4000 hours for the good capacitors? That's like 6 months of continuous usage. Surely shome mistake?
I'm not too knowledgable concerning electronics, but I believe that capacitors are typically used at specifications far below their "rated" ability, and that this rating is more of a worst-case scenario.
Toy Biz, in its filings, pulled no punches. The figures "stand as potent witnesses for their status as nonhuman creatures," the company argued. How could they be humans, Toy Biz said, if they possessed "tentacles, claws, wings or robotic limbs?"
Or a mechanical heart, ceramic and titanium hips and knees, or an implanted insulin pump?
OK, so I don't know anyone with tentacles or claws, but some prosthetic limbs make use of quite a bit of robotic technology, even if the level of technology is still at the point where it struggles to grasp a doorknob. Does the presence of non-human parts make you non-human?
A while back, I had a problem with a persistent faint buzzing in my room, which I could hear only at night.
It turned out to be coil whine from my monitor's power supply. Even when switched "off", it was never completely off -- the power button was only a soft power off, like an ATX supply. The reason I only heard it at night was that during the day it was drowned out by ambient noise. Once identified, it was easily solved by moving the power strip into a convenient location, so I could cut the power completely.
I can think of some other applications for this device. For instance, aboard satellites and space probes -- many planets experience extreme fluctuations in temperature during their days (assuming this is a planet with a usable day length), and satellites will experience temperature fluctations as they pass in and out of earth's shadow.
While these are basically the sort of things we us solar panels for now, this has the potential to be more robust and compact -- or maybe not, but they would still have certain advantages. For instance, on Mars, solar panels may suffer from dust deposition, while this wouldn't. They also wouldn't suffer as much from the effects of radiation exposure. On the other hand, I don't know how well it would scale up.
There might be some terrestrial applications, too. For instance, for research you might want to power a sensor (temperature, wind speed, etc) in some remote location. Solar works fine when you're out in the open, but something like this could work in the middle of a shady forest, too.
"There's got to be an easier way to get him to switch than pushing it in him. I bet that CD hurt!"
I dunno, AOL's been using that approach for years, seemed to work pretty well for them...
And another something else also cool...
on
DNA Goes Binary
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"You wanna see something cool... how about DNA having a parity bit?? Take a peek...."
Here's another something else interesting -- the equivalent of a DNA RAID Array, found in the microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. This particular bacterium has the distinction of being the most radiation-resistant organism known.
D. radiodurans posses four copies of its circular chromosome, stacked together like a roll of Lifesavers. This alignment allows for fast and efficient repair of any errors.
I had a little bird, her name was Enza. I opened the door, and In-flew-Enza.
When the 1918 flu first broke out, it occurred during what was quite possibily the worst possible conditions for a it to occur. WWI was on, so large numbers of young people were being shipped all over the globe. At the same time, in many counteries the press was hobbled by wartime censorship, thus delaying the medical community's recognition of the pandemic's existence. The nickname of that the Flu was given, "The Spanish Lady" actually came about from Spain's status as a neutral nation during this time -- the press was able to speak freely, and so its existance was revealed there first.
The 1918 flu virus had a couple of interesting features. As the Bloomberg article mentions, it has an unusual ability to kill young adults. Basically, your typical influenza virus (and many diseases in general) have a U-shaped mortality curve -- highest among children and the elderly. However, this particular outbreak had a W-shaped curve, with a sudden spike right in the middle.
The reason for this mortality spike has long been a matter for conjecture. One feature of this particular flu outbreak was that it often killed suddenly, sometimes without warning, with victims also frequently showing presence of hemorrhage and edema in the lungs. This was so unusual that some have wondered if it was influenza at all -- after all, back then a virus was a mysterious "filterable agent", invisible to the most powerful optical microscopes. However, we do know from more modern research that a particularly large proportions of people who lived through that period have antibodies against a particular influenza type.
