Manipulating the information: a dangerous strategy.

Alongside my dearest friend Luis Bustos, we have created a Brainshark presentation how different a scientific research could be covered by two types of publication: a scientific magazine and a news website.

You could get to the video from this link: http://goo.gl/Pu7bc

We invite you to comment and share our video, and we hope that you would like it.

What about recycling...?

Millions of monitors and flat-screen TVs will be soon at the end of their useful life or maybe they will become obsolete, so they would become a threat to the environment. This situation brings a very serious problem to the world, because we already have mountains and mountains of technological waste in the world. However, there is a group of researchers that are developing a set of tools to help recycling these devices in an efficient way. The LCDs that were created before 2009 use fluorescent lighting cold cathode bulbs to light the screens. These screens also contain mercury, and that is why it is so difficult to incinerate them or just throw them to a rubbish dump. During the following years, is estimated that billions of these screens will be retired of service every year. A professor at the Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States, called Fu Zhao, who is also one of the researchers, warns that if those screens are not properly treated, they may cause a serious damage in the environment. Furthermore, Fu Zhao and some of his students are elaborating a system to help the recycling industry to provide an appropriate treatment to these screens. The objective is to produce the tools and the equipment specially designed to disassemble LCDs within an acceptable labor cost and, at the same time, to recover the most expensive materials included in the screens to reduce the environmental risks.

When I knew about this research and the tools that are being created to reduce the environmental damage that these screens produce, I was very surprised to know that these screens have a useful life of only 4 or 5 years. This is something that we are not told of when we are buying them. I also think that this kind of technology should not be allowed to be created, because we have to take care of the environment and of course these TV are not helping to protect it. Do you have one of these TVs? If so, what will you do with it when it becomes useless?

Draw a hear and print it

The dream of creating organs to be transplanted is near. Many of you might remember the movie "Bicentennial man" and how he created organs and saved many lives. This might be possible now, thanks to the 3D printers and the huge progress they bring.

I know it might sound like a sci-fi movie but printing three dimensional organs such as a hearts, livers and kidneys is something that a lot of researchers all over the world had been working on for a long time.

One of this teams has been able to use the 3D printers technology to actually print human tissue. This team from San Diego, California is directed by Keith Murphy and they work at Organovo. Their final objective is to be able to print complete organs, to be transplanted.

In simple words, the printer has two heads. On one side they put the cells and on the other side they put the gel. The work is very precise and this two components together to create a three dimensional tissue.

The biological 'inc' is made of stem cells or bone marrow. They are kept on test tubes and cultivated there.

They create the form they want to give to the tissue, on the computer but then it is nature itself that does the work. Cells organize themselves to form the tissue.

The advantages of this advancement is that the organisms of the patients would never reject the new tissue because it would come from them.

In the future they expect to be able to create new organs that patients cannot reject and to save millions of lives, because the wait for a new organ would not exist.

For further information you can watch this video: Video (It is in spanish)

Faster wireless connection

Nowadays, we are able to capture every moment of our life with cameras, cellphones and mp4 recorders, yet these files could be to difficult to transfer to our laptops because of their size. Some of these files can be several gigabytes in size and it takes to much time to finally get to see them on your computer, and even more time if you transfer them wirelessly.

This is how a new technology was created. It is a speedy alternative called 'multi-gigabit communication module” and it is six times faster than a USB cable. Other advantage is that carrying a USB cable can be annoying for some people and it is easy to forget at home, but with this technology you don't need to.

Frank Deicke, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, took 'wireless' to another level. “It transfers data at a rate of 1 gigabyte per second (Gbit/s). To put this into context, one e-mail character has a size of eight bits. The infrared module is able to transfer 125 million characters per second,” Deicke said.

In general, cable connections between electronic devices are faster than wireless ones but in this case it is the other way around because the “multi-gigabit communication module” is six times faster than a USB2 cable.

What is more impressive is that when compared to a conventional wireless connection, like Wi-Fi, the IPMS solution is 46 times faster and when compare to other Bluetooth connections, the result was even more impressive. It is 1430 times faster!

