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Judge Richard Posner, who recently threw out an entire patent lawsuit involving Apple and Motorola, has been nothing if not outspoken on the wildly busy US patent litigation system. In an interview published today by Reuters, he calls patent litigants animals struggling for survival and suggests that some industries—perhaps including software—shouldn’t have patent protection at all.
“It’s a constant struggle for survival,” Posner told Reuters in his chambers at the US Court of Appeals in Chicago. “As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem.”
While Posner said the pharmaceutical industry has a decent claim to patents because of the huge investment it takes to create drugs, he added that advances in software and other industries are less costly. The benefit companies get from being first to market would exist even if software patents didn’t. Smartphones are particularly problematic because they have thousands of patented components and features, he said.
from Ars Technica
In honor of Independence Day in the United States, here’s John A. Conkling, adjunct professor and fireworks expert to show us the chemistry behind fireworks. Watch this video and learn the science so that you can impress all your friends and family tonight with your incredible knowledge. [via Adafruit]
from MAKE
Four years ago, double amputee Oscar Pistorius — aka the Blade Runner — was battling bureaucracy (and his own ability) for the chance to compete in the Beijing Olympics. He might not have made the cut for China, but this time around he’s secured his ticket to London. The South African athlete was already penned in for the 4 x 400 meters relay, and will now also compete in the singles 400 meters — said to be his favorite distance. The South African Olympic committee made a last-minute decision to include Pisterous in the team, making him the first amputee track athlete to compete in the full Olympic games. An amazing achievement in its own right, but a race victory on top of the bureaucratic one would surely be the ultimate finish.
from Engadget
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a prototype smart headlight which blots out individual drops of rain or snow — improving vision by up to 90 percent. Made with an off-the-shelf Viewsonic DLP projector, a quad-core Intel Core-i7 PC and a GigE Point Grey Flea3 camera, the Rube Goldberg-esque process starts by first imaging raindrops arriving at the top of its view. After this, the signal goes to a processing unit, which uses a predictive theory developed by the team to guess the drops’ path to the road. Finally, the projector — found in the same place as the camera — uses a beamsplitter like modern digital 3D rigs. Used in tandem with calculations, it transmits a beam with light voids matching the predicted path. The result? It all stops light from hitting the falling particles, with the cumulative process resulting in the illusion of a nearly precipitation-free road view — at least in the lab. So far, the whole process takes about a hundredth of a second (13 ms) but scientists said that in an actual car and with many more drops, the speed would have to be about ten times quicker. That would allow 90 percent of the light located 13 feet in front of the headlights to pass through, but even at just triple the speed, it would give drivers a 70 percent better view. To see if this tech might have a snowflake’s chance of making it out of the lab, go past the break for all the videos.
from Engadget
Looks like playing games and watching sci-fi flicks didn’t do the University of Iowa’s Jack Scudder any harm. The NASA-funded researcher has been studying elusive magnetic portals connecting the Earth and Sun, and now he’s figured out how to find them. The portals, also known as X-points in Scudder-speak, are born from the mingling of Earth’s magnetic field with incoming solar winds. These astral connections create flux transfer events (we’ve got Doc Brown’s attention) — high-energy particle flows responsible for, among other things, the eerie twinkling of the polar auroras. Off the back of Scudder’s data wizardry, NASA‘s planning the 2014 Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), sending four craft into the void to observe the portals. Each spacebot is capable of locating them, and when one is found, inviting the others ’round for a study date. Taking a leaf from Scudder’s book, Engadget researchers have tracked down a NASA video detailing the mission, located beyond the fold for your convenience.
from Engadget
Today I tripped over a interesting application of science that will change how we look at our friend, the common house ant.
53 year old scientist Dr Mohamed Babu in Mysore, India was alerted to this phenomenon by his wife, who noted that when ants drank some spilled milk, their transparent rear segments would turn white.
Dr Babu decided to experiment with coloured sugar water and photographed the results. While the ants fed on the sweet liquid treats, they decorated their bums with the colour of their snack.
Honestly, this has absolutely no scientific application, but it does look pretty cool.
The effort that Dr Babu put in to the experiment is rather impressive. He discovered that the ants would gravitate toward the brighter colours, and found they only took up the blue and green droplets once the brighter droplets were too crowded. He had to develop a process where drops of different sizes were left in different locations of the paraffin observation area he crafted.
Also, if he didn’t get the picture he wanted Dr Babu would have to wait until the following day before the ants would return to feed.
Sometimes discovery can be fun, and I actually like the cute pictures of creepy little ants all decorated like they are supporting a sports team, or are from the same school.
I can just imagine these ants gossiping around the water drops: “I am eating the green stuff today. This is going to go straight to my ass!â€
