Did You Know? Were Wright brothers first fliers?

In fact, there were other aviation pioneers before them.”

The story of the first flight is one that every American school child knows by heart: The Wright Brothers flew their craft "The Flyer" in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, thus making history and ushering in a transportation mechanism that would change the world.

Two years, four months and three days before the successful flights of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, a birdlike monoplane took to the air at early dawn on August 14, 1901, near Bridgeport, Connecticut, carrying its inventor and builder, Gustav Whitehead, a distance of approximately a half mile.. He was a German immigrant to America and his "Number 21" and "Number 22" airplanes made those flights.

Making synthetic life

Think of a living being, completely different in structural organization and behavior from any of the existing species on earth! You are imagining a monster, right? Actually, I am not indicating to such a creature to think about. Well, it's something about synthetic biology and creation of artificial life. If a single cell can be synthesized, why cannot be a multicellular being then? However, things are not so easy as they seem to be. Today, we will focus mainly on synthetic biology, what it has to offer for the benefit of mankind and a slice of artificial life.

Synthetic biology came to its modern phase with the work of J. Craig Venter. To start a life form, no matter how simple it is, you must have the blueprint, DNA (Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid) in place that means inside the cell. At the initial stage of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology, some gene segments were being inserted in microorganisms and the effect of that insertion was observed through the expression of the proteins that are encoded by those gene segments. In 2003, the researchers of J. Craig Venter Institute created a synthetic version of the bacteriophage phiX 174. Later, in 2007, they were able to transform one species of bacteria to another by genome transplantation which is performed by taking the whole genetic material from one organism and inserting it into another one in place of the regular genetic material of the latter one. Very recently, the scientists of that institute have developed methods to synthesize and assemble the complete genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. This is, indeed, a breakthrough in synthetic biology as it gives a hint to succeed in creating artificial life forms just because the blueprint which is the genetic material can be made artificially! Although it is just copying something what really exists from before, it will encourage scientists to think about synthesizing genes having, may be, totally new functions. This dream is very rationale as synthetic biology takes into account the different disciplines of science including Biology, Chemistry and Engineering where engineering is being integrated into biological science and ultimately helping to make life models in the field called systems biotechnology or systems biological engineering.

The ultimate goals of synthetic biology include designing and building of engineered life forms that process information, modify chemicals, produce fuel, energy, food and maintain and enhance human health and environment we live in. To serve these purposes, artificial life forms can be useful. Artificial life is something that leads us to the domain of life-as-it-could-be from life-as-we-know-it. With all its possibilities, the ability of synthetic biology is thought to have a major effect in fifty years of time. Artificial microbes can be made targeted for serving specific purposes like producing gasoline or degrading many toxic chemicals. Moreover, synthetic biology has to offer new and improved diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, biosensors and many more.

Nevertheless, the creation of new life forms is not without its fear and/or limitations. There is a concern that artificial life may threat other existing life forms on earth including humans and can also be used as biological warfare. However, the first premonition is probably misplaced because life is so robust and has evolved so strongly over time; it is not so easy to be threatened by some artificial life forms. Again, the second threat of using it as a biological warfare can be prevented just by good will of the scientists and the mass people. At the end, it seems that intensive research on synthetic and systems biology will definitely work for the betterment of mankind.

Samsung's economy smartphones

Whenever we think of Samsung mobile phones, expensive high-end smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S or S II come to our mind.

But Samsung also has good smartphones for those who don't want to spend a lot of money on phones.

There are few Samsung touchscreen phones available in the market.

For the music lovers Samsung has Champ and Champ Duos with powerful speakers and longer battery support with up to 16GB of memory support. With social networking features, Champ and Champ Duos cost Tk 5,690 and Tk 6,790 respectively.

Then there is Samsung Corby II with Wi-Fi feature, the phone has built in SNS links, document viewer, active syn with customisable home screen. The Corby II is available at Tk 9,990.

For smart look Samsung has dual SIM touch phone Star II with 3.2” display and metal finish sleek body. It features Favorite Buddy list, TouchWiz3.0, Social Hub, Active sync, Google sync, Document Viewer and more. The phone is priced at Tk 11,990.

Then there is Galaxy Pop form Galaxy series, at an affordable price of Tk 15,500.

The phone gives access to unlimited entertainment through over 150,000 applications from Android Market and Samsung Apps.

