Technology

Do you find that your camera is not registering violet correctly?  Flowers that are more violet in appearance are coming out blue, while some purple flowers come out all right.  In the picture below, the daisy and the pansy to the right appear more or less correct while the pansies at centre and left may appear more or less “true blue” depending on which camera.  This is discussed in the YouTube Why Do Purple Flowers Photograph as Blue? (from which I extracted the picture below) and its sequel Photographing Purple Flowers with the Panasonic FZ200 - update. The problem arises…

A prolonged Internet outage affecting major sites like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and The New York Times on Friday has commentators concerned that this is was a practice run for future, more widespread disruption of the internet. The distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) targeted the dynamic domain name service provider Dyn and came in three waves during the day. Dyn provides internet address translation through DNS servers to take a name like www.nytimes.com and translate it into an address like 170.149.159.130. Denial of service attacks use a variety of techniques to keep the DNS…

Researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on an iPhone 5 that can analyze several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker, producing lab quality results. At a time when patients and medical professionals expect always faster results, researchers are trying to translate biodetection technologies used in laboratories to the field and clinic, so patients can get nearly instant diagnoses in a physician's office, an ambulance or the emergency room. The team created an eight channel smartphone spectrometer that can detect human interleukin-6 (IL-6), a known biomarker for lung,…

About five phones out of 2.5 million replacement Samsung Note 7's caught fire according to Samsung and the CPSC.  That is less than one tenth of one percent.  Your odds of being hit by lightning on a sunny day are better than that.   Here is a simple calculation.    5/2,500,000 *100  = 0.0002%   Put another way 99.9998% of Samsung Note 7 replacement  are perfectly fine.  A total of about 40 counting both the replacement and the original.  If we double the 2.5 million to get the amount of total Note 7's that 40 still means less than one…

Researchers produced the first molecular map of the genes that are active in the various cells of the human pancreas. They have also revealed differences in genetic activity between people with type 2 diabetes and healthy controls.  The pancreas is an important organ that regulates the body’s metabolism through hormones that it secretes into the blood from special cells. By studying thousands of individual cells, the team has made up a molecular atlas of the pancreatic cells with a focus on the hormone-producing ones in the Islets of Langerhans. An analysis of data revealed many…

You soon won't have to judge a book by its cover, you'll be able to judge through it. Researchers writing in Nature Communications describe a prototype of an imaging system that can read closed books. They tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.  The researchers developed the algorithms that acquire images from individual sheets in stacks of paper, and the Georgia Tech researchers developed the algorithm that interprets the often distorted or incomplete images as individual letters…

Customers may grumble about having to pay fees for everything on an airplane, American airport security and a la carte pricing has certainly turned travel into a third world experience, but a new analysis has found that checked baggage fees have improved the biggest aspect of flying - getting to a destination on time. "Because passengers changed their behavior, less weight went into the plane below the cabin," said Mazhar Arikan, a University of Kansas assistant professor in their business school. "This offset any changes in carry-on luggage, and it helped airlines improve their on-time…

Move over glass windows, something even more old school than you could be back in fashion. A new paper in Advanced Energy Materials finds that windows made of transparent wood could provide better energy efficiency than glass, while eliminating glare and providing uniform and consistent indoor lighting.   The process starts with bleaching from the wood all of the lignin, which is a component in the wood that makes it both brown and strong. The wood is then soaked in epoxy, which adds strength back in and also makes the wood clearer. The team has used tiny squares of linden wood about 2…

If you're the type of person who lets closet clutter creep into their lives, a connected wardrobe may be for you. It reminds you to wear unworn clothes or to give them away to charity. Like most things that invoke terms like "ethical" and "consumption", it involves guilt, and a not-so-subtle threat. If you don't wear them, the garments will automatically get in touch with a charity and ask to be recycled, with the Goodwill or whatever automatically sending out a mailing envelope for return. It uses washable radio-frequency identification (RFID) contactless technology which will…

The NFL's schedule makers face a lot of uncertainty when they sit down every spring to put together the next season's Monday Night Football schedule. They want viewers and they want to give teams national exposure.  Yet the games won't be played for several months, and all sorts of things can happen that make a game which seems compelling in April a viewership bust in October: Players might be traded, injured or leave in free agency, and there is often a great deal of parity so a playoff team from one season may take a nosedive the next. A Monday Night Football schedule that once…