How To Do (Almost) Everything With A Kindle 3

Photo of third-generation Kindle. Courtesy Amazon.com

From Gadget Lab:

Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can.

I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle.

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Neandertals Blasted Out Of Existence, Archaeologists Propose

TRINKETS OF SURVIVAL Human-made items, such as these pendants fashioned from animals' teeth, appeared in a Russian cave shortly after volcanic eruptions around 40,000 years ago wiped out Neandertal populations in the area, researchers say.Golovanova et al.

From Science News:

Modern humans may have thrived thanks to geographic luck, not wits.

Neandertals didn’t get dumped on prehistory’s ash heap — it got dumped on them. At least three volcanic eruptions about 40,000 years ago devastated Neandertals’ western Asian and European homelands, spurring a rapid demise of these humanlike hominids, says a team led by archaeologist Liubov Golovanova of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Air Force's Space-Based Surveillance Satellite Launches Tomorrow, To Scan For Space Junk

Space Debris NASA

From Popular Science:

A massive collection of spacecraft parts, dead satellites, and spent rocket stages circle high above the Earth in a sort of “floating landfill.” According to recent estimates, about 4 million pounds of space junk currently orbit the Earth, including some 20,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters.

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BlackBerry Maker 'To Unveil 'BlackPad' Tablet To Take On iPad Next Week'

The Blackpad has not been officially released yet but some technology bloggers say these pictures are what it is likely to look like

From The Daily Mail:

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) is set to unveil its version of a tablet computer to take on the iPad next week, it was claimed today.

The BlackPad, as it has been nicknamed, will be launched before the end of the year and will have a seven-inch touch screen and at least one built-in camera, a source told the Wall Street Journal.

And it is claimed that RIM will unveil the device at a developers' conference in San Francisco next week.

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Robots On TV: Rescue Bot Knows, Um, What You Mean

From New Scientist:

A robot that can understand plain English and manage a complicated to-do list could soon be the hero of search and rescue missions.

Most robots that can recognise speech only respond to pre-determined instructions. For example, some powered wheelchairs respond to spoken directions, but only when certain words are spoken clearly. In the real world, that's not how humans communicate. Our speech is peppered with "disfluencies" – the "umms", "ahs" and stutters of everyday language. If we want to successfully speak to robots in real-life situations – such as search and rescue missions, where noise and stress might get in the way of clarity – robots need to understand these complications.

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Mars Methane Mystery: What's Making The Gas?

This image shows concentrations of Methane discovered on Mars. Click to enlarge this image. NASA

From Discovery News:

Methane in Mars' atmosphere lasts less than a year meaning something -- either geologic or biological -- keeps belching it out.

A six-year study of methane in Mars' atmosphere shows the planet is far from dead, though whether it is merely geologically active or host to microbial life is unknown.

An Italy-based team of researchers combed through billions of measurements taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor to compile seasonal maps of the gas, a simple chemical compound that appears in minute quantities in Mars' carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

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Artificial Human Brain Being Built In A Lab

Credit: Wikimedia

From Cosmos:

BIRMINGHAM: Researchers have developed an artificial bit of human brain to help them study Alzheimer's and other diseases, a huge improvement over animal models.

Mike Coleman and his team from Aston University, Birmingham, have developed artificial brain tissue that responds to some chemicals like human brains do. Their findings were presented at the British Festival of Science in Birmingham.

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Neandertals Were Able To 'Develop Their Own Tools'

From The BBC:

Neanderthals were keen on innovation and technology and developed tools all on their own, scientists say.

A new study challenges the view that our close relatives could advance only through contact with Homo sapiens.

The team says climate change was partly responsible for forcing Neanderthals to innovate in order to survive.

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Watch And Learn How Music Videos Are Triggering A Literacy Boom

A group of people watched television at a slum in Gulbai Tekra, an area in the city of Ahmedabad in India. (Jaydeep Bhatt)

From Boston.com:

Tiny, sun-soaked Khodi on the western coast of India’s Gujarat state is the kind of village where cattle still plough the fields and women fill clay pots with water from the village well. In the past few years, however, the town has been changing: Thatched mud huts are slowly giving way to sturdy, single-story concrete blocks; farmers conduct their business on cellphones. The state buses, which until a decade ago were only filled with men, are now crammed with women. Enrollment in the local school has soared.

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Ocean Cooling Contributed to Mid-20th Century Global Warming Hiatus

Iceberg in the icefjord near the city of Ilulissat in Greenland. While the temperature drop was evident in data from all Northern Hemisphere oceans, it was most pronounced in the northern North Atlantic, a region of the world ocean thought to be climatically dynamic. (Credit: iStockphoto/Anders Peter Amsnæs)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2010) — The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing Sept. 22 in Nature.