A theory is that the high lethality was not due just to the virus itself, but to an immune over-reaction (which would be strongest in young adults) which damaged the lungs. Other theories have suggested that perhaps the influenza outbreak was actually a co-epidemic, with some other agent also present -- another virus, a bacterium, even lungworms have been proposed. While it is likely that weakened victims often picked up secondary infections, evidence for an actual binary epidemic is weak.
Could the epidemic occur again if the strain were resurrected, or perhaps spontaneously put back together by the mutational drifts and re-arrangements that Influenza constantly is undergoing? Indeed, one of the questions is why hasn't it survived into the present? Some have suggested that perhaps the impact was large enough that humanity has been selected for greater resistance. Or perhaps features of the disease have since been incorporated into the various strains which still smolder today, producing a herd resistance which would be enough to prevent a major pandemic. Or maybe we've just been lucky, and it went extinct all by itself.
Either way, I think that even if it suddenly popped up, with all it's virulence intact, we're in much better shape today. We have a network that tracks the ebb and flow of flu epidemics every year, we have a spread of well-characterized vaccines (plus a new nasal spray vaccine coming soon), plus four different FDA-approved anti-virals for influenza. Even if it turned out to be something radically different -- and the historical antibody profiles previously mentioned suggest it's not.
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
Here's a surprise then, gas exchange is not the only process affected. One effect is that the equilibrium states of chemical reactions which alter pressure are affected (A consequence of Le Chatelier's principle). Another is that the solvent properties of water are subtly affected, causing some proteins to denature.
In fact, the effect is pronounced enough that it can be used commercially to perform pasturization (both with and without heat). Here's a link to a company called Avure which offers High Pressure Pasturization equipment.
"It can't be that sensitive. Suppose they put about 20 millimoles in him (that's a lot, especially just for imaging). About 10^22 atoms (Avogadro, remember him?). After 3*7*3=63 halflives there about 2^63/=/ 10^19 times fewer, about say a thousand (this is rounded to the nearest power of 10). If he's near the detector for about say 1 minute, that's about a 500th of a halflife so we can expect, what, one of the atoms to decay?"
Could be a lot more than that. While the desired isotope used for medical purposes had a half-life of eight hours, I can think of two possibilities that would explain the detection. If the half life is 8 hours, it had to be generated just before use (with a reactor, accelerator, or by chemical purification of an intermediate decay product from an isotope of a different element). Could there be some side reactions/impurities that generated small amounts of other isotopes with longer half lives?
Another is that the decay path doesn't stop after one step -- nuclei resulting from the initial decay could also be radioactive.
"It's actually impossible to make a perfect cube out of Lego. The ratios of lengths of the sides of the pieces are such that there is no integer multiples which are identical."
There is way to make perfect cubes -- by using techniques other than just stacking square blocks. You can use angle pieces to produce a cube, or rods like the type you find in Technics sets. Might not look quite as pretty, though.
It looks like Dr. Draper is taking a very direct method of testing this out -- grind up tires, expose to water, raise test organisms in water. Looks like a very empirical approach.
One thing about the rubber that comes off tires is that it's worn and weathered. Both the surface where the wear is directly, and the particles themselves have had time to oxidize, which is going to change the types of compounds that you'll leach from your samples. More accurate results might be obtained if she took her ground samples, and let them age a bit while exposed to air and sunlight. Some substances would break down or be altered, while other new ones might be formed during this time.
After leaching the particles, you might then pass it through soil samples. Larger particulates will settle out, while some organic substances will bind to clays or be degraded by microbes. The results might be more like what actually ends up in run-off.
If she wanted to take a more reductionist approach, she could obtain the individual substances used in tires, and test them individually against her organisms. Butadiene rubber, Carbon black, Silica (sometimes), Sulfur vulcanizing agents, etc. This ignores any reactions that may occur between the ingredients (probably minimal for some ingredients like carbon black, but extensive for the vulcanizing agents, for example), but gives some hints as to what exactly is causing your problems.
