September 26, 2006, 7:14 PM CT

Smallest Multimedia Computer

Nokia today introduced the Nokia N75, its smallest multimedia computer, offering digital music playback, quality photography, telephony and rich internet communication. The Nokia N75 provides a complete multimedia experience in a thin and elegant clamshell, while utilizing Nokia's renowned ease of use.

"By combining people's entertainment and leisure needs into the Nokia N75, Nokia is affecting the lifestyles of mobile device users in a positive way. With all its features and beautiful design, the Nokia N75 keeps your life connected and it's far easier and more enjoyable to just have one device to carry around, and still keep ahead of the game!" said Nigel Rundstrom, vice president of Multimedia Sales for Nokia in North America.

Soundtrack to your life

The Nokia N75 music experience excels even with the device closed. The digital music player has easy controls on the cover of the device, and the reflective 1.36" color cover display guides you to your music, which is always just a button press away. Supporting a multitude of different formats, including MP3, M4A, AAC, and WMA, the advanced digital music player includes an equalizer, playlist, shuffle and repeat features for a direct connection to compatible online music services. When you connect the Nokia N75 to your compatible PC, a mere tap on the music key acts as an instant link to music stored. The PC-mobile synchronization redirects your favorite tunes straight to the Nokia N75, which can store up to 1,500* individual tracks on an optional 2GB microSD card. In addition to playing downloaded music and ripped cds, the Nokia N75 also includes a stereo FM radio, allowing you to listen to your favorite talk or music radio stations through your compatible headphones or through the integrated 3D stereo speakers.........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

September 26, 2006, 7:00 PM CT

Featured Content For Google Earth

Google Inc. recently released Featured Content for Google Earth, a new showcase of multimedia overlays in Google Earth that connect users to information about the world around them from a variety of premium content providers.

Users can access these informative overlays by clicking on the "Featured Content" checkbox in the Google Earth sidebar. In doing so, icons for each Featured Content provider will span the globe, enabling users to click on individual locations and learn about the area's significance. The Featured Content showcase will be routinely updated to include innovative and diverse contributions from additional content providers.

"We are excited to provide users with the opportunity to learn more about the natural wonders and manmade landmarks of the world with Featured Content for Google Earth," said John Hanke, director, Google Earth and Maps. "We believe Google Earth is an excellent medium for organizing and sharing the world's geographic information and we continue to explore opportunities to bring visually compelling and informative content into Google Earth".

Initial Featured Content for Google Earth partners include:

• United Nations Environmental Program - The UNEP overlay for Google Earth includes successive time-stamped images illustrating 100 areas of extreme environmental degradation around the world. From the deforestation of the Amazon to the fallout of raging forest fires in Sub-Sahara Africa and the decline of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, this before-and-after imagery spanning the past 30 years offers users an online resource for learning about the environmental crisis zones around the world.
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Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 26, 2006, 6:51 PM CT

Microsoft Research Changing Face of Computing

From wide-ranging enhancements for the upcoming Microsoft® Windows Vista- operating system to data-mining innovations in SQL Server- to powerful anti-spam filters in Microsoft Office Outlook®, Microsoft Research teams have delivered hundreds of product innovations to Microsoft Corp. customers since 1991. Today at an event marking the research organization's 15th anniversary of turning ideas into reality, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates appeared on screen as Microsoft Research Senior Vice President Rick Rashid and leaders from academia and industry gathered at the company's Redmond lab to recognize these successes and preview new areas where Microsoft Research continues to influence the future of computing.

"From the beginning, Microsoft Research has provided an open, collaborative environment where the brightest minds in computer science can work together to tackle the hardest problems in computing and explore new ideas for reinventing the PC," Gates said. "During the past 15 years, Microsoft researchers have contributed amazing breakthroughs and insights that have advanced the state of the art in dozens of technology fields. Their work is a clear reflection of Microsoft's commitment to innovation".