For the conventional devices it takes more time because the process is too long. In simple words, when you need to transfer something, the data needs to be packed and unpacked but before that, the file needs to be converted into a radio signal and then the receiving device needs to convert it back into the file itself.

The researcher and his team had to build a small infrared module with fast-working hardware and software. 
  “We achieved this ultimately through a clever combination of different technical solutions,” said Deicke.

They used a transceiver, an optical component which is able to send and receive light signals simultaneously. The transceiver is very small and manages to fit in a laser diode to send light pulses and a photo detector to detect them. The decoders that receive and translate the encoded data are also crucial.

In the future this technology is expected to improve, going from 3 Gbits to 10Gbits per second and allowing us to connect any laptop to any camera without problems.

A war has started, this time on Twitter.

I suppose and hope that all of you are informed about the military attacks that have been launched between the Israeli Military Force and Hamas (armed group from Palestine), and how dangerous and tense is the atmosphere these days, because of the alarm of a new big scale armed conflict between those two groups.

Nonetheless, apart from all the missiles and mortars that Israel and Hamas are shooting to each other, there is another kind of response to the attacks: Twitter, the incredibly popular site of the “40 words”, has been used by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and the Alqassam Brigades (military wing of Hamas) to publish statements regarding the conflict, some accomplishment like the murder of a Palestine leader (Ahmed Jabari) or to call on justice for the killings of 40 civilians in Gaza.

These are the polemic tweets that the IDF and Hamas had posted these recent days:

As you can see social media could be a determine factor in this conflict, because will not only inform about all the news regarding this armed conflict, but also be THE way how the rest of the world is going to create their bias about the struggle. All the tweets posted by these two military forces, apart from been used to show off their goals, killings and strategies; they will be the direct pieces of information about how these battle is lived and fought by Israelis and Palestinians.

Love is in the air !

Have you ever think why some people are more attractive when you smell them? The pheromone is a biochemical signals which can impact in other people without even noticing. As in the animal kingdom, sex pheromones can indicate us the range of attraction to different people. This is a kind of mechanism that we all have that influences, unconsciously, our decision about attraction. 

Scientists have begun to figure it out why the odor of some people influences the sexual attraction. Even though people can consciously appreciate some smells, pheromones are not consciously perceived. According to some studies, scientists believe that we have a gland, in the top of our nose, which is called veromonasal organ. This is supposed to be the responsible of detecting the sexual pheromones in other people, but some other scientists reject this idea. If indeed we have that gland in our nose, our brain couldn't be able to decode these signals. 

We have to be aware that as we belong to the animal kingdom, all our responses are, at the end, natural and primitive. Obviously that in contrast to animals, our main sense to feel attraction to other people is our sight, but we have to know that a good reception of pheromones can make a difference in our future relationships. Do you believe that our brain can detect the pheromones? What would happen if as we smell the perfumes, we can also smell and feel our pheromones?

If you want to know more about this, please check this site:

http://www.ehow.com/info_8206153_human-attraction-types-pheromones.html

Ready to reach the stars?

The American multinational corporation Google, has launched a new project that will allow users travel through the space like every kid has always imagine. This experiment has been called “100.000 Stars”, and the reason for this name is really simple: with help from NASA, the European Space Agency and other sources alongside the technology used in Chrome, Google’s creative lab is creating a magnificent display of the one hundred thousand nearest stars in relation to our Sun.

 And that’s not everything of course, apart from the possibility of zooming in or out the site, or literally navigate through our cosmos, with the assistance of the Virtual Encyclopedia Wikipedia, users are able to acquire information about every star shown on the display, and get a digital image of the celestial body. The site starts with a short explanation of itself, and then the user will gain full control of it; either he could begin a followed tour through the site or just explore our part of universe by himself, like a real astronomer could do.

