A designer named Kosho Tsuboi has conceived a beautiful gadget idea. His product, the Magic Calendar, is an e-paper calendar that syncs with a smartphone to display your schedule. The project is associated with Google’s Android Experiments, which appears to be a Japanese program in which creators can pitch ideas for Android-centered gadgets. In this case, the calendar relies on a custom Android app, and, judging off the below video, uses Google Calendar for syncing.
A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”
Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission, Smidt and colleagues created a simulation of collapsing stars that resulted in supermassive black holes forming in less time than expected, cosmologically speaking, in the first billion years of the universe. “It turns out that while supermassive black holes have a growth speed limit, certain types of massive stars do not,” said Smidt. “We asked, what if we could find a place where stars could grow much faster, perhaps to the size of many thousands of suns; could they form supermassive black holes in less time?” A video about the discovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD4xECbHx_I&feature=youtu.be
Ten of the most promising new regional aerospace start-up companies descended on El Segundo on Tuesday to pitch their futuristic concepts for the next wave of industry advancement, from orbiting cell towers in space to drones that communicate with each other.
The event, organized by new-tech business support company Starburst Accelerator, was held at The Aerospace Corp., the research and development arm of the adjacent Los Angeles Air Force Base.
Such meetings between legacy aerospace companies and energetic up-and-comers are becoming commonplace, as the industry works to keep up with a flood of technological advancements propelling the commercialization of low-Earth orbit.
Electronic computers are extremely powerful at performing a high number of operations at very high speeds, sequentially. However, they struggle with combinatorial tasks that can be solved faster if many operations are performed in parallel.
The EU Horizon 2020 has launched Bio4Comp, a five-year €6.1M project to build more powerful and safer biocomputers that could outperform quantum computing.
The Bio4Comp project has the ambitious goal of building a computer with greater processing speed and lower energy consumption than any of the most advanced computers existing today. Ultimately, this could translate into enabling large, error-free security software to be fast enough for practical use, potentially wiping out all current security concerns.
A total of €6.1M have been awarded to an European team of researchers from TU Dresden, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Lund University, Linnaeus University and Bar Ilan University, as well as the British company Molecular Sense.
People who received regular lifestyle counseling online were able to lower their blood pressure as much as a medication would, researchers said Saturday.
Their study involved 264 people with high blood pressure and an average age of 58.
The subjects’ average blood pressure began at around 140/90 mmHg, meaning they had what is clinically known as stage 1 hypertension.
A team of researchers from Sweden, France, Belgium and Switzerland has found a way to reverse resistance to an antibiotic drug used to treat tuberculosis. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes how they screened compounds that activated different pathways to activate ethionaide, a compound used to treat tuberculosis.
The researchers are currently working with GlaxoSmithKline and Biotech Bioversys to further develop the small prototype molecule into a drug that can be mass produced and sold.
(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers from Sweden, France, Belgium and Switzerland has found a way to reverse resistance to an antibiotic drug used to treat tuberculosis. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes how they screened compounds that activated different pathways to activate ethionaide, a compound used to treat tuberculosis.
The development of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections has very clearly made the world a healthier place. Unfortunately, over time, bacteria have been evolving to thwart such compounds, putting us all at risk once again. Because of that, scientists have been searching for new treatments, or in some cases, ways to make old treatments work again using new techniques. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to make ethionaide, a prodrug (a compound that is metabolized in the body to produce a desired drug), become effective again in patients infected with resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Ethionaide was developed back in the late 1950s as a treatment for tuberculosis. It is activated by an enzyme called EthA found in the bacteria—once activated, ethionaide attacks the bacteria. Over time, many strains of M. tuberculosis have become resistant to ethionaide by developing EthA mutations that do not activate the compound, making it useless as a treatment. To get around this problem, the researchers searched for and found a prototype molecule called SMARt-420 that activates ethionaide by taking a different route—interacting with a secondary gene. The team has found that giving patients a dose of the small molecule after administering a dose of ethionaide restored the lattter’s ability to destroy a range of M. tuberculosis—testing showed it reduced the bacterial load found in patient lungs after just three weeks—similar to the effectiveness of ethionaide alone against M. tuberculosis prior to the develop of resistance.
“A problem that I see with the current literature on open innovation is that while focusing predominantly on theoretical aspects of the concept (value proposition, strategic alignments, governance and management, human capital and culture), it pays little attention to the description of specific open innovation practices.”
So, what does everyone think so far?
Whatever else might be true of the live-action Ghost in the Shell movie, it’s also true that the filmmakers have put as much of the budget on the screen as humanly possible. And as you can tell when you watch the film’s opening scene—available here and now for your viewing pleasure—it has paid off, at least in in the visuals department.
