Lust For Warmth Cozy penguin huddle

Greed is good for penguins that huddle together to avoid Antarctica's icy weather.
According to a new study, penguin groups can maximize everyone's heat when individual birds act selfishly, huddling in ways that keep them toastiest.
"Even if penguins are only selfish, only trying to find the best spot for themselves and not thinking about their community, there is still equality in the amount of time that each penguin spends exposed to the wind," study researcher Francois Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who normally studies fluid dynamics, said in a statement.

Source: Live Science

Light & Genetics Neurons from Stem Cell

Researchers and patients look forward to the day when stem cells might be used to replace dying brain cells in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Scientists are currently able to make neurons and other brain cells from stem cells, but getting these neurons to properly function when transplanted to the host has proven to be more difficult. Now, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have found a way to stimulate stem cell-derived neurons to direct cognitive function after transplantation to an existing neural network.
The study was published November 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"We showed for the first time that embryonic stem cells that we've programmed to become neurons can integrate into existing brain circuits and fire patterns of electrical activity that are critical for consciousness and neural network activity," said Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study. Lipton is director of Sanford-Burnham's Del E. Webb Neuroscience, Aging, and Stem Cell Research Center and a clinical neurologist.
The trick turned out to be light. Lipton and his team -- including Juan Piña-Crespo, Ph.D., D.V.M., Maria Talantova, M.D., Ph.D., and other colleagues at Sanford-Burnham and Stanford University -- transplanted human stem cell-derived neurons into a rodent hippocampus, the brain's information-processing center. Then they specifically activated the transplanted neurons with optogenetic stimulation, a relatively new technique that combines light and genetics to precisely control cellular behavior in living tissues or animals.

Source: Science Daily

Nano Converter Power from light and heat

A University of Texas at Arlington physics professor has helped create a hybrid nanomaterial that can be used to convert light and thermal energy into electrical current, surpassing earlier methods that used either light or thermal energy, but not both.
Working with Louisiana Tech University assistant professor Long Que, UT Arlington associate physics professor Wei Chen and graduate students Santana Bala Lakshmanan and Chang Yang synthesized a combination of copper sulfide nanoparticles and single-walled carbon nanotubes.
The team used the nanomaterial to build a prototype thermoelectric generator that they hope can eventually produce milliwatts of power. Paired with microchips, the technology could be used in devices such as self-powering sensors, low-power electronic devices and implantable biomedical micro-devices, Chen said.
"If we can convert both light and heat to electricity, the potential is huge for energy production," Chen said. "By increasing the number of the micro-devices on a chip, this technology might offer a new and efficient platform to complement or even replace current solar cell technology."
In lab tests, the new thin-film structure showed increases by as much at 80 percent in light absorption when compared to single-walled nanotube thin-film devices alone, making it a more efficient generator.
Copper sulfide is also less expensive and more environment-friendly than the noble metals used in similar hybrids.
In October, the journal Nanotechnology published a paper on the work called "Optical thermal response of single-walled carbon nanotube-copper sulfide nanoparticle hybrid nanomaterials." In it, researchers also say also found that they could enhance the thermal and optical switching effects of the hybrid nanomaterial as much as ten times by using asymmetric illumination, rather than symmetric illumination.
Coauthors on the Nanotech-nology paper from Louisiana Tech include Yi-Hsuan Tseng, Yuan He and Que, all of the school's Institute for Micromanufacturing.
"Dr. Chen's research with nanomaterials is an important advancement with the potential for far-reaching applications," said Pamela Jansma, dean of the UT Arlington College of Science. "This is the kind of work that demonstrates the value of a research university in North Texas and beyond."
Chen is currently receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop nanoparticle self-lighting photodynamic therapy for use against breast and prostate cancers. In 2010, he was the first to publish results in the journal Nanomedicine demonstrating that near infrared light could be used to heat copper sulfide nanoparticles for photothermal therapy in cancer treatment, which destroys cancer cells with heat between 41 and 45 degrees Celsius.
Next month, the Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology will publish Chen's work successfully coupling gold nanoparticles with the copper sulfide nanoparticles for the photothermal therapy. Such a material would be less costly and potentially more effective than using gold particles alone, Chen said.