Plant Renaissance Cycads not 'living fossils'

Once thought to be the last remaining members of a plant lineage that went extinct with the dinosaurs, modern-day cycads are now believed to have diverged from a more recent common ancestor.

Although cycad populations suffered major losses about 65 million years ago when dinosaurs their once primary dispersal agents went extinct, the plants later experienced a renaissance due to a global climate shift, a new study suggests. Living cycads diverged from an ancestral species that flourished around 12 million years ago, not from older dinosaur-era relatives, an international team of researchers reports online October 20 in Science.

To estimate the divergence time of living cycads, researchers used a technique called molecular clock analysis. First they measured the genetic differences separating 200 living cycad species. Since certain genetic changes typically accrue at a fixed rate once species radiate from a common ancestor, scientists were able to use this cycad DNA data, in conjunction with the fossil record, to predict a much more recent divergence.

Will Steve Jobs' final vendetta haunt Google?

Google can only hope that Steve Jobs' final vendetta doesn't haunt the internet search leader from his grave.

The depths of Jobs' antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson's authorised biography of Apple's co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs' long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death.

The biography drips with Jobs' vitriol as he discusses his belief that Google stole from Apple's iPhone to build many of the features in Google's Android software for rival phones.

It's clear that the perceived theft represented an unforgiveable act of betrayal to Jobs, who had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and had welcomed Google's CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, to be on Apple's board.

Jobs retaliated with a profane manifesto during a 2010 conversation with his chosen biographer. Isaacson wrote that he never saw Jobs angrier in any of their conversations, which covered a wide variety of emotional topics during a two-year period.

After equating Android to "grand theft" of the iPhone, Jobs lobbed a series of grenades that may blow a hole in Google's image as an innovative company on a crusade to make the world a better place.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs told Isaacson. "I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty."

Jobs then used a crude word for defecation to describe Android and other products outside of search.

Android now represents one of the chief threats to the iPhone. Although iPhones had a head start and still draw huge lines when new models go on sale, Android devices sold twice as well in the second quarter.

According to Gartner, Android's market share grew 2 1/2 times to 43 percent, compared with 17 percent a year earlier. The iPhone's grew as well, but by a smaller margin to 18 percent, from 14 percent.

Both Google and Apple declined comment to The Associated Press when asked about Jobs' remarks.

Jobs' attack is troubling for Google on several levels.

It suggests that Apple, which has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision, may try to derail Android in court, even if Google obtains more patent protection through its proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of phone maker Motorola Mobility Inc. The derision comes across as a bitter pill for Page and Brin, who have hailed Jobs as one of their idols. It also appears to contradict Schmidt's repeated assertions that he remained on friendly terms with Jobs even after he resigned from Apple's board in 2009.

Most of all, Google should be worried whether the Android brand is damaged by the withering criticism of a revered figure whose public esteem seems to have risen as friends, colleagues and customers paid tribute over the past few weeks.

"The words of cultural icons have a lot of power after death," veteran technology analyst Rob Enderle said. "This almost sounds like a spiritual leader declaring a jihad on Android as his dying wish."

Apple fans tend to be fiercely loyal, making it more feasible to envision an anti-Android movement taking shape like some kind of political protest, Enderle said.

Can Romance Be Reduced to Pronouns?

Behavioral scientists have long known that humans, whether in the schoolyard or in a dimly lighted bar, have a tendency to subconsciously mimic the sounds, style and movement of others. Recent research, however, shows that this mimicry also extends to how we speak and write. Even the least important words we choose can say a lot about us.

In one unusual experiment, 187 men and women gathered on the Northwestern University campus to take part in several four-minute speed dates. The couples talked about their respective majors and where they grew up, but none of that interested the University of Texas at Austin psychologist James W. Pennebaker. Instead, his focus was on the barely noticed personal pronouns (I, you, me), articles (the, a), prepositions (for, of, on), conjunctions (but, and) and other small words. These commonly used so-called function words, about 180 in all, Pennebaker says, are processed rapidly and subconsciously. And our use of them can reveal, among other things, whether a romance will work out or how well two people work together.

In the speed-dating study, Pennebaker and his colleague Molly Ireland found that couples who used similar levels of personal pronouns, prepositions and even articles were three times as likely to want to date each other compared with those whose language styles didn’t match.() The metric, called language style matching (L.S.M.), was also better at predicting who didn’t make a love connection than the individuals themselves, several of whom showed interest in a partner who did not reciprocate.() “It does better than humans themselves who are in the interaction,” said Pennebaker, author of the new book “The Secret Life of Pronouns.” “Some of the most revealing words we use are the shortest and most forgettable.”