With more than 700 researchers at five laboratories worldwide, Microsoft Research contributes to Microsoft products as well as long-range technology advancements, often in collaboration with the academic community. Microsoft researchers have made a significant global impact on the collective knowledge of the greater software community, openly sharing their research findings and new discoveries by publishing more than 3,700 academic papers across 55 fields.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 26, 2006, 6:40 PM CT

Technology-enhanced Collaboration

While new technologies have made information more accessible, they have yet to live up to their full potential when it comes to knowledge sharing. Two European projects in the field of collaborative learning are looking to change that.

The IST-funded COOPER and TENCompetence initiatives, which began in December 2005 and will run for two and four years respectively, are creating new tools and techniques for technology-enhanced collaborative learning. Part of the Professional Learning Cluster of IST research projects, the two initiatives are complementary in the way they are applying technology to the realm of collaborative learning, in which groups of teachers and pupils cooperate to share expertise and solve complex problems.

"Collaborative learning is already being used with important educational benefits in companies and universities, instead of the more traditional top-down approach of teachers instructing students what to do," explains Xuan Zhou, the COOPER project manager at the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Gera number of. "Our goal is to create an online environment that allows people to learn through collaboration no matter where they are."

The tools to underpin lifelong learning.

That is necessary if collaborative learning is to be paired with lifelong learning, which allows people to learn throughout their careers, constantly picking up new skills and expertise. Lifelong learning is viewed as essential if the European Union is to meet its goal of becoming a dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 25, 2006, 10:16 PM CT

Most Complex Protein Knot Ever Seen

An MIT team has discovered the most complicated knot ever seen in a protein, and they believe it may be associated with the protein's function as a rescue agent for proteins marked for destruction.

"In proteins, the three-dimensional structure is very important to the function, and this is just one example," said Peter Virnau, a postdoctoral fellow in physics and an author of a paper on the work that appears in the Sept. 15 issue of the Public Library of Science, Computational Biology.

Knots are rare in proteins - less than 1 percent of all proteins have any knots, and most are fairly simple. The scientists analyzed 32,853 proteins, using a computational technique never before applied to proteins at this scale.

Of those that had knots, all were enzymes. Most had a simple three-crossing, or trefoil knot, a few had four crossings, and the most complicated, a five-crossing knot, was initially found in only one protein - ubiquitin hydrolase.

That complex knot may hold some protective value for ubiquitin hydrolase, whose function is to rescue other proteins from being destroyed - a dangerous job.

When a protein in a cell needs to be destroyed, it gets labeled with another protein called ubiquitin. "It's a death mark for the protein," said Leonid Mirny, an author of the paper and an associate professor in the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 25, 2006, 10:04 PM CT

Better Sludge Through Metagenomics

Few stop to consider the consequences of their daily ablutions, the washing of clothes, the watering of lawns, and the flush of a toilet. However, wastewater therapy--one of the cornerstones of modern civilization--is the largest microbially-mediated biotechnology process on the planet. When it works, it is a microbial symphony in tune with humanity. When it fails, the consequences can be dire. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, University of Queensland, Australia, have published the first metagenomic study of an activated sludge wastewater therapy process. The research appeared online in the September 24 edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology (http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nbt1247.html).

The metagenomic strategy entails generating DNA sequence information directly from samples of sewage sludge to provide a blueprint of the genes and hence the metabolic possibilities of the wastewater environment, with a view to understanding how the system works and predicting and averting failures or crashes.

"This is a first step in a much broader strategy employing a systems biology approach to the study of microbial communities with the goal of designing predictive models to understand how these communities function," said Hector Garcia Martin, lead author of the study and post-doctoral fellow in the DOE JGI's Microbial Ecology Program. "With this information now available, there are opportunities to bioengineer the process to make it more reliable."........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 24, 2006, 9:56 PM CT

Carbon Capture And Water Filtration

It's time to create a comprehensive accounting system for natural capital to recognize the full value of ecosystem services provided by boreal forests, an ecological economist will urge delegates to Canada's 10th National Forest Congress Sept. 25-27.

The forests' huge value as sinks and reservoirs of atmospheric carbon, for example, is unaccounted for today but needs to be recognized in future, as per Mark Anielski of Edmonton, who will make a presentation to Canadian and international forest officials, and experts from native peoples communities, the energy, farming and tourism sectors and other stakeholders assembling for the Congress at Lac Leamy, Gatineau-Ottawa.

