N Y B B L E M O N T H L Y N E W S L E T T E R
A Free Ezine about Anything Tech and Everything Else
2009.12.29 Issue No. 216
In this season of gift-giving (either to others or to yourself), here are some tips to maximize the bang for your buck when buying tech toys.
Rule number one. Never pay full-price at the store. Things are almost always cheaper online. Better yet, buy it second-hand. Wait till after Christmas, when the presents have been opened. People might not like their gifts. Some might get tired of their new toys quickly. Hit the auction sites for good bargains.
When buying tech toys, get the cheapest model in the best product line. Let me explain. A company usually has different product lines with different features. For mp3 players, the only difference within a product line is the storage capacity. Why pay top bucks for maximum capacity, when you can get the cheapest one (with the same core features) and extend the capacity with external memory cards. For plasma/LCD TVs, the difference is in the screen size. Stick to the series with the features you want, and buy the medium-sized model. You don't pay the premium for the large screen size, but you still get all the features.
Make sure your tech toy is upgradable and/or hackable. No point buying a gadget that is end-of-(feature)life when you buy it. Check that the company is active in publishing new firmware for your gadget to fix bugs or enhance functionality. Better if there's an active hacking community developing software for your device. Again, your toy must be hackable in the first place for all these to work.
Happy holidays, everyone!
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_________ARTIFICIAL MEAT_________
In the not-so-distant future, we'll be eating meat not from animals, but grown in a lab. Researchers in Netherlands have created what was described as soggy pork and investigating ways to make it more palatable. So far, no one has tasted this artificual meat, but such producs could be in the market within five years.
The scientists created the meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig ang putting them in a broth of other animal products. The cells multiplied and created more muscle tissue. All they need to do now is to artificially "exercise" and stretch the muscle, in hopes of turning it into something like steak, so that people will eat it.
Vegetarian groups welcomed the news. There's not gonna be any "ethical objection" if the meat didn't come from a dead animal. Meat produced in a laboratory could reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with real animals. Trivia for you: meat and dairy consumption is predicted to double by 2050 and methane from livestock is said to currently produce about 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
The project is backed by the Dutch government and a sausage maker and comes following the creation of artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.
_________ALGAE BATTERIES_________
Algae is often pushed as the next breakthrough in biofuels. If researchers at
Uppsala University in Sweden, have their way, this slimy stuff could also be the key to paper-thin biodegradable batteries.
Conducting polymers have long been thought to be a solution in developing lightweight, flexible, nonmetal batteries, but these polymers have so far been impractical because regular paper can’t hold enough of them to work effectively. Now Uppsala researcher Maria Stromme and her team has found that the smelly Cladophora algae species that clumps on beaches, can also be used to make a type of cellulose that has 100 times the surface area of cellulose found in paper. Because of this bigger surface area, it can hold enough conducting polymers to effectively recharge and hold electricity for longer amounts of time.
The algae-based paper sheet batteries hold up to 200% more charge than regular paper-based cellulose batteries, and they can recharge in as little as 11 seconds. Eventually, they could be used in any application that requires flexible electronics — for example, clothing or packaging that lights up. Perhaps most importantly, the algae batteries could one day cut down on e-waste from conventional metal batteries.
_________PLASMA ZAPPERS________
Researchers at the
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have demonstrated a prototype device that uses plasma to rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA. The device works by creating plasma, which produces a cocktail of chemicals in air that kill bacteria but are harmless to skin. A related approach could see the use of plasmas to speed the healing of wounds.
Plasmas are known as the fourth state of matter, after solid, liquid, and gas. They are a soup of atoms that have had their electrons stripped off by, for example, a high voltage. (Same plasma as the ones used in plasma TVs.) For this particular medical application, rather than turning a whole group of atoms into plasma, a more delicate approach strips the electrons off just a few, sending them flying. Collisions with nearby, unchanged atoms slows down the electrons and charged ions they leave behind. The resulting plasma is harmful to bacteria, viruses, and fungi - the approach is already used to disinfect surgical tools.
The team says that an exposure to the plasma of only about 12 seconds reduces the incidence of bacteria, viruses, and fungi on hands by a factor of a million - a number that stands in sharp contrast to the several minutes hospital staff can take to wash using traditional soap and water. A similar approach, using the element argon instead of plain air, has been demonstrated for application directly to wounds, and initial indications are that it speeds heaing.
More testing of the devices is necessary before they end up in widespread use, but there is already significant interest from industry.
_________COUNTING ANTS_________
Scientists at the University of Ulm wanted to find out whether ants count. An ingenious experiment conducted in the Sahara suggests that they probably do.
Most ants get around by leaving smell trails on the forest floor that show other ants how to get home or to food. That may work in the forest, but it doesn't work in a desert, as the wind blows aways the smell left in the sand. We know ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do desert ants actually get to their doorstep?