The metric has other applications. An analysis of instant-message exchanges between dating couples used L.S.M. to correctly predict who would be together after three months and who wouldn’t.() More recently, researchers also found that groups with the highest levels of language mimicry performed the best on various tasks. Pennebaker’s team even analyzed the letters and writing of famous couples, including the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In the final, tumultuous years of their marriage, their already-different writing styles became even less synchronized.

Synchrony, however, does not always mean that two people like each other. Analyses of arguments, like the volatile exchange several years ago between the talk-show hosts Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, showed that the women used astonishingly similar speech patterns when they were arguing.() To let people see for themselves, Pennebaker offers an online diagnostic in which individuals can copy and paste their own I.M. conversations. I did this with an argument I was having with a friend, and we had 88 percent L.S.M. — daytime talk show territory.() But given the volume of e-mail, texts and Facebook posts we write, synchrony opens a new frontier into our most personal thoughts. Even the 140 character variety.

China Reins In Entertainment and Blogging

BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”

Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.

Movie Review Anonymous (2011)

“Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad.
First things first. The film’s premise is that the plays and poems commonly attributed to William Shakespeare are actually the work of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This notion, sometimes granted the unwarranted dignity of being called a theory, is hardly new. It represents a hoary form of literary birtherism that has persisted for a century or so, in happy defiance of reason and evidence. The arrival of “Anonymous” has roused Shakespeareans more learned than I to the weary task of re-debunking — in the past two weeks The New York Times has published both an Op-Ed piece and a Sunday magazine Riff opposing the Oxfordian position — and to their cogent arguments I can offer only a small corrective. This is a Roland Emmerich film. (At least I assume it is, though I guess, in the spirit of the enterprise, I should be open to other possibilities. Joe Swanberg? Brett Ratner? Zhang Yimou? It all seems eerily plausible, once you start to think about it.)

Cruel poachers kill Giant stag

The stunning beast was left to die a "painful and lingering death" after being shot three times.

Experts believed the creature, which already had 19 points on its antlers despite not being fully mature, was set to be a contender for the title of Britain's largest land animal.

The Giant, which had suffered shots to its back and belly, was found dead last weekend.

Local landowners said he had only appeared in the Shirwell area of North Devon in the past month or so.

They added they had done their best to keep the stag a secret for fear of trophy hunters tracking him down.

But news of the beautiful creature soon spread and for the past few weeks the area had been overrun with poachers and deer spotters, all trying to get a glimpse or a shot at the stag.

Vet Peter Green, an advisor to the British Deer Society who examined the animal, said: "He had undoubtedly suffered considerably from these wounds before dying slowly. He was not in his prime.

Friday, October 21, 2011 StarTech Samsung, Google unveil 'Ice Cream Sandwich' phone

South Korea's Samsung Electronics Wednesday unveiled its new smartphone that runs on Google's latest Android operating system, the latest weapon in its battle to topple Apple's iPhone.

The launch of the "Galaxy Nexus", which comes days a after the new iPhone 4S went on sale, was initially scheduled for October 11 but was delayed following the death of Apple chief Steve Jobs as a gesture of respect.

Samsung -- the world's number two mobile phone maker -- and Apple are also engaged in a series of patent lawsuits over the technology and design of smartphones and tablet computers.

"We are very proud of this milestone," Samsung's Mobile Communications Business president JK Shin said as the new phone was unveiled in Hong Kong.

The Galaxy Nexus is the first device to use the new Android "Ice Cream Sandwich" -- a title that continues Google's tradition of naming its operating systems after desserts in alphabetical order.

The firms said the new handset offers easier and quicker Internet browsing, an improved camera and enhanced security using face recognition technology.

It also features "Android Beam", a function that allows content to be shared between two devices by simply touching them together.

The smartphone will be available in the United States, Europe and Asia from November, before being gradually rolled out to other markets. Its price was not announced.

The launch of the Galaxy Nexus come as Apple's iPhone 4S has already notched up sales of more than four million units since launching in seven countries on Friday.

The Apple handset will be available in 22 other countries, including much of Europe, by the end of October, and more than 70 countries by the end of 2011.