Sci-tech
Now...Store
Hundreds of Movies
Six
leading technology companies have formed a consortium to make
an optical disc that could store a few hundred movies. The
Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance, which includes
Fuji Photo and CMC Magnetics, will let consumers conceivably
put a terabyte (1TB) of data on to a single optical disc,
reports Cnet news.com. The consortium said an HVD disc could
hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at
over one gigabyte a second or 40 times faster than a DVD.
HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray
and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of
data while dual layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs
hold about 4.7GB. Sony unveiled a home server with 1TB of
storage for the Japanese market last year. Half the capacity
would be enough to record six channels of TV for five and
a half days non-stop, Sony said.
Pollution
Fighter turns Clot Buster
A
material normally used to clean up car exhaust fumes could
one day be used in dressings and surgical equipment to prevent
severe skin infections and blood clots. It might even help
combat infections by the MRSA superbug, a newly filed patent
claims. What these medical problems have in common is that
they can be treated with nitric oxide (NO). This gas is able
to regulate blood pressure, stop thrombosis - blood clotting
in the vessels - and is a powerful antibacterial agent. However,
applying NO to the right areas and at the right levels is
a major challenge. "As nitric oxide is toxic in large
quantities you have to be able to deliver the right amount
to the right place," says Russell Morris, a chemist at
the University of St Andrews in the UK. And because the gas
is very reactive and quickly breaks down in the body, it is
hard to find a way to deliver it to a specific site. But Morris
thinks it will be possible to release NO onto the skin at
precisely controlled rates using the same technology that
catalytic converters use to scrub the gas from car exhaust.
Some converters do this by trapping NO in a compound called
a zeolite, then breaking it down into harmless nitrogen and
oxygen.
Surround-sound
Tailored to Individual Ears
Virtual
surround sound systems in MP3 players, TV sets and games consoles
take an ordinary stereo headphone signal and boost and delay
some frequencies to mimic a surround-sound effect. But how
realistic the resulting sound appears varies from person to
person, as we all have differently shaped ears and heads.
A joint project between the University of York in UK and the
University of Sydney in Australia has worked out a solution.
A modified photo booth takes 3D images of the listener's head
to measure the shape and size of their ears. These measurements
are then used to compute how much to boost and delay the sound
to create an ideal effect for that person. The calculated
surround-sound profile is then stored on a smartcard which
will plug into a new generation of compatible gadgets.
Easy
Slow-motion
Users
of a new camcorder will be able to intercut bursts of slow
motion as they shoot, without the need for tricky editing
and without the blur which spoils most home video slo-mo.
When the "Live Slow" button on the £500 JVC
camcorder is pressed, the camera temporarily stops recording
pictures direct to tape and instead starts feeding four copies
of each frame into a memory chip. When transferred to tape
and played back at normal speed, the sequence contains frames
to show smooth action at a quarter of normal speed. The effect
can be used to highlight someone swinging a cricket bat, say,
or an athlete jumping over a bar. When the slow-motion clip
ends, the recording jumps back to normal speed.
Left-handers
View World Differently From Right-handers
Researchers
have said that left-handed people view the world differently
from right-handed people.
Studies
conducted by researchers from the University of Birmingham,
has stated that left-handed persons use opposite sides of
their brains for looking at and making sense of an image compared
to right- handed people. For their study, researchers used
a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS),
which momentarily disrupts brain activity and applied it over
either the left or right parietal lobe at the back of the
brain while volunteers concentrated on the details of a visual
stimulus. The findings revealed that stimulation of the left
side of the brain made it harder for right-handers to attend
to detail, whilst stimulation of the right side had this effect
on left-handers. "In right-handed people the right hemisphere
sees the whole picture, whereas the left hemisphere attends
to the details. However, we have found that in left-handed
people, this is completely reversed. Not only our language
function, but even the way we see the world can depend on
our handedness," said Prof Glyn Humphreys from the University's
School of Psychology. He further added that hence brain damage
would affect left and right-handers' ability to make sense
of detail in different ways. The research further stated that
not only are left-handed people more susceptible to a range
of problems, including allergies, auto-immune diseases, depression,
drug abuse, epilepsy, schizophrenia and sleeping disorders,
but are also thought to have poorer spatial skills, rendering
themselves more vulnerable to car crashes and other serious
accidents. (ANI)
Scientists
Discover Flying Ants
Scientists
have discovered a species of ant found in the tropical forests
of Panama to be the only wingless insect capable of controlled
flight. The Cephalotes atratus worker ants typically live
on tree trunks more than 90 feet above the forest floor. If
they fall, it means a long climb back to their nest. But scientists
found that the ants hardly ever hit the ground. Instead they
go into free-fall and like sky divers steer their way through
the air. The team of researchers led by Steve Yanoviak, Robert
Dudley and Mike Kaspari of Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
painted the ants' legs white and captured their falls on film.
The ants were seen to glide backwards, abdomen first, towards
their tree and typically rejoined their nest-mates within
10 minutes of a fall. "For an ant, a 30-metre fall to
the forest floor is akin to me falling three-and-a-half miles.
An ant falling to the forest floor enters a dark world of
mould and decomposition, of predators and scavengers, where
the return trip is through a convoluted jungle of dead, accumulated
leaves. "Gliding is definitely the way to go, and we
won't be surprised if we find more examples of this behaviour
among wingless canopy insects," Kaspari said.
Source:
Webindia123.com / Newscientist.com / Cnet.com.
Compiled
by: Imran H. Khan
Copyright
(R) thedailystar.net 2004
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