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Tech Blog | Email this | CommentsThis wouldn't be the first time that a scientist, and a relatively huge team, have tried to bring back an extinct animal. Furthermore, it isn't the first time that a Woolly Mammoth has been the extinct animal of choice. But for one scientist, those previous attempts mean nothing, because within the next five years, Dr. Akira Iritani wholeheartedly believes that he can bring back the giant animal.
Dr. Iritani plans on travelling to a Russian-based Mammoth research facility this summer, where he will try to acquire a working tissue sample. Iritani says that as long as the sample is three square centimeters, he should be able to retrieve what he needs to create life from the sample. He will insert the cells into an egg of an African elephant, where the gestation period is said to be last up to 600 days.
Iritani will be using a method, while slightly altered to fit his precise needs, that was originally used by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology 16 years previously. This method successfully cloned a mouse that had been frozen for 16 years. Obviously 5,000 years, which the Woolly Mammoth has been extinct, is drastically different than 16 years, but Iritani believes the "technical problems" have been overcome, and therefore it is finally possible to bring back a Woolly Mammoth.
Dr. Akira Iritani is a professor at Kyoto University. If he succeeds in his endeavor, Iritani plans on studying the Woolly Mammoth's genes and ecology to figure out why the species became extinct.
[via PCMag]
Continue reading Quadrocopters learn to build things, when will humans learn to fear them? (video)
Quadrocopters learn to build things, when will humans learn to fear them? (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkHacked Gadgets | TheDmel (YouTube) | Email this | CommentsWe have seen all sorts of hacks for the Kinect since the motion tracking gesture controller launched for the Xbox 360. The thing is really cool and has turned out to be quite the hackable little device for people to take and use for all sorts of things. So far, most of those hacks haven't been anything that I am interested in.
A geek going by Demize2010 over on YouTube has posted up a video of him using the Kinect with the Wii nunchuck and remote for playing some Call of Duty. The movement of the player is controlled with the normal Wii motion controls with the Kinect picking up the gestures to control other things.
Now for the part that will really blow your geeky little mind, the version of Call of Duty the dude is playing is running on the PC. He hacked the Wii controllers to work for motion, aiming, and shooting and the Kinect to do things like lean and others. Talk about a geeky mashup of gaming goodness.
Via PC World
Scientists have reportedly known that lightning emits radiation within it for quite some time, but unfortunately for those scientists they have been unable to take any kind of x-ray photographs of the event. It simply moves too quickly, and up until recently, there simply hasn't been an x-ray camera that was able to take the necessary shots to capture lightning in mid-strike. That is, until now. A giant x-ray camera, which was created by a graduate student named Meagan Schaal, has been the first ever to capture a lightning strike with an x-ray camera.
The photograph was taken during a batch of recent thunderstorms at Camp Blanding, in Florida. The lightning bolt streaked down from the sky at almost one-sixth the speed of light, but the camera was able to capture it. Joseph Dwyer, who is a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, said, "Something moving that fast would go from Earth to the moon in less than ten seconds." Obviously, finding a camera on the shelf wasn't going to cut it, so Dwyer turned to his students. One of his graduate students, Schaal, managed to create the x-ray camera. It weighs in at 1,500 pounds, and it is made of an x-ray detector that's housed in a box that resembles a refrigerator. It's lined with lead, to make sure that the x-ray detector is kept safe from stray radiation.
How many images does this new camera have to take to capture lightning in its natural state? 10 million per second. Unfortunately, storage of so many photos meant that the images couldn't be all that detailed. The camera can only take 30 pixels. Meaning, the results are images that are produced on a hexagonal grid. However, the researchers were able to learn that lightning carries the majority of its x-rays at the head of its strike, with barely any lingering radiation trailing away. Dwyer confirms that the lightning's strike holds all of its x-rays at the tip, rather than through the entirety of its length.
One thing to note, is that while these tests were being run during thunderstorms, the scientists had to make sure that the bolts struck where the camera could capture them. For that to happen, the researchers had to shoot rockets into the thunderstorm's clouds, with wires trailing behind them, making sure that the lightning would streak down the wire and into the camera's field of view. With that being noted, Dwyer points out that this artificial creation of lightning probably had no affect on the results, and if they could reproduce a truly natural strike, he is confident the same conclusion would be revealed.
[via National Geographic]
cidh.oas.org/relatoria/showarticle.asp?artID=829&lID=1
IMHO, this article condemns the US stance and considers it as a violation of the free speech :D