"4. Tanaka Kouichi (A pioneer in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)"
Minor Correction: Tanaka's work was actually in Mass Spectrometry (MALDI method used to ionize large molecules, such as proteins). The prize was shared with John Fenn (also Mass Spec) and Kurt Wüthrich (for NMR).
I also noticed that some sources are spelling his name "Koichi". This is the spelling that appears on the Nobel Foundation site.
"Maybe your elves can built it. I have some schematics for it. Pr0... er... pencil holder schematics are becoming really big, with the internet and all, you know, Santa?"
I think that little slip of the tongue may have just landed you on the "Naughty" list.
"Rumor has it, doctors will soon be rendering a patient's internal organs with ASCII art."
Though it isn't exactly an example of an internal organ, noted author Kurt Vonnegut has already made progress in this field. In one of his books (Cat's Cradle?) he makes use of the ASCII rendering technique to provide the reader with a detailed visual of a sphincter:
*
Whoa... just imagine how many polygons that would have taken!
"All lies! Only if the government gives me a ticket to fly over to where the telescope is located and see at it for myself and allow me to check out other things in space to ensure it's not a fake. Then MAYBE I'll believe them.
Hey, you've got my support. To cut down on costs, though, I'm going to vote for the one-way ticket option.
Re:if they don't like it, they can get out of town
on
Only Thieves Block Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Technology makes some good business models go bad and eliminates certain categories of jobs. It happened for farming... "
"Which is still the most important job in the world, and always will be. It takes a lot of decadence to forget that fact. "
I can think of one occupation that's even more important than that -- Motherhood.
"There is sort of an inherent problem with that. If the hole is too small to even hit any nerve endings, it's probably too small to let blood cells through."
Actually, the article says otherwise, in an example where the researcher actually stuck his finger in to test it out -- "As the cut in his finger deepened and he felt no discomfort, Rode became convinced. When the blood started to flow, he yanked his finger away."
I'm guessing that what's happening here is a result of the laser's ability to cut through with no damage to the surround areas. A nerve endings that gets destroyed or vaporized sends no signal -- but normally what happens is that nearby endings get activated by the microscopic tearing and damage done on the surrounding tissue. In this case, the surrounding tissue is completely untouched, so nothing happens.
"It's not so much 'theft' as 'mating'. ..gene exchange is just one method by which bacteria maintain genetic diversity."
While some kinds of bacteria will exchange DNA through a process similar to mating (called conjugation, no less), others can pick up DNA from dead bacteria (micronecrophilia?:) ), bacteria species not their own, and even stray bits of DNA floating in the environment.
The article mentions that the Northeast/Northwest passages would probably be open for a brief period each year. I wonder, though -- once open, maybe the passage could be kept open with icebreakers. Perhaps for a few extra weeks? Maybe extra months?
It would be quite expensive, but the tolls for using the Panama canal can be over a hundred thousand dollars for some ships.
We couldn't wear contacts in the fab because of a cleaning chemical in the floor with the trade name Pirhana. If something ever went wrong and the fans backblasted, Pirhana would melt plastic - and thus your contacts.
I believe this may be a reference to Pirhana Solution, a mixture of Sulfuric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide. Very effective at removing even the slightest traces of contaminants from a surface, but also known for it's nasty habit of detonating when mixed with organic solvents.
Apparently, there are a number of problems with pencils, including the flammability of wood/graphite in the pure oxygen atmospheres that were used at that time, and that conductive graphite dust could drift into electronics and cause a short.
Slashdot Mirror
4000 hours for the good capacitors? That's like 6 months of continuous usage. Surely shome mistake?
I'm not too knowledgable concerning electronics, but I believe that capacitors are typically used at specifications far below their "rated" ability, and that this rating is more of a worst-case scenario.
