General Biology Berkeley Course Webcast

General Biology Course at University of California – Berkeley, Fall 2007. Instructors John Forte, R Fischer and R Malkin. “General introduction to cell structure and function, molecular and organism genetics, animal development, form and function. Intended for biological sciences majors, but open to all qualified students.” A great service from Berkeley with video and audio… Topics include: Macromolecules structure and function, How cells function-an introduction to cellular metabolism and biological catalysts, Microbes – Viruses, Bacteria, Plasmids, Transposons and Homeostasis: The body’s defenses.

Robot Fish

Pretty cool swimming fish robot from Essex University.

Wireless Power

An end to spaghetti power cables by Maggie Shiels, BBC News

Mr Rattner envisaged a scenario where a laptop’s battery could be recharged when the machine gets within several feet of a transmit resonator which could be embedded in tables, work surfaces, picture frames and even behind walls.

Intel’s technology relies on an idea called magnetic induction. It is a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using their voice; the glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency. At the wall socket, power is put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator – basically an antenna. The receiving resonator is tuned to efficiently absorb energy from the magnetic field, whereas nearby objects do not.

Intel’s demonstration has built on work done originally by Marin Soljacic, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, researcher Alanson Sample showed how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source three feet away. This was achieved with relatively high efficiency, only losing a quarter of the energy it started with.

Don’t expect to see this available commercially this year, they estimate it is at least 5 years away. Though this is not university and business collaboration in the sense they are working together, it is in the sense that Intel is building upon the work MIT did. See other posts on university and business collaboration.

Patent Gridlock is Blocking Developing Lifesaving Drugs

How patent gridlock is blocking the development of lifesaving drugs by Michael Heller, Forbes

Since a 1980 Supreme Court decision allowing patents on living organisms, 40,000 dna-related patents have been granted. Now picture a drug developer walking into an auditorium filled with dozens of owners of the biotech patents needed to create a potential lifesaving cure. Unless the drugmaker can strike a deal with every person in the room, the new drug won’t be developed.
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Nicholas Naclerio, who used to head the BioChip Division at Motorola , told Scientific American, “If we want to make a medical diagnostic with 40 genes on it, and 20 companies hold patents on those genes, we may have a big problem.”
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And it’s not just drugs we’re losing. Today anything high tech–banking, semiconductors, software, telecom–demands the assembly of innumerable patents. Innovation has moved on, but we’re stuck with old-style ownership that’s easy to fragment and hard to put together. This debacle’s only upside is that assembling fragmented property is one of the great entrepreneurial and political opportunities of our era.

This is a critical problem I have written about before. The broken patent system is a serious problem that needs to be fixed.

Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly

photo of Dragonfly

If you know the what type of dragonfly is in the photo, please add a comment (update: a comment indicates it is not a dragonfly but a Great Spreadwing Archilestes grandis damselfly – I really enjoy getting feedback like this. It appears the most common way to differentiate the two is how the wings are at rest but the Spreadwing is an exception). I had a small preying mantis drop on my head, and then the ground, a month ago in my backyard. But when I got my digital camera I couldn’t find it again. The variety of insects you can see can be amazing, especially if you don’t use poisons and chemicals in your yard.

Photo by John Hunter, creative commons attribution license.

Engineer Uses Gravity

Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton

On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then — somehow — the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water’s surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot — and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

How do they do it?

Well, there’s a rope. There’s a pulley. And the rope and the pulley work a contraption made out of a pipe. The whole gizmo is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan by the name of Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago; if he were alive, he’d call it cutting edge. And there’s the beauty of it: It’s sophisticated, yes, but only because it’s simple.
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Garrett Brown revolutionized the movie business 38 years ago when he invented the Steadicam, a mechanical arm for cameramen that smooths away the jerkiness of hand-held shots. Much later, he came up with the Skycam, which rides a web of wires above the heads of football players. In between, Mr. Brown, 66 years old, got his one-line brief from NBC: “They wanted a camera,” he says, “that stayed with divers, including going underwater with them.”
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The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe’s full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass. From the diving platform to the water line, the glass is smoky. Below the line, it’s clear, so the camera need not adjust its exposure as it streaks into underwater darkness.

The pipe is caulked. The camera drops through air. “It doesn’t splash into the water,” Mr. Brown said. “That would look horrible.”

The appropriate use of technology is great to see. Applying knowledge well is a key to good engineering.

Very Long-Term Backup

Very Long-Term Backup by Kevin Kelly

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.
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The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog “human-readable” scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on. Some of the key indexing meta-data for each language section (such as the standard linguistic code number for that language) are displayed in a machine-readable font (OCRb) so that a smart microscope could guide you through this analog trove.

Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years. But even without reading, a person might guess there are small things to see in this disk.

This is another project of an organization I like very much: The Long Now Foundation.

Treadmill Cats: Friday Cat Fun #3

Have a nice day 🙂

Updated to a new treadmill call video as the old one was removed.

Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts

Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder is a great engineer and full of wonderful quotes for engineers to take to heart. The autobiography of the Woz is certainly a good read for any engineer. Woz urges engineers to follow their hearts

Wozniak talked about a life driven by his passion for the electronics and computing. And passion can be a more important incentive than money, he said.
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“Sometimes when you’re short of resources it forces you to do better work,” he said. To design the Apple’s logic circuitry, “I couldn’t afford an online timeshare computer system. I had to write down ones and zeros (and simulate the computer’s operations). It was all done by hand, never once on a computer.”
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He offered his computer designs to HP five times, but they never were interested. “I would not sell something for money without my employer getting a cut of it.”

Life in a bubble

Hundreds of insect species spend much of their time underwater, where food may be more plentiful. MIT mathematicians have now figured out exactly how those insects breathe underwater.

By virtue of their rough, water-repellent coat, when submerged these insects trap a thin layer of air on their bodies. These bubbles not only serve as a finite oxygen store, but also allow the insects to absorb oxygen from the surrounding water.

“Some insects have adapted to life underwater by using this bubble as an external lung,” said John Bush, associate professor of applied mathematics, a co-author of the recent study.

Thanks to those air bubbles, insects can stay below the surface indefinitely and dive as deep as about 30 meters, according to the study co-authored by Bush and Morris Flynn, former applied mathematics instructor. Some species, such as Neoplea striola, which are native to New England, hibernate underwater all winter long.