A blog about everything

A ribosome reads an mRNA sequence and produces protein according to its genetic code. Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

From: Wired.Com

By Aaron Rowe

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three molecular biologists who study ribosomes, the protein factories within cells.

Ribosomes were discovered in the 1950’s by George Palade, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the makeup of cells, but scientists weren’t able to take a close look at those organelles till the end of the century. Thomas Steitz, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, and Ada Yonath developed tricks for examining the tiny structures with x-rays and electron beams. The high-resolution 3D images they acquired will help chemists develop a host of better medications.

“Scientists around the world are using the winners’ research to develop new antibiotics that can be used in the ongoing battle against antibiotic-resistant microbes that cause so much illness, suffering and death.” said Thomas Lane, president of the American Chemical Society, in a press release. Read more…

Biology, Biotech, Medicine Biology, Biotech, Medicine

Source: instructables.com

This is an exercise in recycling and alternative energy use. I used a discarded 62 inch satellite dish and used CD’s to create this along with materials that I had laying around. Nothing was purchased fo

r this project.

step 1Making the base/stand

I did not have the base, so I made one from 3″ ABS plastic pipe inserted in the ground about 18″. I then filled it with concrete and re-rod for stability.

Read more…

Green, Home made Green, Home made

Developed by the Graffiti Research Lab a division of the Eyebeam R&D OpenLab , LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials.

Guys from Evil Mad Science Laboratories provided some experiments with LED Throwies.

“The throwie (and I use the term loosely, referring to devices with or without magnets) is a darned useful thing. But the first time that I was introduced to the concept, I asked what a lot of other electronics-oriented people do: “where’s the resistor?”

Turns out that it’s a fair question. LEDs aren’t normally driven directly from a battery. And yet (1) people were making throwies with every imaginable color of LED and (2) they apparently weren’t exploding. So what’s the deal?

Turns out that the deal depends on what kind of LED you’ve got, and a few more things after that. The “standard” battery for this sort of thing is a CR2032 3V lithium coin cell. Almost any kind of an LED can be found in one of those little keychain flashlights, but throwies usually are made with 10 mm diffused-lens LEDs in assorted colors.

Most garden-variety LEDs are rated to operate safely at 20 mA or perhaps a little bit higher. Blue, white, and most modern green LEDs have a typical forward voltage of about 3.5 V when run at 20 mA, and typical red or yellow LEDs have a forward voltage of about 1.7 V when run at 20 mA.

This is actually straightforward for the 3.5 V LEDs. It means that when you put that 3 V coin cell across a blue or white LED, the current will stay safely below 20 mA, because the coin cell does not provide enough voltage to exceed that.

And while this does provide an upper bound, it doesn’t actually say much about what goes on once you hook up the LED. The current through the LED depends exponentially on the voltage across it, and the voltage across the battery depends on the current due to its internal resistance, and a number of other potential factors come into play. If you actually measure it, you might find that the current across the LED looks like this: Read more…

Home made Home made

By Priya Ganapati

From: Wired.Com

TV manufacturers want to bring that experience to your living room with 3-D displays that work much like the ones in the theaters. Major consumer-electronics companies, including Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Sony, are betting on 3-D, with compatible TV sets planned for the market in 2010.

To understand why, here’s a short primer on how our vision works.  Our eyes are about 3 inches apart, which means each eye sees a slightly different perspective of the same scene. The brain takes images from both eyes, fuses them together and uses the difference between the images to calculate distance, creating a sense of depth.

Getting the 3-D effect at home involves tricking the brain into doing something similar with the images that it gets from a TV set. But that’s not a trivial problem: TV makers have to figure out a way to precisely show a set of slightly different images to each of your eyes.

So how do they do that? Here are the key technologies that are making their way into 3-D TVs.

Read more…

Home audio video, Technology Home audio video, Technology

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is going on sale in more than 100 countries around the world, including the UK.

The reader has been confined to the US since its launch in November 2007; Amazon expects to have sold a million of the devices by the end of the year.

The global version will run on the 3G network, although Amazon has not specified the networks that will provide connectivity for the devices.

The Kindle store will offer over 200,000 English language titles.

Hundreds of publishers are signed up including Penguin, Faber and Faber, and HarperCollins.

It will also carry more than 85 US and international newspapers and magazines.

Internet, Technology, netbooks, wired netbooks, Technology, wired

Hello everybody! I just started this blog to make some short notes on some really intersting  stuff.

Uncategorized