Kurt Starnes

"Now a fresh analysis by McKay and colleagues rules out the carbonate decomposition explanation. The researchers have used high-resolution electron microscopy not available 13 years ago to study the physical and chemical make-up of the magnetites in detail, and found that no plausible geological scenario could explain the carbonate decomposition origin." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

""It's actually similar to what our own immune system does," said Gregor Morfill, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who led the research. "The plasma produces a series of over 200 chemical reactions that involve the oxygen and nitrogen in air plus water vapour - there is a whole concoction of chemical species that can be lethal to bacteria," he told BBC News." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"New research by leading alternative energy research firm New Energy Finance finds that solar power will cost less by about 50% at the end of 2009 compared to the end of 2008." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

Found at: http://www.tuaw.com/2009... ||| "What do you get when you combine an old Xbox with OS X and some Mac Pro level hardware? This monstrosity. Built by Will Urbina, the OS Xbox Pro is a hackintosh casemodded into an original Xbox dev kit, with some crazy hardware under the hood, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT card, 8GB of RAM, an 16GB solid state drive, and four traditional hard drives -- one boots Windows 7, the other one does OS X (Snow Leopard, we believe -- he bought a copy retail), a Ubuntu install in there somewhere, and two other sweet hard drives for video editing. And here's the wacky thing: Total material cost of the system is under $1500. That, combined with the video above, almost makes me want to spend a month of weekends trying to do something like this myself (aside from, you know, fitting it into a dev kit Xbox thing -- although fitting it into an old Macintosh might be a fun build, too). At any rate, awesome build for sure." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

For some, a mesmerizing 10+ minutes of well shot video and wondrous creation. - Kurt Starnes

Step away from the Mac!!! - Christopher A Carr

"Speed isn't good enough when you're shipping something like transplant supplies for emergency surgery or human organs. You also need to be perfectly sure that what you're sending hasn't been compromised for even a second along the way. FedEx has come up with an answer: Senseaware, a drop-in sensor that pings the status of its contents to the Web, including temperature, exact location, and whether the shipment has been opened or exposed to light. There's even an accelerometer, for detecting drops. Having already completed a beta test, Senseaware will now be deployed with 50 FedEx medical clients this spring." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"The osmotic power plant guides sea water and fresh water into separate chambers, which are divided by an artificial membrane. Salt molecules pull the fresh water through the membrane, increasing the pressure in the sea water chamber. This pressure is then utilized in a power generating turbine. The prototype has a limited production capacity and will be used primarily for testing and data validation leading to the construction of a commercial power plant in a few years time. Statkraft claims that the technology has the global potential to generate clean, renewable energy equivalent to China's total electricity consumption in 2002 or half of the EU's total power production (some 1600 to 1700 Twh)." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"This image represents the integration of genomic, metabolic, proteomic, structural and cellular information about Mycoplasma pnemoniae in this project: one layer of an Electron Tomography scan of a bottle-shaped M. pneumoniae cell (grey) is overlaid with a schematic representation of this bacterium's metabolism, comprising 189 enzymatic reactions, where blue indicates interactions between proteins encoded in genes from the same functional unit. Apart from these expected interactions, the scientists found that, surprisingly, many proteins are multifunctional. For instance, there were various unexpected physical interactions (yellow lines) between proteins and the subunits that form the ribosome, which is depicted as an Electron microscopy image (yellow)." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"Hiding in the cargo was a robot drone | Programmed to destroy Davy's spaceship home | Davy switched out his brains, now the drone's a dog clone | Named him Copernicus and threw him a bone" - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

WIN. - teh Dork Knight aka Kenny

Poor Owen Wilson. - Derrick

"There is no Cupcake Manufacturers Association keeping count, but anecdotal evidence indicates that stand-alone cupcake shops have been spreading not just in the acknowledged cupcake meccas of New York and Los Angeles but also in Boston, Denver, Austin, Tex., and lots of smaller places. Nationwide, cupcake sales, according to the market research firm, Mintel, are projected to rise another 20 percent over the next five years at a time when other baked goods are expected to grow in the single digits." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

Sent from Kurt's Mobile - Kurt Starnes from email

"The research focused on Great Basin bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva), which grow in six western U.S. states and are among the longest-lived organisms on Earth. Some pines reach ages of up to 5,000 years, which gave the study authors an opportunity to put together a record going back nearly as far that compares bristlecone growth rates at various altitudes." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

BTW, the article doesn't cite a specific, dated tree, just that they can live for up to 5,000 years. Remarkable. - Kurt Starnes

See: http://www.pbs.org/indepen... - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests he received a C for this paper although in a later interview he claims that when asked he told a reporter "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C"." - Kurt Starnes

"A treasure trove of Tibetan art and manuscripts uncovered in "sky high" Himalayan caves could be linked to the storybook paradise of Shangri-La, says the team that made the discovery." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"GENEVA: Two circulating beams have produced the first particle collisions in the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, three days after its restart." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"A key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors. Now, in a study appearing in this week's JBC, researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet: generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

"A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals. This groundbreaking research, which may now allow for the production of environmentally conscious plastics, is published in two papers in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering to mark the journal's 50th anniversary." - Kurt Starnes from Bookmarklet

It's good news. I hope the car industry gets on to it. It's all very well making 'environmentally friendly' electric cars, but when the plastics inside still use tonnes of fossil fuels it defeats the purpose - Mo Kargas

"PowerTutor is an application for Google phones that displays the power consumed by major system components such as CPU, network interface, display, and GPS receiver. The application allows software developers to see the impact of design changes on power efficiency. Application users can also use it to determine how their actions are impacting battery life. PowerTutor uses a power consumption model built by direct measurements during careful control of device power management states. This model generally provides power consumption estimates within 5% of actual values. A configurable display for power consumption history is provided. It also provides users with a text-file based output containing detailed results. You can use PowerTutor to monitor the power consumption of any application. PowerTutor's power model was built using a HTC G1. It will run on other versions of the GPhone, but when used with phones other than the G1, power consumption estimates will be rough. We plan to provide power models for other phones in the future." - Kurt Starnes