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Itsy Bitsy Spider's Web 10 Times Stronger Than Kevlar

The web of the Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini), can span some square feet (2.8 square meters) and is attached to each riverbank by anchor threads as long as 82 feet (25 meters). Credit: Matjaz Kuntner.

From Live Science:

Scientists have found the toughest material made by life yet — the silk of a spider whose giant webs span rivers, streams and even lakes.

Spider silks were already the toughest known biomaterials, able to absorb massive amounts of energy before breaking. However, researchers have now revealed the Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) has the toughest silk ever seen — more than twice as tough as any previously described silk, and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

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Amazing Sight in the South Pacific

From Funzug.com

A yacht was traveling in the south Pacific when the crew came across a weird sight. Look at these photos and try to imagine the thrill of experiencing this phenomenon.

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Editor's Note

Updating my computers, regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

How Change of Seasons Affects Animals and Humans

The equinox, on Wednesday evening, marks the beginning of fall and less daylight for the Northern Hemisphere. The change can have profound effects on animals and is also partially responsible for fall foliage. Credit: Dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Tomorrow (Sept. 22) at 11:09 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time, the center of the sun will cross Earth's equator, marking the autumnal equinox, and the start of fall in the Northern Hemisphere.

For a brief period, days and nights around the world each last close to 12 hours (day and night are not exactly equal, as the term “equinox” is meant to imply). Then, as the Earth continues its path around the sun, days become shorter and nights lengthen, with the change becoming more pronounced in the higher latitudes, but remaining nonexistent at the equator.

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Boeing Wins Bid to Build Vulture, The Solar Spyplane That Stays Aloft For Five Years

SolarEagle Boeing's SolarEagle will fly continuously for five years under DARPA's Vulture II program. Boeing

From Popular Science:

Boeing’s spyplane development wing won an $89 million contract this week to build the SolarEagle unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, designed to fly continuously for five years at 65,000 feet.

As the winner of Darpa’s Vulture II program, the plane really only has to fly for one to three months by 2014, however.

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Black Strings: Black Holes With Extra Dimensions

Five-dimensional black strings evolve into black holes connected by black string filaments, in this computer simulation. Credit: Pretorius/Lehner

From Live Science:

Meet the Bizarro universe version of a black hole: a black string.

These hypothetical objects might form if our universe has hidden extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that we can see, scientists say. A new study of five-dimensional black strings offers a glimpse into how these strange objects might evolve over time – if indeed they exist at all.

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Germany's North Sea Wind Turbines Attracting Sea Strangers

An aerial view of the offshore energy park Alpha Ventus in the North Sea, about 45 kilometres (27 miles) north of the island of Borkum, April 27, 2010. "Alpha Ventus," the first German wind park in the North Sea, has become home to a new biotope. On the foundations of the turbines, which began operating this spring, scientists have found oysters, crabs, sea anemones, and mussels. (Ingo Wagner/Pool/Reuters)

From ABC News/Spiegel Online:

A slew of non-native marine species have made their home on the Alpha Ventus wind turbines off the German coast in the North Sea. Scientists say the oysters and crabs, among others, have not affected the structures.

"Alpha Ventus," the first German wind park in the North Sea, has become home to a new biotope. On the foundations of the turbines, which began operating this spring, scientists have found oysters, crabs, sea anemones, and mussels.

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The Pill At 50: Maybe Not The Best Birth Control For 2010

The birth control pill's simplicity helped it beat out competition - diaphragms, timed intercourse - in 1960. But today having to take a pill daily is a major shortcoming. TIM MATSUI / Getty Images

From Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Pill turned 50 this year. Is it aging gracefully?

There's no doubt that it revolutionized contraception after Food and Drug Administration approval in 1960. It offered women a safe, effective way to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Women chose it over less reliable methods such as timed intercourse and the diaphragm.

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Reprogrammable Card Can Be Many Credit Cards In One

Card 2.0 The Multi-Account credit card lets you toggle between different accounts at the same bank. Dynamics Inc.

From Popular Science:

A pair of new computerized credit cards can re-program their own magnetic stripes and hide their account numbers, providing added security for bank customers who don’t want to carry lots of plastic inside RFID-proof metal wallets.

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Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

Exercise has been shown to be ineffective when it comes to losing weight – dieting is a better route Photograph: Getty

From The Guardian:

Got a few pounds to lose? Cancel the gym membership. An increasing body of research reveals that exercise does next to nothing for you when it comes to losing weight. A result for couch potatoes, yes, but also one that could have serious implications for the government's long-term health strategy

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