Toy Biz, in its filings, pulled no punches. The figures "stand as potent witnesses for their status as nonhuman creatures," the company argued. How could they be humans, Toy Biz said, if they possessed "tentacles, claws, wings or robotic limbs?"
Or a mechanical heart, ceramic and titanium hips and knees, or an implanted insulin pump?
OK, so I don't know anyone with tentacles or claws, but some prosthetic limbs make use of quite a bit of robotic technology, even if the level of technology is still at the point where it struggles to grasp a doorknob. Does the presence of non-human parts make you non-human?
A while back, I had a problem with a persistent faint buzzing in my room, which I could hear only at night.
It turned out to be coil whine from my monitor's power supply. Even when switched "off", it was never completely off -- the power button was only a soft power off, like an ATX supply. The reason I only heard it at night was that during the day it was drowned out by ambient noise. Once identified, it was easily solved by moving the power strip into a convenient location, so I could cut the power completely.
"Nobody's saying they are exactly like us. In fact, on average they have larger breasts, greener skin, heavier mascera, and wear shorter miniskirts."
And that's just the male of the species!
I can think of some other applications for this device. For instance, aboard satellites and space probes -- many planets experience extreme fluctuations in temperature during their days (assuming this is a planet with a usable day length), and satellites will experience temperature fluctations as they pass in and out of earth's shadow.
While these are basically the sort of things we us solar panels for now, this has the potential to be more robust and compact -- or maybe not, but they would still have certain advantages. For instance, on Mars, solar panels may suffer from dust deposition, while this wouldn't. They also wouldn't suffer as much from the effects of radiation exposure. On the other hand, I don't know how well it would scale up.
There might be some terrestrial applications, too. For instance, for research you might want to power a sensor (temperature, wind speed, etc) in some remote location. Solar works fine when you're out in the open, but something like this could work in the middle of a shady forest, too.
"There's got to be an easier way to get him to switch than pushing it in him. I bet that CD hurt!"
I dunno, AOL's been using that approach for years, seemed to work pretty well for them...
"You wanna see something cool... how about DNA having a parity bit?? Take a peek...."
Here's another something else interesting -- the equivalent of a DNA RAID Array, found in the microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. This particular bacterium has the distinction of being the most radiation-resistant organism known.
D. radiodurans posses four copies of its circular chromosome, stacked together like a roll of Lifesavers. This alignment allows for fast and efficient repair of any errors.
When the 1918 flu first broke out, it occurred during what was quite possibily the worst possible conditions for a it to occur. WWI was on, so large numbers of young people were being shipped all over the globe. At the same time, in many counteries the press was hobbled by wartime censorship, thus delaying the medical community's recognition of the pandemic's existence. The nickname of that the Flu was given, "The Spanish Lady" actually came about from Spain's status as a neutral nation during this time -- the press was able to speak freely, and so its existance was revealed there first.
The 1918 flu virus had a couple of interesting features. As the Bloomberg article mentions, it has an unusual ability to kill young adults. Basically, your typical influenza virus (and many diseases in general) have a U-shaped mortality curve -- highest among children and the elderly. However, this particular outbreak had a W-shaped curve, with a sudden spike right in the middle.
The reason for this mortality spike has long been a matter for conjecture. One feature of this particular flu outbreak was that it often killed suddenly, sometimes without warning, with victims also frequently showing presence of hemorrhage and edema in the lungs. This was so unusual that some have wondered if it was influenza at all -- after all, back then a virus was a mysterious "filterable agent", invisible to the most powerful optical microscopes. However, we do know from more modern research that a particularly large proportions of people who lived through that period have antibodies against a particular influenza type.
A theory is that the high lethality was not due just to the virus itself, but to an immune over-reaction (which would be strongest in young adults) which damaged the lungs. Other theories have suggested that perhaps the influenza outbreak was actually a co-epidemic, with some other agent also present -- another virus, a bacterium, even lungworms have been proposed. While it is likely that weakened victims often picked up secondary infections, evidence for an actual binary epidemic is weak.