This last application of Google join the vast group of services that the successful corporation had integrated into our daily life – Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google+, among others -, but after using for a few minutes, you’ll start realizing that more than a service, is a beautiful tool that could not only amaze or entertain, but also enlighten the young minds of future scientists.

Smart anti-theft fabric

Imagine you and your family left the city for the weekend and you came back only to find that your house had been robbed. You start thinking that things would have gone completely different if you had had an alarm and or better security system. Now, that is not a problem!

A new anti-theft system has been created, a woven based fabric that triggers an alarm when is penetrated or cut by an intruder. This new and revolutionary fabric allows the exact point of the break-in to be identified and is cheaper than many other anti-theft systems. 

A very important characteristic of this fabric is that it can be hidden anywhere so it acts as an invisible way trick robbers into thinking that you don't have an alarm and can be used in protecting entire buildings. But this fabric incorporates, in fact, a fine web of conductive threads connected to a microcontroller that detects warning signals emitted when the fabric is cut, and triggers an alarm.

The smart fabric was developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin in collaboration with the Technische Universität Berlin and ETTLIN Spinnerei und Weberei Produktions GmbH. IZM project manager Erik Simon said, “The fabric could be used to implement an entirely novel, invisible security system for buildings,”. 

The fabric along with other materials like concrete or integrated to the rafters of the roof, could be the perfect solution for banks, museums and jeweler's shops. Researchers say that it could also be used with floor materials in combination with pressure sensors, to turn on the alarm if someone enters the room. This would not represent any danger for animals nor humans.

This technology is also very cheap because of the materials with which it is made of. They used standard materials and components such as silver-coated conductive threads and a signal evaluation system. 

Erik Simon also explains that this conductive thread can be incorporated in the polyester substrate and the result would be: a fabric that can be trimmed to any length and any surface size.

What do you think about it? Would you have it in your house?
 

One more pro to Facebook

Last week Remi and Evelyn Urbano, two small kids from Newton, Massachusetts, posted the following picture in their mom’s Facebook account:

What do you think it happened? The kids got more than 118,000 likes on that image and after a quick visit to the Ellen M. Gifford Cat Shelter, Hairryette (they wanted to name their cat Hairy Pawturrr, but it turned out being a female) got a new family and the kids’ dream was fulfilled thanks to the social network created my Mark Zuckerberg.

Every single day, thousands of campaigns are launched or ‘shared’ through Facebook and well, a lot or maybe most of them are just frauds or swindles but there are others that show real efforts of people, trying to accomplish some things they really want. It could be a little cat wanted by two American children or a young man in Chile trying to find support to a cause, both cases demonstrate the powerful tool that Facebook could be in order to get what you might want; all you need is a good image and catchy statement.

Facebook, formed with a social purpose in a college institution in the U.S., nowadays has tended to be a lot more than that – Businesses, politics campaigns, games, relationships, even criminal investigations had seen the light through this website, turning the term social much more complete, perfected and inclusive.

I really believe that Mark Zuckerberg never even dreamed about creating a platform where almost every aspects of human social life could have a place.

What are your thoughts related to Facebook’s growth in terms of applications or actions that we could do with it?

Is the male contraceptive pill a good idea?

For decades the woman has been in charge of taking a contraceptive pill in order to prevent undesired pregnancy…until now. Scientists are working on a new pill that it is going to be used by men. The recent tests on mice have shown positive results; decrease in sperm count and temporary infertility. But the effects on humans are yet unknown. Parallel to this some doctors affirm that there is a need for such pill because “the lack of it has contributed to the number of unplanned pregnancies.” (read full piece of News here!)

The investigation, however, does not refer to the STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases). It may be the case that a man who’s taking the pill has sexual intercourse with a woman who has AIDS and he does not wear a condom trusting that avoiding pregnancy is more important. In this hypothetical case taking a simple pill will not prevent him from getting that STD.

For this reason I think that it will be necessary to educate men about the use of the pill before marketing it. Men will have to be aware that the pill will keep you from having a baby, but not from getting a STD. Both condom and pill will be recommended, don’t forget!