In Spaceballs, one of the greatest movies ever made, Mel Brooks huffs canned air. The movie features a made up brand called “Perri-Air”, but that doesn’t mean canned air is fiction. More »
from Kotaku
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Video: Government Wizards Levitate Drugs With Ultrasonic Sound
Levitating Drugs Dan Harris
To create brand-new drugs, pharmaceutical researchers have turned to levitating them with blasts of ultrasonic sound.Good drugs dissolve easily in the body. Bad pharmaceutical molecules, meanwhile, lock themselves into hard-to-absorb crystals that require strong doses to work, and this overcompensation often leads to crummy side effects.
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
From News: U.S. Kids Eat Nearly As Much Salt As Adults, Putting Health At Risk
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
From The UberReview: iPhone 5 Lightning Connector Adapter Prices Will Burst Your iBubble
I’ll give it to Apple, they really know how to capitalize on what, for many is a difficult situation. With the introduction of the Lightning Connector, the folks at One Infinite Loop have changed things up on the bottom of the latest crop of iDevices. The problem, obviously, is that the new 8-pin connector doesn’t play nicely with any accessory devices that are on the market at this time. If you own a fancy iPod Dock then you are going to need an adapter – and guess what? They aren’t cheap!
Want a straight up adapter that will connect your 8-pin device to something with a 30-pin port? You will be parting with $29. If you want 0.2 meters of cable between your 8-pin iDevice and your now obsolete accessory, you will need to hand over $39. Finally, if you just want a regular old cable to connect to your computer – it will set you back $19.
Here’s the thing: Apple products are well-made, I get that. Aside from an overheating problem with an old MacBook Pro and a burned out Airport Express (that I used to capacity 24 hours a day for a couple of years), I haven’t had too many problems with anything from Apple – except for the cables. The iBrick that powered my old MacBook Pro burned out and I have at least two 30-pin cables that are so frayed around the connector that they look dangerous. Quality-wise, things are bad enough that one almost gets the impression that cables are to Apple what spare parts were to Henry Ford.
If I pay $19 for a cable, I expect to get a little more than what a third party manufacturer would sell for $5.
from The UberReview
From The UberReview: Robots Now Faster Than Humans, Be Very Afraid
Usain Bolt is the fastest human on the planet, 27.78 mph… that might be slow in a car but it is extremely quick for a human. Unfortunately for Mr Bolt, the folks at Boston Dynamics have been work on a robot that can go a little faster. The Cheetah Robot has set a new robot land speed record with an impressive 28.3 mph – in a robot apocalypse they could outdo the best we’ve got, and they plan to make it go 50.
Now, having robots that can run down Usain might seem like bad news for him, but if push comes to shove, but if the rules for bears apply to robots then all he really has to be able to do is run faster than the slowest guy in his group. Given that every human on Earth is slower than Usain Bolt, he should be able to do that for a very long time.
[Source]
from The UberReview
From Ars Technica: Apple v. Samsung verdict is in: $1 billion loss for Samsung
Aurich Lawson
A jury of seven men and two women has just read the Apple v. Samsung verdict to a packed courtroom—and it was all bad news for Samsung. The Korean electronics giant has been found to infringe all of Apple’s utility patents and all but one of the four design patents asserted, and was ordered to pay more than $1.05 billion in damages to Apple.
That’s less than the $2.75 billion Apple asked for, but still a huge sum. If it holds up on appeal, it will stand as the largest patent verdict of all time. More importantly, it gives Apple a huge leg-up in the corporate patent wars, and immeasurably strengthens the company’s negotiating position with regard to the Android phones it is struggling against.
Samsung has been the number one seller of smartphones in the U.S. in the past few years, and this verdict could alter the balance of power. Apple’s ultimate target is Google, which created the Android operating system that runs on Samsung smartphones. Steve Jobs thought Android was a rip-off of Apple products, and vowed to declare “thermonuclear war” on the competing OS, according to his biography.
from Ars Technica
From Droid Life: Analysts: Google’s Nexus 7 Sales Could Reach 8 Million By the End of 2012
Taken from the number of sales of the displays used in the device, it looks like Google will be looking at a grand total of 8 million Nexus 7 tablets sold by the end of 2012. According to what Google had previously expected to sell since the July launch, that’s more than double the previous estimates. Google spokespeople have yet to confirm these projections, but once the sales numbers are posted, folks are likely to be happily surprised at the popularity of the Jelly Bean-powered device.
I know I could speak for most readers here that it’s easily been one of the most popular Android devices ever launched. With fantastic build quality, Jelly Bean, and that unbeatable $200-$250 price tag, it can’t be beat.
Via: Computer World
Cheers Sameer!
from Droid Life