Technicolor research and development centre

An engineer performs a demonstration of a drone used to previsualise camera effects during the press conference inaugurating the new Technicolor research and development centre in Cesson-Sevigne near the central western city of Rennes in France on November 22. Photo: AFP

Nokia litigates against Blackberry-maker over patents

Young IT professionals, with the help of sanitation experts will go for an intensive brainstorming and programming marathon session to develop innovative IT applications to tackle the poverty in Bangladesh.
More than 150 participants, mostly IT experts and university students have already registered to participate in the two-day Sanitation Hackathon from November 30, 2012 at the Ruposhi Bangla hotel in Dhaka.
The event is being organised by Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank.
This intensive coding marathon is aimed at finding innovative IT solutions to address the lack of access to basic sanitation by 2.6 billion people in the world. The Sanitation Hackathon follows last year's Water Hackathon which was organised by the World Bank.
The overall goal of the Sanitation Hackathon is to form a community of IT professionals and sanitation experts that will collaborate in future to address challenges in the sanitation sector.
Lack of access to basic sanitation causes the death of approximately 4,000 children a day and billions of dollars in economic losses. Using new technology like data maps, mobile games, SMS services, crowd sourcing and opening up data can also help to solve various other development problems.
Registration form and details are available at its website www.hackathonbd.com.
The Sanitation Hackathon will take place simultaneously on the same
weekend in Lahore, Jakarta, Cape
Town, Dakar, Lima, Manila, Dar es Salaam, Pune, various locations in
North America, Hartford, Helsinki and London.

Samsung Galaxy products infringe Apple patent: Dutch court

A Dutch court ruled on Wednesday that some of Samsung Electronics' Galaxy smartphones and tablets infringe an Apple patent in the latest round of the two firms' worldwide battle.
The court ordered Samsung Electronics to pay Apple damages, determined by how much profit it has made from the sales.
The patent dispute concerns the Android operating system versions 2.2.1 to 3.0 used on Samsung's Galaxy tablets and smartphones, the court said.
Samsung and Apple, the world's top two smartphone makers, are locked in patent disputes in at least ten countries as they vie to dominate the lucrative mobile market and win over customers with their latest gadgets.
Samsung, the world's top maker of smartphones, infringed Apple patents to make its smartphones and tablets, a US trade panel judge said in a preliminary decision issued last month.
Samsung won a court case last month in the Netherlands, when a Dutch court ruled the company did not infringe an Apple patent by using certain multi-touch techniques on some of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablet computers.

Microsoft CEO defends its innovation record, financial results

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer defended his company's record on innovation and financial performance at the annual shareholders' meeting, but conceded that he should have moved faster to get into the booming tablet market dominated by Apple Inc's iPad.
Bill Gates, co-founder and now chairman of the world's largest software company, was one of the first to champion tablet-sized devices more than 10 years ago, but Microsoft failed to come up with a product that worked as well as the iPad. Gates was silent throughout the meeting, attended by about 450 shareholders.
"We're innovating on the seam between software and hardware," said Ballmer, asked why his company had fallen behind rival Apple. "Maybe we should have done that earlier."
A month ago, Microsoft launched the Surface tablet - its first own-brand computer - but has not revealed sales figures.
In the tablet market, "we see nothing but a sea of upside," Ballmer said, an acknowledgement that until now Microsoft has effectively had zero presence in the tablet market.
"I feel pretty good about our level of innovation," he added.
Ballmer said smartphones running Microsoft's new Windows software were selling four times as much as they did at this time last year. Microsoft has never given sales numbers of Windows phones, primarily made by Nokia, Samsung and HTC.
Windows currently has 2 to 4 percent of the global smartphone market, according to various independent data providers. Its overall market share will not likely grow in proportion to its own sales, given that sales of other smartphones - mostly running Google's Android system - are also growing quickly.
Ballmer, flanked by Gates and Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein, was asked by several shareholders to explain Microsoft's lackluster share price, which has been stuck for a decade, and has been outperformed by Apple and Google Inc stock in recent years."I understand your comment," he told one shareholder. He went on to explain that Microsoft had "done a phenomenal job of driving product volumes" and was focusing on profiting from that growth.
He suggested that whether investors recognized that value at any given time was out of his hands.
"The stock market's kind of a funny thing," he said, adding that Microsoft had handed back $10 billion in dividends and share buybacks to investors in the last fiscal year.
Several shareholders at the meeting in Bellevue, an upscale suburb of Seattle, complimented the executives on how they had grown and managed the company.
Microsoft's shares rose almost 18 percent during fiscal 2012, which ended in June of this year, compared with a 3 percent rise in the Standard & Poor's 500.
Despite such fluctuations, Microsoft's shares stand around the same level they did 10 years ago.