Could the epidemic occur again if the strain were resurrected, or perhaps spontaneously put back together by the mutational drifts and re-arrangements that Influenza constantly is undergoing? Indeed, one of the questions is why hasn't it survived into the present? Some have suggested that perhaps the impact was large enough that humanity has been selected for greater resistance. Or perhaps features of the disease have since been incorporated into the various strains which still smolder today, producing a herd resistance which would be enough to prevent a major pandemic. Or maybe we've just been lucky, and it went extinct all by itself.
Either way, I think that even if it suddenly popped up, with all it's virulence intact, we're in much better shape today. We have a network that tracks the ebb and flow of flu epidemics every year, we have a spread of well-characterized vaccines (plus a new nasal spray vaccine coming soon), plus four different FDA-approved anti-virals for influenza. Even if it turned out to be something radically different -- and the historical antibody profiles previously mentioned suggest it's not.
Hmm... I think I've seen an example of this in action somewhere.
Human life depends heavily on gaseous exchanges, which behave differently at different pressures. Since liquids and solids are hardly compressible, it seems like a no-brainer that organisms that do not rely on gaseous exchanges can reamin intact perfectly well in extremely high pressures.
I would have been more surprised if they had been destroyed.
Here's a surprise then, gas exchange is not the only process affected. One effect is that the equilibrium states of chemical reactions which alter pressure are affected (A consequence of Le Chatelier's principle). Another is that the solvent properties of water are subtly affected, causing some proteins to denature.
In fact, the effect is pronounced enough that it can be used commercially to perform pasturization (both with and without heat). Here's a link to a company called Avure which offers High Pressure Pasturization equipment.
"In fact the entire observable universe had about 10^120 atoms. So you are out of luck very soon."
No problem. I just whip out my handy dandy quark notcher, punch a whole, and double my capacity!
"It can't be that sensitive. Suppose they put about 20 millimoles in him (that's a lot, especially just for imaging). About 10^22 atoms (Avogadro, remember him?). After 3*7*3=63 halflives there about 2^63 /=/ 10^19 times fewer, about say a thousand (this is rounded to the nearest power of 10). If he's near the detector for about say 1 minute, that's about a 500th of a halflife so we can expect, what, one of the atoms to decay?"
Could be a lot more than that. While the desired isotope used for medical purposes had a half-life of eight hours, I can think of two possibilities that would explain the detection. If the half life is 8 hours, it had to be generated just before use (with a reactor, accelerator, or by chemical purification of an intermediate decay product from an isotope of a different element). Could there be some side reactions/impurities that generated small amounts of other isotopes with longer half lives?
Another is that the decay path doesn't stop after one step -- nuclei resulting from the initial decay could also be radioactive.
"It's actually impossible to make a perfect cube out of Lego. The ratios of lengths of the sides of the pieces are such that there is no integer multiples which are identical."
There is way to make perfect cubes -- by using techniques other than just stacking square blocks. You can use angle pieces to produce a cube, or rods like the type you find in Technics sets. Might not look quite as pretty, though.
It looks like Dr. Draper is taking a very direct method of testing this out -- grind up tires, expose to water, raise test organisms in water. Looks like a very empirical approach.
One thing about the rubber that comes off tires is that it's worn and weathered. Both the surface where the wear is directly, and the particles themselves have had time to oxidize, which is going to change the types of compounds that you'll leach from your samples. More accurate results might be obtained if she took her ground samples, and let them age a bit while exposed to air and sunlight. Some substances would break down or be altered, while other new ones might be formed during this time.
After leaching the particles, you might then pass it through soil samples. Larger particulates will settle out, while some organic substances will bind to clays or be degraded by microbes. The results might be more like what actually ends up in run-off.
