcony, fly around a bit, and then turn around for a SMACK!! landing against the sliding glass door. Naturally this will probably annoy my snotty neighbors

Link to FlyTech Dragonfly on Robots Rule

Filed under: design, science, tronix | 7 Comments

It seems my grandma was probably good at math without really knowing she was good at math! (she could simply look at you and knit up a sweater without so much as a pattern) According to this article in Science magazine on the relationship between knitting and math,

Mathematics has long been an essential tool for the fiber arts. Knitters and crocheters use mathematical principles—often without recognizing them as such—to map the pattern of a cable sweater, for instance, or figure out how to space the stitches when adding a sleeve onto a jacket.

The mathematicans featured, Hinke Osinga and Bernd Krauskopf, will be coming out with a book in the spring called Making Mathematics with Needlework which will contain patterns and mathematical discussions of 10 craft projects. (via Boing Boing which also has a few links to some neat projects you can make).

UPDATE: The mathematicians are actually not involved with the book but there’s more info on it here.

Filed under: science | 2 Comments
Tagged: crafty

There is not other “RACE” or groups that are as sexualized as the generic “Asian woman.” Latina comes the closest. You can see for “Arab women” you can plenty of images of the stereotypes veiled woman. Then other during the presentation prompted me to type in “Korean, Japanese, black, African American, and etc.” = and as you can see “Asian women” win the most sexualized google image search. When you perform the search based on more specific cultures – like “Dominican” - it’s not as sexualized as “Latina.” Same for when you search “Japanese” - it’s not as sexualized as “Asian.” Sometimes sweeping stereotypes are easier for mass groupings of people – differences can be dropped as common denominators can be promoted.

Link

Filed under: science | 2 Comments
Tagged: bigotry

To some of you this may feel like any old Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving, but here at TikiRobot! Studios we are having a wild and rampant party. Old Skool TR fans may recall that at the beginning of 2006 I reporting TikiRobot! having the remarkable attribute of a single Google Unit. (In those times they were called “Googlewacks”). You can see the evidence in the screen capture to the left. Today we have well over 10,300 Google Units and no sign of slowing down.

Even more amazing is our track record with The Pineapple Audience Model. The chart below shows that our Audience Model predicted almost exactly 100,000% growth-to-date compared with our initial launch last spring . As you can see, if our servers can continue to handle the traffic, 2007 is going to be huge. We look forward to all of you buying lipstick and diapers from our innovative and helpful advertising engine over in the sidebar.

Link to 10,300 Google Units
Link to Pinapple Audience Model Projection

Filed under: all talk, meta, science | 1 Comment

This animation of a cell’s inner workings is absolutely stunning. Here is a bit more about the biology and the animators.

You see an actin filament being manufactured from its constituent monomers; these fibres are instrumental in pulling subcellular structures around the cell and also for providing a framework for materials to be transported around the cell on. A protein comes in and chop the actin fibre - the manufacture and dissociation of both actin and microtubules is a regulated, dynamic process. Similarly you see microtubule formation and a microtubule catastrophe - when microtubules dissociate, it’s very fast. Then the coolest bit of the video - a microtubule motor protein pulls a vesicle to its destination in the cell. The cellular motor proteins really do look like this - their mechanism of action is basically a walk forwards.

Beautiful! (via MoFi)

Filed under: science, video | 1 Comment

Time: 12pm
Place: Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA
Ditch that corporate job for a while and come check out an Exploratorium exhibit that Michael Ang helped create. It’s called “Three Drops” — an interactive video piece where you can play with water at three scales: molecular, a single drop and … ??? come find out!! I love mang’s stuff and I can’t wait to see it.

Link to Three Drops on Flickr

Filed under: design, science, video | 3 Comments
Tagged: mang

ZeroOne is an international art & technology festival that’s happening in San Jose this week so my office is taking the day off tomorrow to check it out! Since I was enlisted to organize the day out, I thought I’d post some of the things I culled over here too (these are sort of biased towards location based, sound, and telephony projects, cause well, that’s what we do at work. But there are lots of other neat projects to check out!)

At the San Jose Museum of Art as part of the Edge Conditions exhibition

• Listening Post
  is an “art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.” Sort of like We Feel Fine but amplified!

(more…)

Filed under: cartography, design, science, tronix, upcoming | 6 Comments

This looks interesting. Bio Mapping is a project by Christian Nold, an artist in London, that “allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.”

This can be used to plot a map that highlights points of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

David Smith, a writer for the Guardian, has an account of how it works over here. Maps like this become even more interesting I think when you begin to overlay information from other maps like this one.

(via SmartMobs)

Filed under: cartography, design, science | 1 Comment

Neato. Odeo allows you to embed audio players on your site with feeds of your favorite podcasts so I’ve created a new tikirobot page of shows I like listening to. The only annoying thing is that the player prefaces every podcast title with the name of the channel (which seems unnecessary and prevents me from seeing the specific title of a podcast) Maybe I will write them about that. (okay, I think I’ve fixed somewhat by changing the default width of the players from 400px to 600px.) They seem to be using this open source media player XSPF over here. Anyways, you guys should add shows that you like too :-)

Filed under: all talk, beats, medicine, science | 1 Comment
Tagged: podcasts

It’s good to see the Germans working towards the greater good. Dig on Napshell, the latest in power-napping technology. I like Janine Anderson’s rationale here:

Since they’re designed for outside use, you’ll soon see these cool mobile beds at your favorite park, nightclub or hotel. But you might want to pick one up for yourself as well because — well, do you really need a reason?

Features include ergonomic matresses and Dolby Surround. Hopefully the Make people will pimp these out with knobby tires and solar powered motors.

Link to Napshell (english version).

Filed under: all talk, medicine, science, support, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: ninja

JohnJohn found some new planets!
JJ: ‘One of the planets in this paper orbits its star in just 2.1 days, which is a new record for close-in planets, commonly referred to as “hot jupiters”.’

We present a modification to the iodine cell Doppler technique that eliminates the need for an observed stellar template spectrum.
[snip]
We used this new Doppler technique to discover three new planets: a 1.5 Mjup planet in a 2.1375 d orbit around HD 86081; a 0.71 Mjup planet in circular, 26.73 d orbit around HD 224693; and a Saturn-mass planet in an 18.179 d orbit around HD 33283. The remarkably short period of HD 86081b bridges the gap between the extremely short-period planets detected in the OGLE survey and the 16 Doppler-detected hot jupiters (P < 15 d), which have an orbital period distribution that piles up at about three days. We have acquired photometric observations of two of the planetary host stars with the automated photometric telescopes at Fairborn Observatory.

Filed under: science | 1 Comment

BB points to this news story that has Arthur C. Clarke battling Buddhist monks over daylight savings time. It also shows Clarke wearing a tshirt that says “I INVENTED THE SATELLITE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT!” I don’t know what to say. Here is Clarke’s paper on geosynchronous satellites.

Filed under: science | 2 Comments
Tagged: tshirt

Every so often a project comes along where you say “Wow. That is awesome. I could have done that. When I quit my job and was bumming around doing nothing I could have made the world a better place and created a project that pushes the envelope of software, art and civil society.”

Today we honor Sven and his sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! project. Word up, Sven. This is great stuff.

Check out the self-produced video documentary on
YouTube or QuickTime video.

Filed under: beats, science | 0 Comments

Mike made this pretty timelapse of the sunset in Hawaii!

Filed under: science, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: mike , timelapse

here’sa nifty site that teaches you to examine a heart. Use the tutorial to look at some anatomy, or test yourself with the quiz! Just in case you were wondering what your doctor is listening for..

Filed under: medicine, science | 2 Comments