Facebook nixes rumours on copyright shift

Facebook is telling its users to ignore rumors spreading on the social network that they need to post a statement to protect their copyrights of their comments and other materials.
"There is a rumor circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users' information or the content they post to the site," Facebook said in a "fact check" notice on its website Monday.
"This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been."
The notice came after the copyright notice went viral -- suggesting that a posted statement was needed to protect copyrights on Facebook. The hoax had been around in the past but resurfaced after Facebook announced changes to its privacy policies last week.
Users began repeating these posts, which stated, "In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my
copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings,
professional photos and videos, etc...
This will place them under protection of copyright laws."
Warnings about the so-called "chain letter hoax" were issued as far back as June from the security firm Sophos and others.
And noted technology blogger Robert Scoble poured scorn Monday on those falling for the trick, saying on his Facebook page: "If you are posting about copyright on Facebook and you haven't done your research you are an idiot."

Neutrino - gate keeper of the Universe

Out of the hundreds of elementary particles floating around in the Universe, surprisingly the elusive neutrino holds clues to some of the most profound questions in astronomy. These chargeless, near-massless, structureless particles zipping around at nearly the speed of light have lately been in the headlines for violating the cosmic speed limit of 300,000 kilometers per second. Neutrinos (Italian for “little neutral ones”) come in three “flavors”: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino.
The number of neutrinos moving freely throughout the Universe since the Big Bang is staggering, about 300 million in every cubic meter. The Sun and supernovae (exploding stars that have reached the end of their life) are the primary sources of neutrinos reaching us. Every second over 500 trillion solar neutrinos enter every square meter of the Earth's surface exposed to the Sun. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, about trillion neutrinos will pass through your body. But don't panic, they are inert and harmless; just “little bits of spin-energy that have got detached,” according to astrophysicist Arthur Eddington.
Why should we care about these furtive particles? Strange as it may seem, the intrinsic properties of neutrinos make them an influential player in the field of cosmology. They carry a wealth of information of great cosmic significance, about the high-energy events that produced them, deep secrets of the cosmos from distant galaxies and the remote past. They are essential in understanding what happened in the briefest moments after the Big Bang. They can tell us why the Universe contains more matter than antimatter. If they have mass, even if it is miniscule, it will be the dominant form of matter in the Universe.
Neutrinos act as telescopes and allow us to take a peek into the interior of the Sun. They are critical in understanding stellar evolution and dynamics of supernovae where heavy elements are produced. They are living witnesses of star birth and their violent death. Just like red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation, neutrinos have a tale to tell about the Universe of which they are part. Detection of neutrinos, therefore, is crucial if we want to have a handle on all of these and other aspects of cosmology.
It is notoriously difficult to detect these snippets; it is like looking for a needle in a giant haystack. Absence of charge makes them unresponsive to electromagnetic interaction. Lack of internal structure (no quarks) prohibits them from taking part in strong interaction. They cut through the Earth unhindered and move off to outer space. Only a slab of lead several light years thick will be able to stop these ephemeral particles. They announce their presence only through weak interaction associated with the radioactive break-up of a nucleus.
Occasionally neutrinos do interact with matter making it possible to capture a few of them if the detectors are large enough. Also known as “neutrino telescope,” the detector is a huge tank filled with large amount of liquid such as chlorine-rich cleaning fluid or heavy water. The liquid increases the chances for particle interaction. The detectors must be placed deep underground, beneath a mountain or inside a mine, so that only neutrinos can reach them. All other particles coming from outer space that could befuddle the detectors are blocked by the thick layers of overlying rocks.
The earliest detector built in 1967 is buried nearly a mile deep in a gold mine at Homestake, South Dakota. It was expected that out of the trillions of neutrinos that will reach the detector, the capture rate would be at least one per day. After more than two decades, it was found that on the average it trapped only one neutrino every three days. A more recent detector buried in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada revealed that the neutrinos on their way to the Earth can change flavor. The Homestake detector was tuned for only one flavor, the electron neutrino; hence the low count rate.
Clearly, the problem of detecting neutrinos is of immense proportions. We still have “miles to go” before we can say we are on the verge of solving the neutrino puzzle. However, the detection in 1987 of more than the expected number of neutrinos from a supernova explosion 168,000 light years away by underground telescopes in Japan and Ohio has infused new life into neutrino physics. Physicists are now more than ever inspired to build some of the most sophisticated detectors to find and unmask the guise of this gate keeper of the Universe.

