Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:48:34 GMT

Don't tell Paris: Swarovski Crystal iPod accessories

A girl can never have too much bling, except maybe Paris Hilton, so don't tell her about these iPod-Swarovski Crystal MP3/IPod Ear Phones.

The 'Hand Rocked' Swarovski crystal earphones for your MP3 or iPod come in Clear, Gold, Red, Sapphire, Light Sapphire, Fuschia and Light Pink and coodinate with iPod covers.

Made in the UK with over 800 genuine Swarovski crystals, these are the perfect sparkly accessory. The aluminium iPod nano case is hinged to allow access to all your ipod functions, and has a felt lining to protect your baby.

From the wonderfully eclectic English site, Boutique to You, figure 19.99 GBP (approx. $39) for the ear buds and 49.99 GBP ($97) for the Swarovski encrusted crystal cases.

Posted by: Sarah      Read more     Source

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:35:21 GMT

Grado GS 1000 Statement Series Headphones combine the old and new school.

OK, yet another travel related story. Have you noticed the serious upgrade in headphones on airplanes recently? Only a few people use the ones that are supplied by the airlines, which isn''t so surprising. My ears hurt for a couple of hours and of course the sound quality is rather lousy. These days, you see personal ear buds, and a lot more of the high end Bose Quiet Comfort Noise Canceling variety.

Check these out for your next trip. I saw the ultra lux Grado GS 1000 Statement Series in a nameless mall in Taipei.

This flagship offering has a wooden housing that offsets it up to date features. Grado tweaked the driver to work with the wood to reduce distortions. The cushion shaped foam creates a large chamber for a more spatial quality to the sound.

Stone Audio UK offers it for £995 (or about $1,890).

Posted by: Sarah      Read more     Source

February 27, 2007, 8:05 PM CT

Computer Model Mimics Neural Processes

For the first time, MIT scientists have applied a computer model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach.

"People have been talking about computers imitating the brain for a long time," said Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. "That was Alan Turing's original motivation in the 1940s. But in the last 50 years, computer science and AI (artificial intelligence) have developed independently of neuroscience".

"Our work is biologically inspired computer science," said Poggio, who is also co-director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning.

"We developed a model of the visual system that was meant to be useful for neuroscientists in designing and interpreting experiments, but that also could be used for computer science," said Thomas Serre, a postdoctoral associate in Poggio's lab and lead author of a paper on the work in the March 2007 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

"We chose street scene recognition as an example because it has a restricted set of object categories, and it has practical social applications," said Serre......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 26, 2007, 6:53 PM CT

A Zero-emissions Snowmobile

Snowmobiles long ago replaced dogsleds for hauling people and cargo in the polar regions, especially in remote research stations and field camps such as those on the Greenland Ice Sheet and in Antarctica.

But for all their utility, snowmobiles are not very environmentally friendly.

So, on March 19, 2007, four National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported teams will compete in the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge in Houghton, Mich., to produce a zero-emissions snow vehicle. The challenge attracts teams of undergraduate engineering students from across North America with the goal of designing a snowmobile with lower environmental impact, less noise, fewer emissions and a lighter footprint--all without sacrificing the performance snowmobile enthusiasts love.

The NSF-funded projects are coordinated by VECO Polar Resources, NSF's logistics contractor for Arctic research. The agency awarded the group $10,000 to support the four teams.

The competition grew from the demand for cleaner snowmobiles in national and state parks and forests. One alternative to restricting or banning snowmobiles on public lands is to find appropriate technological solutions to noise and pollution problems.

Now in its fifth year, the challenge is a competition for college and university student members of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to encourage young engineers to design quieter machines that produce low emissions, but still "smoke" in the performance department. The students are given the opportunity to apply their engineering skills to a difficult problem, working in teams to develop real-world solutions......... Posted by: Jim      Read more         Source

February 26, 2007, 6:43 PM CT

Engineering Plus Studio Art

Daniel Schneider '07 jokes that he is majoring in snow sculpture. Actually, his major is engineering modified with studio art, but since he arrived on campus in 2003, a number of elements of his course of study have involved building Dartmouth's annual giant snow sculpture for Winter Carnival.

"I've always loved to build things," says Schneider, who hails from Brooklyn, N.Y. "I started with LEGOs and sand castles; I've built sets for theater productions; I've worked with Habitat for Humanity in New York City; I've done some carpentry on a farm in New Zealand; I've designed and built an outdoor stage at the Upper Valley Events Center in Norwich (Vt.). I love to build".

Schneider also likes to find ways to make the building process more streamlined and energy efficient. For example, as part of his senior honors thesis, he converted a 36-foot hay elevator, originally designed to lift heavy bales of hay to a loft, into a five-gallon bucket snow conveyor. This, he says, made it so much easier to move snow to the top of the giant sculpture, which was an enormous skiing bunny this year for the 2007 Winter Carnival (the theme was "Dartmouth Down the Rabbit Hole" in honor of Alice in Wonderland).

"We used to lift the snow in 55-gallon drums. It was slow, back-breaking work," he says......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 22, 2007, 10:14 PM CT

New Hydrogen Fuel System

Northern Nevada energy consumers can be excused if they have a sense of "sticker shock" when their power bills come due following the holiday season. Or, that they have a feeling of powerlessness as the price of gasoline climbs to $3 per gallon.

They wonder: will the days of the $1 tank of gas ever return?

Thanks to research done by a University of Nevada, Reno professor in the area of hydrogen energy generation, soaring power bills could become a thing of the past. And, finding a power source for your car that costs as little as $1 per gallon could also soon become a welcome reality.

