Sugar cube-sized supercomputer in 10 to 15 years: IBM
“IBM scientists have said that a pioneering research effort could shrink the world’s most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube.
The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one.
The plan is to reduce computers’ energy use, rather than just to shrink them.
Dr Bruno Michel said future computer costs would hinge on green credentials rather than speed.
Michel and his colleagues have already built a prototype to demonstrate the water-cooling principle. Called Aquasar, it occupies a rack larger than a refrigerator.
IBM estimates that Aquasar is almost 50 pc more energy-efficient than the world’s leading supercomputers.
“In the past, computers were dominated by hardware costs – 50 years ago you could hold one transistor and it cost a dollar, or a franc,” the BBC quoted Michel as saying at IBM’s Zurich labs.
Now when the sums are done, he said, the cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.
The overwhelming cause of those energy costs is in cooling, because computing power generates heat as a side product.
The Aquasar prototype clocked up nearly half again as much, at 1.1 billion operations. Now the task is to shrink it.
“We currently have built this Aquasar system that’s one rack full of processors. We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system in to one sugar cube – we’re going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube.””
Read more at DNA
Eggs with the oldest known embryos of a dinosaur found
“Palaeontologists have identified the oldest known dinosaur embryos, belonging to a species that lived some 190 million years ago. The eggs of Massospondylus, containing well-perserved embryos, were unearthed in South Africa back in 1976. The creature appears to be an ancestor of the family that includes the long-necked dino once known as Brontosaurus.
The study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology also sheds light on the dinosaurs’ early development. The researchers used the embryos to reconstruct what the dinosaurs’ babies might have looked like when they roamed the Earth. Having studied the fossilised eggs, the team, led by Professor Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, discovered that the embryos were the oldest ones ever found of any land-dwelling vertebrate.
“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz. “Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.”"
Read more at BBC News
Phineas Gage and the effect of an iron bar through the head on personality
“The photograph above, which was uncovered earlier this year, is one of only two known images of an otherwise unremarkable man named Phineas Gage who attained near-legendary status in the history of neuroscience and psychology one fateful day in 1848 at the age of 25.
Gage earned his place in the neurological hall of fame in a most unusual – and extremely unfortunate – way. A railroad construction foreman in the US, he was in charge of a crew of men who were working on the construction of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish, Vermont. On 18 September, he and his crew were excavating rocks to make way for the railroad. Gage was preparing for an explosion, using the tamping iron he holds in the photograph to compact explosive charge in a borehole. As he was doing so, the iron produced a spark that ignited the powder, and the resulting blast propelled the tamping iron straight through his head.
John Harlow, the physician who attended to Gage at the scene, noted that the tamping iron was found some 10 metres away, “where it was afterward picked up by his men, smeared with blood and brain”. He provides a detailed description of the “hitherto unparalleled case” in a letter to the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, entitled “Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head”:
“[The tamping iron] entered the cranium, passing through the anterior left lobe of the cerebrum, and made its exit in the medial line, at the junction of the coronal and sagittal sutures, lacerating the longitudinal sinus, fracturing the parietal and frontal bones extensively, breaking up considerable portions of the brain, and protruding the globe of the left eye from its socket, by nearly half its diameter. ”
Remarkably, Gage survived this horrific ordeal, and by all accounts was conscious and walking within minutes. Back at Gage’s nearby lodgings, Harlow removed small bone fragments from the wounds, replaced larger fragments that had been displaced by the passage of the tamping iron, and closed the large wound at the top of Gage’s head with adhesive straps.
Several days later, one of the wounds became infected and he fell into a semi-comatose state. Fearing the worst, his family prepared a coffin, but Gage soon recovered and by January 1849 was leading an apparently normal life. But those closest to him began to notice dramatic changes in his behaviour.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The night sky as you’ve never seen it before
“TimeScapes,” a modern portrait of the American Southwest
Via Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Fear doctors (mad scientists?) use tarantulas to terrify
“What’s scarier than bats in the belfry? Easy: tarantulas in an MRI tube.
To observe the brain’s panic-response network in full freak, British researchers asked 20 volunteers to lie inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. One by one, the scientists then had each person view a screen that showed a tarantula crawling closer … and … closer to the subject’s feet. As the spider advanced, MRI scans allowed researchers to see flashes of activity switch from the volunteer’s prefrontal cortex – a region associated with anxiety – to a spot in the midbrain known to involve intense fear. But the neural terror waned when the tarantula retreated, “regardless of the spider’s absolute proximity,” wrote the study’s authors. In other words, as long as the spider was moving away, no matter how close it still was, the volunteers relaxed.
Titled “Neural Activity associated with monitoring the oscillating threat value of a Tarantula,” the study was published today by the National Academy of Sciences. They could simply have dubbed their paper: “Watching the Willies.” What the researchers glimpsed, they say, was the brain’s danger-tracking system at work.”
Read more at Body Odd (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Science finds the plane truth about in-flight meals
“The inexplicable blandness of airline food has been pondered at 30,000 feet by generations of travellers. Now an explanation has been offered in the form of research showing that people lose their sense of taste when listening to the sort of “white noise” heard inside an aircraft’s cabin.