The mobile computer boom

Analysts and industry pundits forecast that the notebook market, which has been growing faster than the desktop market for the past three years, is expected to overtake the desktop market by Q4 FY2011-12. A fall in prices, large deals from governments and institutions, and demand from consumers and sectors such as education are expected to help the notebook numbers.
According to both IDC and Gartner, Q3 FY2010-11 saw notebook volumes rise, and for the first time a million-plus notebooks were sold in India in a single quarter. The research agencies put the notebook numbers at around 1.11 million. As per Gartner, desktops grew by 5 percent in Q3 FY2010-11 whereas notebooks grew by 41 percent as compared to the same quarter last year.
“The last quarter has been historic in many ways,” states Gopal Swaminathan, Director, Sales and Marketing, Intel India. “I remember in 2006 we were striving hard to do a million mobile processors in India for the entire year. The market has grown nearly four times for notebooks. The demand is driven by all sectors and a very buoyant consumer market, which is preferring mobile computers.”
Enterprises in India, both small and big, are in the midst of a technology refresh cycle. “Notebook numbers are helped by the fact that many SMB and enterprise entities are replacing their desktops with notebooks,” says Rajeev Mehta, MD, Zest Systems, Delhi.

Entry-level notebook prices have dropped below the Rs. 25,000 mark; this has helped break the ice with new customers. Acer, which has driven new price-points in notebooks for nearly a decade, created a new price bracket of Rs. 20,000 with its e-machines brand. Explains S Rajendran, CMO, Acer India, “For every thousand-rupee bracket in the sub-Rs. 25,000 market, you are creating a new set of aspirants who want to buy a computer, or who are willing to buy a notebook instead of a desktop.”
The drop in notebook prices has been helped by the drop in the prices of the building blocks that make a notebook. According to Display Research, which tracks key components such as LCD screens, the average price difference between mobile and desktop TFT screens was down to 2 percent in Q2 FY2010-11 from around 16 percent in 2008. Even in hard disk drives and memory, the price difference is less than 20 percent now—three years ago it used to be nearly double. “It’s simple. With notebook volumes growing, the prices of the components are also bound to come down,” points out Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager, India and Saarc, Seagate.
All this has resulted in a noticeable change in a number of large government tenders; these were traditionally for desktops, or notebooks plus desktops, but now they are mostly for notebooks. For example, the Kerala IT Schools tender, which was originally drafted for 20,000 notebooks and 50,000 desktops, was changed to an all-notebook order. The first tender for 15,000 netbooks and 12,000 notebooks was opened in early November. The next round is for 50,000 notebooks, and is expected to be completed around early February 2011.
Similarly, 17 states have earmarked purchases that will end up in the sale of almost 6,00,000 notebooks to the government and education sectors over the next nine months.
Credit needs to be given to the PC vendors who tried to grow the market by introducing niche products and models targeting specific user communities. In addition, vendors have been positioning notebooks as a fashion accessory, and investing in promotional campaigns with fashion brands and events. HP was a sponsor of Miss India 2010, and Dell launched a series of notebooks with shades matching the colors of nail-polish maker OPI.
“The launch of multi-color models complemented by aggressive promotions and discounted bundling schemes augmented consumer PC spend, especially in the portables segment,” comments Sumanta Mukherjee, Lead PC Analyst, IDC India. “Vendors have been quick to introduce new models that appeal to a young generation of PC buyers who are purchasing notebooks.”
Despite the home desktop market getting a new lease of life with the introduction of all-in-one PCs a year back, the volumes are said to be far from inspiring. Vendors have noted that notebooks are being purchased in place of the traditional multimedia home desktop. “Many first-time buyers are comfortable buying notebooks, especially young urban couples who are sharing a notebook at home,” says Amar Babu, Managing Director, Lenovo India.
Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner India, predicts that in the second half of 2011 the Indian PC market will witness more notebooks being shipped than desktops. “In 2010, the ratio between notebooks and desktops for the first two quarters was 34:66; by Q3 FY2010-11 it had become 40:60. In India many first-time buyers are buying a notebook as their first PC. With value products and competitive prices, vendors are able to meet the expectations of price-sensitive buyers, and this is accelerating the growth of notebooks.”