The Loudest Animal in The World
A tiny water boatman is the loudest animal in the world (relative to its body size). Scientists from Europe recorded the aquatic bug "singing" at up to 99.2 decibels -- the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a full orchestra. The booming sound is created by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as "stridulation," which researchers say is a courtship display (and a damn impressive one!).
"We were very surprised. We first thought that the sound was coming from larger aquatic species such as a Sigara species [of] lesser water boatmen," said Dr. Windmill from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
Although 99% of the sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the songs were still loud enough to be audible to the human ear.
"The song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river," said Dr Windmill.
Most of the loudest animals in the world are also the biggest, with blue whale songs reaching 188 dB and elephants' rumbling calls measuring 117 dB.
"If you scale the sound level they produce against their body size, Micronecta scholtzi are the loudest animals on Earth," said Dr Windmill.
Without any clear adaptations to amplify the sound, the question of exactly how the insects physically make such a loud noise remains a mystery.
"These very small bugs create sound at very high level, and it could be very useful for future ultrasonic systems to learn how they do that," said Dr Windmill.
The Google+ Project
There's a lot to like about Google Plus, the new social network from everyone's favorite search engine: the design, the thoughtfully created and easy-to-use privacy settings (Circles), the built in mobile chatting (Huddles) and video chatting (Hangouts) features, the smart news reader (Sparks), and more. But if Google Plus had one "killer" feature, it would definitely be the instant photo uploads from Android.
In many ways, Google Plus is a Facebook-inspired clone. Google hasn't rethought social so much as re-engineered it. You can almost visualize the checklist that went into the social network's creation. Do we have a like button? Check! (It's the+1 button.) Do we have a News Feed? Check! (It's the "Stream.") Do we have privacy settings? Check! (They're called Circles.)
That's not to say that Google hasn't done a great job with the implementation - Google Plus is already a much better product than the half-baked experiment that was Google Buzz, the mashed-up social networking aggregator that was smooshed into your Gmail inbox.
But for the mainstream user, a Facebook-like experience isn't necessarily enough of a draw to lure them away from a social network where their friends already hang out, to a new one populated with their email contacts, no matter how pretty it looks.
Unless, there's a reason. And in Google Plus's case, that reason is photos.
Android is Google Plus's Secret Weapon
There are now half a million Android phones activated each day. As of May 2011, there were over 100 million Android devices worldwide. Consider this Google Plus's potential install base.
And what's the key to social networking success? Photos. Facebook, if anything, is simply the world's largest online photo sharing service. All those status updates and Farmville sessions are just icing on the cake. This summer, Facebook is expected to cross the 100 billion photos mark, which is an impressive statistic, to be sure. However, Facebook still struggles on the mobile front, and even more so on Android, which is less developed than its iPhone counterpart.
Have you ever tried uploading a group of photos to Facebook from your phone using the native app's uploader? Isn't it fun to upload pictures one-by-one to albums you have to first create and name? Oh, it's not?
Well, don't worry then, Google has you covered.
While much of what Google offers feels like a Facebook alternative, the Android application is Plus's real innovation. With an opt-in feature called "Instant Uploads," your mobile phone's photos are immediately online, and are, by default, private only to you. Later, you can visit you that private album's page, and reshare individual photos with the appropriate group. Baby photos? Maybe just share with family and/or close friends. Photos of a beautiful scenic view you took on your nature walk? Share with everyone. And so on. You decide.
This photo-sharing idea in Google Plus isn't so different, really, than what Apple is introducing with iCloud. Via iCloud's PhotoStream service, your mobile photos are synced to all your devices instantly: computer, mobile. "cloud" (Apple's servers). But iCloud has an Achilles' Heel: if you don't manually move those photos into photo albums on your Mac or PC, they'll eventually disappear. iCloud, you see, only stores the last 1,000 images in the "cloud."
Google Plus, however, will store them all, forever. (Or at least for as long as Google exists.)
Out of everything that Google has launched, this one feature stands out as having the potential for the most disruption and the most viral impact, not only because of this instant upload and free cloud storage, but also because of the "share by email" feature. That's right: your "friends" don't have to be on Google Plus before you initiate the sharing process.
World’s Fastest Computer
Scheduled to be officially displayed at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg today, a Japanese super-computer has grabbed the title of world's fastest computer.
The K Computer, built by Fujitsu, is based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan and leaves previous records for the world's fastest computer in the dust with a processing power of more than 8 petaflop per second (that's 8 quadrillion calculations per second!) -- three times faster than its closest competitor located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. The United States takes the bronze, with a super computer owned by the US Department of Energy and housed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The K Computer contains more than 80,000 2GHz SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs (with eight cores each), to deliver a total of more than 640,000 combined processing cores. The world's fastest computer also consumes a ton of power -- a massive 9.89 megawatts. Given its gigantic processing output however, it still manages to be the fourth most energy-efficient system in the list of the worlds 500 fastest computers. In June 2008, the Roadrunner from the US Los Alamos National Laboratory broke the peta-flop processing barrier for the first time. It now resides in tenth place, as American super-computer begins to fall behind the speed of research and technology in Asia.