Anielski and research colleagues estimate that environmental services from the boreal from climate regulation via carbon capture and storage, water filtration and waste therapy, to biodiversity maintenance, pest control by birds, etc. are worth about $160 per hectare, or $93 billion per year in Canada.

Globally, the estimates produce a rough value of ecosystem services rendered by boreal forests (almost 10 million northern square km spanning Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Alaska) of US $250 billion per year, a huge figure unrecognized in national income accounts or measures such as Gross Domestic Product.........

Posted by: Sarah      Permalink         Source

September 24, 2006, 9:44 PM CT

From zero to a billion electron volts in 3.3 centimeters

In a precedent-shattering demonstration of the potential of laser-wakefield acceleration, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with colleagues at the University of Oxford, have accelerated electron beams to energies exceeding a billion electron volts (1 GeV) in a distance of just 3.3 centimeters. The scientists report their results in the recent issue of Nature Physics.

By comparison, SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, boosts electrons to 50 GeV over a distance of two miles (3.2 kilometers) with radiofrequency cavities whose accelerating electric fields are limited to about 20 million volts per meter.

The electric field of a plasma wave driven by a laser pulse can reach 100 billion volts per meter, however, which has made it possible for the Berkeley Lab group and their Oxford collaborators to achieve a 50th of SLAC's beam energy in just one-100,000th of SLAC's length.

This is only the first step, says Wim Leemans of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD). "Billion-electron-volt beams from laser-wakefield accelerators open the way to very compact high-energy experiments and superbright free-electron lasers."

Channeling a path to billion-volt beams.

In the fall of 2004 the Leemans group, dubbed LOASIS (Laser Optics and Accelerator Systems Integrated Studies), was one of three groups to report reaching peak energies of 70 to 200 MeV (million electron volts) with laser wakefields, accelerating bunches of tightly focused electrons with nearly uniform energies.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 20, 2006, 9:44 PM CT

The Point Of Icicles

Contemplating some of nature's cool creations is always fun. Now a team of researchers from The University of Arizona in Tucson has figured out the physics of how drips of icy water can swell into the skinny spikes known as icicles.

Deciphering patterns in nature is a specialty of UA scientists Martin B. Short, James C. Baygents and Raymond E. Goldstein. In 2005, the team figured out that stalactites, the formations that hang from the ceilings of caves, have a unique underlying shape described by a strikingly simple mathematical equation.

However, stalactites aren't the only natural formations that look like elongated carrots. Once the scientists had found a mathematical representation of the stalactite's shape, they began to wonder if the solution applied to other similarly shaped natural formations caused by dripping water.

So the team decided to investigate icicles. Eventhough other researchers have studied how icicles grow, they had not found a formula to describe their shape.

Surprisingly, the team observed that the same mathematical formula that describes the shape of stalactites also describes the shape of icicles.

"Everyone knows what an icicle is and what it looks like, so this research is very accessible. I think it is amazing that science and math can explain something like this so well. It really highlights the beauty of nature," Short said.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

September 20, 2006, 5:13 AM CT

Ceramic microreactors for on-site hydrogen production

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have designed and built ceramic microreactors for the on-site reforming of hydrocarbon fuels, such as propane, into hydrogen for use in fuel cells and other portable power sources.

Applications include power supplies for small appliances and laptop computers, and on-site rechargers for battery packs used by the military.

"The catalytic reforming of hydrocarbon fuels offers a nice solution to supplying hydrogen to fuel cells while avoiding safety and storage issues correlation to gaseous hydrogen," said Paul Kenis, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Illinois and corresponding author of a paper accepted for publication in the journal Lab on a Chip, and posted on its Web site.

In prior work, Kenis and his colleagues developed an integrated catalyst structure and placed it inside a stainless steel housing, where it successfully stripped hydrogen from ammonia at temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius.

In their latest work, the scientists incorporated the catalyst structure within a ceramic housing, which enabled the steam reforming of propane at operating temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. Using the new ceramic housing, the scientists also demonstrated the successful decomposition of ammonia at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.........

Posted by: Sarah      Permalink         Source