Technology

Modern DNA sequencing techniques have been turned toward creating a highly sensitive, quantifiable analysis of animal, plant, and microbial substances present in foodstuffs. In pilot studies, the researchers were able to use their new DNA method to detect the presence of a 1% content of horse meat in products and to determine the actual amount with a high level of precision. The researchers even found slight traces of the DNA of added mustard, lupin, and soy in a test sausage prepared for calibration purposes, something that could also be of interest with regard to allergy testing of foods.…

In my previous blog post, Introduction to the 555 Timer IC , you learned how to build an optical Theremin using a 555 Timer. The original Theremin used radio frequency interference caused by the movement of the player's hand to change the pitch of the instrument. The optical Theremin depends on the intensity of light that falls on a photo resistor also controlled by the movement of the player's hand. The amount of light that fell on the photo resistor changed the resistance in the circuit. When more light fell on the photo resistor, it reduced the resistance in the circuit and this made…

Can a computer predict the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament, called March Madness by fans and the NCAA corporate juggernaut alike? If so, Science 2.0 will save you some time: third seed Florida will be your national champion. The prediction is from Georgia Tech's Logistic Regression/Markov Chain (LRMC) college basketball ranking system, a computerized model that has correctly chosen the men's basketball national champ in three of the last five years.  The LRMC predicts that Florida, Louisville, Indiana and Gonzaga are most likely to advance to the Final Four in Atlanta, with…

Being Pope may mean good things in the afterlife but here on Earth, it doesn't count for a lot on the Internet. On the day Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, over 600 domain names were registered by cybersquatters. They must be evangelicals. Even mistaken names like Francis I were taken. So Popefrancis.org is not available to the Roman Pontiff, along with most of the country-specific domains, like popefrancis.fr. Even popefrancisi.com was scooped by someone. Oddly, at the time of this writing, his Argentina country-specific domain was still available - so if you want to…

Iconic RSS Feed Icon I have been a regular user of Google Reader, and I was quite disappointed when I got to know about it's impending shutdown. Google Reader has been my information dashboard consisting of science and technology blogs for a long time.  I am sure, like me, many information professionals and scientists have benefited from regular commentaries of analysts via blogs. Now, I have to look for an alternative which will be equally cool or better and free. So far I haven't found a good one and I take this as an opportunity to share my thoughts on building a RSS reader…

In this article you will learn how to build an optical theremin using a 555 Timer IC. You will learn the functions of the pins on the 555 chip that are used in this build. You will learn that when the 555 is in astable mode, the output from pin 3 is a continuous stream of pulses called a square wave that can be heard on a speaker as a tone. Finally, after you have built the optical theremin you will learn how to play the instrument. A theremin is a musical instrument that is played without actually touching the instrument. The original theremin used radio frequency interference caused by the…

The 555 Timer IC was introduced by a company called Signetics (later bought out by Philips) in 1972 and was designed by Hans R. Camenzind in 1971. The 555 chip has 25 transistors, 15 resistors and 2 diodes in an 8 pin DIP (Dual In-line Package) and looks like a square bug with eight legs. It has a notch at the top and Pin 1 is in the top left corner. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Signetics_NE555N.JPG)

The 555 Timer IC was introduced by a company called Signetics (later bought out by Philips) in 1972 and was designed by Hans R. Camenzind in 1971. The 555 chip has 25 transistors, 15 resistors and 2 diodes in an 8 pin DIP (Dual In-line Package) and looks like a square bug with eight legs. It has a notch at the top and Pin 1 is in the top left corner. http://www.instructables.com/file/FED4KHEH5IRV0NI (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Signetics_NE555N.JPG)

As network carriers debate the next Ethernet standard, and whether transmission speeds of 400 gigabit per second or 1 terabit per second should be the norm, engineers are working on new ways to squeeze next-generation performance out of current-generation systems.  A team from AT&T has devised a new technique that enables tuning of the modulation spectral efficiency and allows 400 Gb/s signals to be sent over today's 100 gigahertz-grid optical networks over ultra-long distances. Spectral efficiency is the information rate that can be transmitted over a given bandwidth, and measures…

Researchers have developed a cloud-computing platform,  the RoboEarth Cloud Engine, that allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers for tasks and learning. This continues their work towards creating an Internet for robots. The new platform extends earlier work on allowing robots to share knowledge with other robots via a WWW-style database, greatly speeding up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks. The developed Platform as a Service (PaaS) for robots allows to perform…