For everything from family to computers…
American Airlines says it can save $1.2 million by replacing heavy flight manuals with iPads. What else could be eliminated to save even more on fuel? Physicist Rhett Allain has a suggestion that would reduce fuel as well as trips to the restroom.
from Wired Top Stories
Petco was searching for a new way to re-energize the pet-friendly toy line of their nationwide chain when they found Kristin Tercek. The NYU film school grad started her career producing animations for Coca-Cola, Cartoon Network, and Saturday Night Live. But it wasn’t her on-screen endeavors that caught the pet supply store’s attention. It was her line of hand-sewn plushies, with a following among collectors, gallery owners, and a category manager at Petco.
from Wired Top Stories
We’ve seen DIY supercomputers before: take a few motherboards, give them all the same processor, give them all the same amount of RAM and couple them all together via LAN. It has been a cheap and effective way for educational institutions (and enthusiasts) to jump into supercomputing. The Iridus-Pi continues in the same vein, using a cluster of 64 Raspberry Pi computers and Lego.
University of Southampton Professor Simon Cox has done an outstanding job here, but I definitely think that the next step needs to be doing something to address the power supply issue. The Raspberry Pi runs off 5v micro-USB and can run off 4 x AA batteries, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out a system that significantly cuts down on the amount of adapters and power strips involved.
from The UberReview
Unfortunately, the very lab equipment that pharmaceutical researchers use to create new crystal-free drugs can cause the molecules to crystallize.
To get around this conundrum, science wizards at Argonne National Laboratory, a government-run facility southwest of Chicago, counteract gravity with two opposing speakers. Each speaker pumps out sound at 22,000 hertz–just beyond the upper range of human hearing–and form a standing sound wave that can trap blobs of dissolved experimental compounds.
The technique isn’t a way to mass-manufacture new drugs, at least yet. But the stuff floating in the video above can be moved in the X-ray beamline of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source for detailed chemical analysis–and that might lift promising new drugs into the clinical trial pipeline faster.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
The internet really does have everything, and it’s all available for download without lifting a finger. A series of helpful scripts, all installable in a few minutes, can transform your computer into an automatic media downloading machine. More »
from Lifehacker
Kids’ high salt consumption is putting them at risk for illnesses linked to high blood pressure. The association between salt and blood pressure was highest in kids who are already overweight, the CDC says.
from News