Harald Wolf and his assistant Matthias Whittlinger trained a bunch of ants to walk across a patch of desert to some food. When the ants began eating, the scientists trapped them and divided them into three groups. They left the first group alone. With the second group, they used superglue to attach pre-cut pig bristles to each of their six legs, essentially putting them on stilts. The third group had their legs cut off just below the "knees," making each of their six legs shorter.
This is what happened after the ants had their meal and were released:
- The regular ants walked right to the nest and went inside.
- The ants on stilts walked right past the nest, stopped and looked around for their home.
- The ants on stumps fell short of the nest, stopped and seemed to be searching for their home.
It turns out that all the ants had walked the same number of steps, but because their gaits had been changed, they went exactly the distances you'd predict if their brains counted the number of steps out to the food and then reversed direction and counted the same number of steps back. In other words, all the ants counted the same number of steps back!
_________SPLIT MOBILE PHONE_________
We have candybars, we have sliders, we have dual-sliders, we have twisters, we have flippers. Now, we're about to have splitters. Fujitsu is breaking new ground in the cell phone market with the imminent introduction of a cell phone that splits into two parts.
The
F-04B was recently announced as part of
NTT DoCoMo's new line-up and is scheduled to hit Japanese shelves in March or April next year. At first glance it looks like a conventional slider cell phone, but decouple a catch and the entire back half of the phone can be pulled off. The top half contains a 3.4-inch touchscreen display and most of the electronics needed for the handset to function. The radio module and antenna is also in this part. The back half has a QWERTY keyboard and the slide-out numeric keypad. The two halves stay in contact via Bluetooth up to a distance of about 10 meters. Both halves of the phone include a mic and speaker so either can be used for receiving calls. The top half includes the ringer and vibrator while the bottom half has a light so each is capable of alerting the user to an incoming call.
This could be an advantage for people who worry about potential health problems from keeping a cell phone near the head -- the top half with the phone can be kept in a bag and calls made and received using the lower half of the phone in essentially the same way as a Bluetooth headset works.
Calls can also be dialled via either half although the bottom half with the keyboard lacks a display to assure users that they are entering the right number. If using the keyboard half of the phone to make or receive a call it's possible to use the top half of the display to, for example, check e-mail or take a picture.
Full details of the handset are yet to be announced but NTT DoCoMo said it measures 11.4 centimeters by 5.1cms by 20.4cms and weighs 173 grams. Standby time is 600 hours in WCDMA mode and 400 hours in GSM mode while talk time is 300 minutes and 330 minutes respectively. The screen resolution is 480 pixels by 960 pixels, it has a bilingual (Japanese and English) interface, built-in Felica contactless smartcard and the camera has an impressive 12.2 megapixel resolution. Other features include GPS and HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) high-speed data downloads. Fujitsu also plans to offer an optional projector unit that can be clipped onto the bottom of the phone in place of the keyboard to project images on a nearby flat surface.
There are no plans to put the phone on sale overseas.
_________LANDMINE-DETECTING BACTERIA_________
With landmine strewn across 87 of the world’s countries, these are just major accidents waiting to happen. Each year they cause 15,000-20,000 new casualties, the vast majority of which are inflicted upon civilians.
Currently, finding landmines is done by Sifting through minefields, a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh are trying to find a solution. They have engineered a new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow green wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present.
The new strain was produced using a technique called BioBricking, wherein strands of bacterial DNA can be manipulated to express desired traits. The bacteria are cheap, can be easily mass produced, and offer tremendous advances over the cost of removing a land mine using conventional detectors, which can range from $300 to $1,000. Just need to be careful that spreading of said bacteria is not seen as an act of biological warfare.
_________LIKEABLE LINKS_________
Forward/Reverse DNS Lookup
Cell Size and Scale
Microsoft CD Keys
Software crack download site
Do Speedy Math in Your Head
_________QUESTIONABLE QUESTION_________
Why do ants pick up other dead ants and take them back to their nest? What do they do with them?
_________QUOTABLE QUOTE_________
What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.
~ H.H. The Dalai Lama
_________TRIVIAL TRIVIA_________
How does a trick candle work?
The wick of a trick candle has small amounts of magnesium in them. When you light the candle, you are also lighting the magnesium. When someone tries to blow out the flame, the magnesium inside the wick continues to burn and, in just a split second (or two or three), relights the wick.
Source: Arcamax Trivia
_________LAUGHABLE LAUGH_________
A termite walks into a bar and asks "Is the bar tender here?"
That's all for this week. Nybble is and will always be a work in progress. Please do send me your comments and suggestions on how to improve Nybble. Just hit the reply button to you know, reply.
Got a few Thinkpads lying around the house, so I thought it's about time I fixed them up..jpg)
I'm left with 3.4GB free. Not good. Switched back to WinXP patched all the way to SP4. Ended up with 4GB free. Not bad.