If she wanted to take a more reductionist approach, she could obtain the individual substances used in tires, and test them individually against her organisms. Butadiene rubber, Carbon black, Silica (sometimes), Sulfur vulcanizing agents, etc. This ignores any reactions that may occur between the ingredients (probably minimal for some ingredients like carbon black, but extensive for the vulcanizing agents, for example), but gives some hints as to what exactly is causing your problems.
"4. Tanaka Kouichi (A pioneer in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)"
Minor Correction: Tanaka's work was actually in Mass Spectrometry (MALDI method used to ionize large molecules, such as proteins). The prize was shared with John Fenn (also Mass Spec) and Kurt Wüthrich (for NMR).
I also noticed that some sources are spelling his name "Koichi". This is the spelling that appears on the Nobel Foundation site.
"Maybe your elves can built it. I have some schematics for it. Pr0... er... pencil holder schematics are becoming really big, with the internet and all, you know, Santa?"
I think that little slip of the tongue may have just landed you on the "Naughty" list.
Though it isn't exactly an example of an internal organ, noted author Kurt Vonnegut has already made progress in this field. In one of his books (Cat's Cradle?) he makes use of the ASCII rendering technique to provide the reader with a detailed visual of a sphincter:
Whoa... just imagine how many polygons that would have taken!
"All lies! Only if the government gives me a ticket to fly over to where the telescope is located and see at it for myself and allow me to check out other things in space to ensure it's not a fake. Then MAYBE I'll believe them.
Hey, you've got my support. To cut down on costs, though, I'm going to vote for the one-way ticket option.
"Technology makes some good business models go bad and eliminates certain categories of jobs. It happened for farming... "
:)
"Which is still the most important job in the world, and always will be. It takes a lot of decadence to forget that fact. "
I can think of one occupation that's even more important than that -- Motherhood.
Well, time to go hunting-gathering, ciao!
"someone else on /. is married? wow, and I thought I was the only one."
:)
Uh, I'm seeing a possibility here -- better check you're spouse's Slashdot ID.
"There is sort of an inherent problem with that. If the hole is too small to even hit any nerve endings, it's probably too small to let blood cells through."
Actually, the article says otherwise, in an example where the researcher actually stuck his finger in to test it out -- "As the cut in his finger deepened and he felt no discomfort, Rode became convinced. When the blood started to flow, he yanked his finger away."
I'm guessing that what's happening here is a result of the laser's ability to cut through with no damage to the surround areas. A nerve endings that gets destroyed or vaporized sends no signal -- but normally what happens is that nearby endings get activated by the microscopic tearing and damage done on the surrounding tissue. In this case, the surrounding tissue is completely untouched, so nothing happens.
"It's not so much 'theft' as 'mating'. . .gene exchange is just one method by which bacteria maintain genetic diversity."
:) ), bacteria species not their own, and even stray bits of DNA floating in the environment.
While some kinds of bacteria will exchange DNA through a process similar to mating (called conjugation, no less), others can pick up DNA from dead bacteria (micronecrophilia?
The article mentions that the Northeast/Northwest passages would probably be open for a brief period each year. I wonder, though -- once open, maybe the passage could be kept open with icebreakers. Perhaps for a few extra weeks? Maybe extra months?
It would be quite expensive, but the tolls for using the Panama canal can be over a hundred thousand dollars for some ships.
We couldn't wear contacts in the fab because of a cleaning chemical in the floor with the trade name Pirhana. If something ever went wrong and the fans backblasted, Pirhana would melt plastic - and thus your contacts.
I believe this may be a reference to Pirhana Solution, a mixture of Sulfuric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide. Very effective at removing even the slightest traces of contaminants from a surface, but also known for it's nasty habit of detonating when mixed with organic solvents.
(remember when we spent millions coming up with a pen that would write in zero-G and the Russians just used pencils?)...
There's a page for this on the Urban Legends Reference Page.
Apparently, there are a number of problems with pencils, including the flammability of wood/graphite in the pure oxygen atmospheres that were used at that time, and that conductive graphite dust could drift into electronics and cause a short.