Manoranjan Misra, professor of materials science and engineering, recently received a $3 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue his groundbreaking work in various forms of renewable energy. Misra's current project focuses on harnessing photoactive material from the sun to generate hydrogen. Hydrogen is one of the cleanest forms of energy, and studies have shown that it is 33 percent more efficient than liquid fuels.

Northern Nevada, with its unusually sunny weather with more than 300 sunny days per year could become the perfect hub to generate hydrogen energy, as per Misra.

"We can utilize this great energy resource to our advantage to produce hydrogen," Misra said. "We are uniquely positioned in Northern Nevada, as the average energy from the sun is around one kilowatt per square meter area. In Reno it is much higher than that. Because it is so bright and sunny here in Reno, we have in a number of ways the perfect location for photo-hydrogen generation"......... Posted by: Sarah      Read more         Source

February 21, 2007, 9:39 PM CT

Solving Cellular Mating Puzzle

Using a biochemical version of a computer chip, a team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has solved a long-standing mystery correlation to the mating habits of yeast cells.

The findings, described in the Feb. 18 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, shed new light on the way cells send and receive signals from one another and from the environment through a process called signal transduction. That process, when impaired, can lead to cancer or other illnesses.

"Yeast is a very simple single-celled organism, but in a number of respects it operates much like a human cell," said Andre Levchenko, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins and supervisor of the research team. "Thats why its been studied for a number of years -- because what we find out in yeast often holds true for humans as well. In this study, we looked at how yeast cells signal one another when they want to merge, engaging in a type of mating behavior. Human cells talk to one another in a similar way, and its important to understand this process".

Yeast cells mate by sending out pheromone designed to catch the attention of nearby cells of the opposite mating type. When a prospective partner picks up this "scent," it alters its shape and sends a projection toward the source of the pheromone, leading to a cellular merger. This mating process is regulated by proteins inside the cell called mitogen-activated protein kinases, or MAPKs, through a chain of chemical reactions......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 21, 2007, 8:59 PM CT

Superbot progress

Wei-Min Shen of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute recently reported to NASA significant progress in developing "SuperBot," identical modular units that plug into each other to create robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle and even roll. He illustrated his comments with striking video of the system in action, video now posted on line.

Shen's presentation took place at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum 2007 (STAIF) held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

For the report, he first offered a description of the SuperBot work:

"Superbot consists of Lego-like but autonomous robotic modules that can reconfigure into different systems for different tasks. Examples of configurable systems include rolling tracks or wheels (for efficient travel), spiders or centipedes (for climbing), snakes (for burrowing in ground), long arms (for inspection and repair in space), and devices that can fly in micro-gravity environment.

"Each module is a complete robotic system and has a power supply, micro- controllers, sensors, communication, three degrees of freedom, and six connecting faces (front, back, left, right, up and down) to dynamically connect to other modules.

"This design allows flexible bending, docking, and continuous rotation. A single module can move forward, back, left, right, flip-over, and rotate as a wheel. Modules can communication with each other for totally distributed control and can support arbitrary module reshuffling during their operation......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 19, 2007, 7:51 PM CT

In Order For 'Spintronic' Devices

Physicists at JILA are using ultrashort pulses of laser light to reveal precisely why some electrons, like ballet dancers, hold their spin positions better than others-work that may help improve spintronic devices, which exploit the magnetism or "spin" of electrons in addition to or instead of their charge. One thing spinning electrons like, it turns out, is some disorder.

JILA is a joint venture of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Electrons act like tiny bar magnets whose poles can point up or down. So-called "spintronic" circuits that sense changes in electron spin already are used in very high-density data storage devices, and other spin-based devices are under study. Greater exploitation of spintronics will require spins to be stable-in this case meaning that electrons can maintain their spin states for perhaps tens of nanoseconds while also traveling microscale distances through electronic circuits or between devices.

Researchers have suspected for some time that electrons best maintain the same spin direction at a "magic" electron density. New JILA measurements, described in Nature Physics,* suggest where the magic originates, revealing that electrons actually hold their spins for the longest time-three nanoseconds-when confined around defects, or disordered areas, in semiconductors. They lose their spin alignment in just a few hundred picoseconds when flowing through perfect areas of the crystal. This finding explains the role of density: at very low density, electrons are strongly confined to different local environments, whereas at extremely high density, electrons start hitting each other and lose spin control very fast. The magic point of maximum spin memory occurs at the cross-over between these two conditions......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 19, 2007, 7:14 PM CT

Strain Has Major Effect on High-Temp Superconductors

Just a little mechanical strain can cause a large drop in the maximum current carried by high-temperature superconductors, as per novel measurements carried out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The effect, which is reversible, adds a new dimension to designing superconducting systems-especially for electric power applications-and it also provides a new tool that will help researchers probe the fundamental mechanism behind why these materials carry current with no resistance.

The measurements, reported in Applied Physics Letters,* revealed a 40 percent reduction in critical current, the point at which superconductivity breaks down, at just 1 percent compressive strain. This effect can be readily accommodated in the engineering design of practical applications, NIST project leader Jack Ekin says, but knowing about it ahead of time will be important to the success of a number of large-scale devices. The effect was measured in three types of yttrium-barium-copper-oxide (YBCO), a brittle ceramic considered the best prospect for making low-cost, high-current, superconducting wires. The scientists developed a "four point" bend technique that enables studies of superconducting properties over a wide range of uniform strain at high current levels. The superconductor is soldered on top of a flexible metal beam, which is then bent up or down at both ends while the critical current is measured......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source