IPv6 Day is Here!
Today’s biggest tech. news is that numerically, the Internet has 'run out' of IP addresses. The very last addresses were sold in February.
No, Al Gore had nothing to do with it.
Have we broken the Internet? On to the next fad? Not quite.
IPv6 will be enabled on Google, along with major companies like Facebook for the next 24 hours. This will allow ISPs to test the readiness of a different format of IP addresses. The IP address we are all 'familiar' with (IPv4) currently look similar to this:
111.222.323.444
The new IP addresses, or IPv6, use a colon delimited hexadecimal notation:
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
Research has indicated that ~99.95% of all Internet users will be completely unaffected by this test. Google says that in very rare instances, users may experience connectivity issues due to misconfigured personal computers. Many major companies have supported IPv6 for years (circa '08) and have played an integral part of planning, conceptualizing and implementing this massive protocol overhaul.
Saturn’s Super Storm
NASA's Cassini spacecraft and an ground-based European telescope are both tracking the growth of a gigantic storm in Saturn's northern hemisphere, so large in fact that it stretches around the entire planet.
"Nothing on Earth comes close to this powerful storm," says Leigh Fletcher, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and lead author of a study that appeared in this week's edition of Science Magazine. "A storm like this is rare. This is only the sixth one to be recorded since 1876, and the last was way back in 1990."
This is the first major storm on Saturn observed by an orbiting spacecraft and studied at thermal infrared wavelengths. Infrared observations are key because heat tells researchers a great deal about conditions inside the storm, including temperatures, winds, and atmospheric composition. Temperature data were provided by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal in Chile and Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS), operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"Our new observations show that the storm had a major effect on the atmosphere, transporting energy and material over great distances -- creating meandering jet streams and forming giant vortices -- and disrupting Saturn's seasonal [weather patterns]," said Glenn Orton, a paper co-author, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The violence of the storm -- the strongest disturbances ever detected in Saturn's stratosphere -- took researchers by surprise. What started as an ordinary disturbance deep in Saturn's atmosphere punched through the planet's serene cloud cover to roil the high layer known as the stratosphere.
"On Earth, the lower stratosphere is where commercial airplanes generally fly to avoid storms which can cause turbulence," says Brigette Hesman, a scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who works on the CIRS team at Goddard and is the second author on the paper. "If you were flying in an airplane on Saturn, this storm would reach so high up, it would probably be impossible to avoid it."
Microsoft Acquires Skype for $8.6 Billion
After rumors that first Facebook and then Microsoft were in talks to acquire Skype, the latter announced that it has acquired the VoIP giant for $8.6 billion in cash.
Spearheaded by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the deal was completed Monday evening.
The acquisition is an expensive one for Microsoft. Not only is it the largest price Microsoft has paid for a company in decades, Skype is not yet profitable. Despite revenues totaling $860 million last year and operating profits of $264 million, the company lost $6.9 million overall, according to documents filed with the SEC. And the company carries $686 million in debt.
Much of the company’s appeal rests in its largest user base of 663 million, 145 of which use Skype monthly, and 8.8 million of which are paying customers.
There is one clear set of winners here: Skype's investors. A group including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board purchased the company from eBay for $2.75 billion in September 2009.
Nuclear Fallout Facts – You Won’t Hear This on the News!
Nuclear Facts - A very clued in professional who will not be bought or intimidated into silence: Dr Helen Caldicott, true to style, tells it as it is. As she sees it, you wont usually hear the truth so listen up!
Best Local Gas Prices Map
With gas prices climbing to uncomfortable heights, it's important to get the most bang for your buck! Luckily, Gas Prices Map has came up with a simple, interactive map that displays the best gas prices in your town or city. Using the latest in geo-location technology, simply point a browser to the gas prices map for a live display of the best gas prices in town!
Visit: http://gaspricesmap.org to check it out.
Google Motion – A New Way to Communicate!
The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body.
Check In Wars – Facebook vs. Google
A few days ago, All Facebook found a new area in Facebook's website that allows users to check-in to events. Moreover, Google has pushed a new update to their Latitude app which allows users to check-in.
So is there a new "check in war" brewing?
Yes and no. Neither of these updates by themselves are hugely significant, however Facebook has confirmed that the ability to check-in to events is coming shortly to the massively popular Facebook iPhone app. This has the potential to be a very useful feature, as Facebook events are already quite widely used. Letting your friends know that you're actually at a party you RSVP'd for adds an important location layer to the social experience.
In the Latitude check-ins for iPhone announcement, Google also snuck in the news that Google Places is now available in 30 different languages. Again, this all seems congruent with a push toward local deals and check-ins. Just like Facebook.
And Foursquare.
The war is on!
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