White noise consists of random collections of sounds at different frequencies – such as the muffled noise of aircraft engines – and scientists have demonstrated that it is capable of diminishing the taste of salt and sugar.
The findings could explain a phenomenon well known to airline companies: passengers tend to lose their sense of taste when they are in the air. For this reason, airline meals are often “improved” with extra salt, sugar and other flavourings.
The study also lends further support to the idea that sound plays an important role in the perception of taste. Heston Blumenthal, the celebrity chef, has exploited the trait in a specially designed seafood dish which is served while diners hooked up to iPods listen to the sound of surf crashing on a beach.
Ellen Poliakoff of Manchester University said the study investigated how background noise influenced a person’s perception of food.
The scientists found that certain sounds not only affected people’s sense of saltiness or sweetness, they also influenced how crunchy some types of food sounded to the diners – which in turn affected their perceptions of freshness and palatability.”
Read more at The Independent (Thanks Shaun H)
Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke
“On screen, Dick Van Dyke has been rescued from untimely death by flying cars and magical nannies. Off screen, the veteran star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins had to rely on the help of a pod of porpoises after apparently dozing off aboard his surfboard. “I’m not kidding,” he said afterwards.
Van Dyke’s ordeal began during an ill-fated trip to his local beach. “I woke up out of sight of land,” the 84-year-old actor told reporters. “I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought ‘I’m dead!’”
Van Dyke was wrong. “They turned out to be porpoises,” he said. “And they pushed me all the way to shore.” The porpoises were unavailable for comment.
Van Dyke made his screen debut on the Phil Silvers Show before bagging his own TV sitcom in 1961. His film credits include Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dick Tracy, while his TV drama Diagnosis: Murder ran from 1993 to 2001. In recent years he has appeared on screen in Night at the Museum and its 2009 sequel.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Duncan)
Access denied. I don’t like the way you look at me!
“A small security company has developed a system which can identify people by the way they look at the world. The system, created by the firm ID-U based in Israel, is said to be both simple and reliable. It asks the user to follow a target on a display while tracking the movement of his eyes with a low-resolution camera, reports Technology Review.
The eye movement pattern is as unique as fingerprints. At the moment the system is 97 per cent accurate, says ID-U CEO Palti-Wasserman, who holds a PhD from the faculty of biomedical engineering from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. A potential impostor would have trouble fooling the system. With a fingerprint or retina scanner it is possible to make an accurate copy of the biometrical feature and pass identification. But ID-U does a different test every time, so having a record of the rightful owner passing a test will not help.
As a bonus, the system only needs a display and a regular digital camera, both of which are already in many potential hosts like laptops or ATMs. Once the software is installed, it is ready to be used. The company is working on an iStore app using their algorithms. However ID-U is yet to demonstrate its scalability. What works well for a small group may drop in performance significantly when hundreds or thousands of individuals are involved.”
Read more at RT (Thanks Niall S)
Parrot Zoo Prize Draw – DB related prizes up for grabs!
A message from the Parrot Zoo:
“It’s that time of year again! Yes, it’s cold, windy and wet, and nearly Christmas, but why not treat yourself to an entry (or a few) into our Polly wants a Christmas Cracker prize draw?
Some of the prizes this year are very rare (as only one of them exist) and have been donated by the Charity’s Patron Saint, Derren Brown. The prizes range from a framed tour poster and an A2 Art Print to a Family Season ticket for the zoo.
Entries cost £2.50, and you can enter as many times as you like. The draw will take place on Friday 10th, and the top 3 lucky people will receive a phone call from us congratulating them. A full list of winners will be posted on the website.
So, if you want to enter for yourself or to give that family member an extra special gift, all you need to do is head over to http://www.parrotzoo.com/polly/
Good luck!”
CLICK HERE to see the list of prizes and to enter the draw!
The difference between us and Neanderthals is our creativity
The modern human brain and the Neanderthal brain began at about the same size at birth, but their skulls show that they began developing very differently within the first year of life, scientists say.
Neanderthals evolved more than 400,000 years ago, lived as hunter-gatherers in Europe and Asia, and went extinct about 30,000 years ago.
Judging by the archaeological record, Neanderthals were well-adapted to their particular environment, but they were not as creative in terms of hunting strategies or artwork – for example, they apparently did not make cave paintings the way their human contemporaries did.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology scanned Neanderthals skulls and compared them with modern human skulls. Their results are published in the journal Current Biology.
Subtle changes in the early phases of brain development can have a huge impact on social cognition, communication, and how creative members of a species are, said study author Philipp Gunz of the Planck Institute.
The pattern of brain development described in the study may point to a diminished inclination to communicate through art, and possibly also help explain why modern humans had advantages over Neanderthals, he said.
“If you are an artist you have to understand symbols, you have to understand meaning, you have to look at the world in the certain way, and it seems that Neanderthals, for 200,000 years, didn’t feel like it,” Gunz said.
