Technology
On the road to true Open Publishing, where taxpayer money isn't used to pay to publish or to read already taxpayer-funded studies at all, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing (SCOAP) in Particle Physics has set a new waypoint, and Oxford University Press has signed up Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (PTEP) for this new transparent model of open access, where members can see how the taxpayer money is being spent.
Oxford University Press is not jumping into freeing science just yet; they have 5,500 employees in 50 countries worldwide and 6,000 new…
Is your decision-making suspect? Do you continually date strippers or bad boys who are 'getting their band together' and wish you could instead replace your own judgment with a prosthesis?
Maybe one day. Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have created a prosthetic device which is capable of restoring decision-making due to reduced capacity due from brain disease or injury - in non-human primates, anyway.
The scientists used an electronic prosthetic system to tap into existing circuitry in the brain at the cellular level and record the firing patterns of multiple…
How cheaply can you build a supercomputer? A group from the University of Southampton just made one using 64 Raspberry Pi ARM GNU/Linux boxes ($25 each) and Lego blocks. The machine, named "Iridis-Pi" after the University's Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet.
The team was led by Professor Simon Cox and included Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O'Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment. Professor Cox's son, six-year-old James Cox,…
Drought across the United States has reduced substantially the expected yield of corn and soybean fields for the fall 2012 U.S. harvests. With reduced yield, prices have risen rapidly for these crops that are widely-used food and feed ingredients, huge international agricultural trade commodities, and important food aid essentials.
With the price increases, persons around the world have expressed concerns that a situation similar to 2008 is about to occur. In 2008, high food prices led to social, economic, and political instability – hunger, export restrictions, riots, and the overthrow of…
Hurricane Isaac may have disappointed the news networks and the federal government - it was declared a state-of-emergency before the first rain drop fell and Sean Penn was not roaming the streets of New Orleans with a shotgun to prevent Republican-created zombies - but it was a good test run for some new technology; “terrestrial lidar” or “T-lidar”.
"Lidar" stands for "light detection and ranging." Where "radar" uses radio waves as a form of measurement, "lidar" uses light. Terrestrial lidar, sometimes also called “terrestrial laser scanning”(TLS) uses a sensor that emits laser pulses…
It used to be that a species name was only official if it was printed in a journal - and the print was quite literal, it had to be a print journal.
Why do zoologists hate trees? They don't any more, it seems. Animal species publications is now allowed by a new vote of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) today. The ICZN considers itself among the most rigorous in scientific publication and the task of keeping information straight on animal names is immense and critical, as almost all data on the living world is linked through organismal names. Animals…
During a recent American political convention, two networks carried real-time Twitter 'data', what they called a meter, based on the commentary on the social media service. While election polls have not been accurate for the last few decades, some technologists believe Twitter can be.
As evidence, they say the have devised a means to predict the outcome of other election-based processes - TV talent shows - through their big data analysis of tweets. Analysis of Twitter is not new, it is built into their API, but Fabio Ciulla from Northeastern University in Boston, USA and colleagues say…
Newswire |
Boston Scientific Corporation has received CE Mark approval for use of its PRECISION(TM) PLUS SPINAL CORD STIMULATOR (SCS) System in patients with the system and are in need for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) head-only scans. The PRECISION PLUS SCS System is the world's first rechargeable SCS device. This approval provides physicians with an additional diagnostic option for patients with chronic intractable pain.
"As spinal cord stimulation becomes more widespread for control of severe disabling refractory pain, it is great to know that -- should the need arise -- head-only MRI scans…
In the last few months there have been two examples where we have seen brand new biotech crops that are tolerant to relatively old herbicides. It feels a little bit like time travel. Dow AgroSciences is developing 2,4-D tolerance trait for corn. That is an herbicide which was first released in 1946. Monsanto is developing a dicamba tolerance trait. That herbicide was first commercialized in 1967. Both have recently moved to the USDA comment period stage for their regulatory status.
Ok, going back 46 or 67 years isn't as exciting as traveling through space and…
Hank |
Don't like Paul Ryan? You're not alone. When he was an outsider, Democrats gushed over how rational and amazing he was but now that he is a Republican Vice-Presidential contender, all they can talk about is how poorly he dresses.
His critics are in luck, they now have a fantasy even more fantastical than the plots of "The West Wing" - the chance to pick their own V.P. that can lose in November. Casual games company Games2win has created the 'Romney VEEP Dating' Game to help players make their own choice by "speed dating" a short list of candidates and giving power to…