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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Apple Inc. today has introduced the much-anticipated iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco.

The iPhone is claimed to be “a revolutionary mobile phone” as stated on the Apple website. The device appears to be running a mobile version of the Apple operating system Mac OSX. It is approximately the same size as a 5th generation iPod, it has a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen display that is used to access all features of the phone including number dial, as well as making phone calls. The iPhone plays music, movies, displays pictures and is able to connect to a wireless network.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the device by walking onto the stage and taking the iPhone out of his jeans pocket. During his 2 hour speech he stated that “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone, We are going to make history today”.

Today Apple also released their Media Center device – Apple TV. It will directly compete with Microsoft’s Media Center operating system. Apple has taken a different approach to the media center market; rather than storing content (such as movies, music and photos) on the device, Apple TV connects to a computer (Mac and Windows) over a wirless network connection and plays all content stored on that computer. This makes it substantially easier for users to organize their media content.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Viktor Schreckengost, the father of industrial design and creator of the Jazz Bowl, an iconic piece of Jazz Age art designed for Eleanor Roosevelt during his association with Cowan Pottery died yesterday. He was 101.

Schreckengost was born on June 26, 1906 in Sebring, Ohio, United States.

Schreckengost’s peers included the far more famous designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes.

In 2000, the Cleveland Museum of Art curated the first ever retrospective of Schreckengost’s work. Stunning in scope, the exhibition included sculpture, pottery, dinnerware, drawings, and paintings.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Yesterday February 17, 2006, the World Health Organisation officially declared presence of the H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus in Egypt.

“There is avian flu now in Egypt,” Hassan el Bushra, regional adviser for emerging diseases at the eastern Mediterranean regional office of the WHO said. His response was to the reported presence of H5N1 virus in dead birds in three areas in Egypt – namely Cairo, Giza, and Al-Minya.

Today February 18, 2006, a responsible source from Egyptian ministry of health announced reporting of another 25 cases of infected birds in Al-Minya with aftermath of 35 confirmed cases between birds, yet there are no human cases reported.

Egypt has banned the import of live birds and has tightened quarantine controls at airports to keep out bird flu. It has also canceled the annual bird hunting season to minimize contacts between people and migrant birds.In Cairo phone numbers 3912136, 3907147, and the hotline 152 have been assigned for reporting any suspected cases. A newly formed unit formed of veterinarians and preventive medicine specialists in Giza actively studying more than 70 reports of dead birds for exclusion of H5N1.

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Naxif has advised people who breed poultry at their homes to dispose of their birds to prevent the virus from spreading.

“The time has come to get rid of the idea of breeding chickens on the roofs of houses, especially under current circumstances,” he said.

Many Egyptian citizens breed chickens and pigeons on the roof of their residences for their own consumption and as a source of extra income.

Despite avian flu mainly being a disease of poultry, it has also infected 171 people, killing 93 of them, and is steadily mutating. If it acquires the ability to pass easily from person to person it could cause a pandemic that might kill millions.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

A Knoxville, USA woman has sold her name on eBay and received an offer. Terri Iligan, age 33, will legally be named “goldenpalace.com” after the required legal work is complete.

The casino owning the website paid $15,199 over the eBay auction service.

She said that she got the idea when trying to find how much it would cost to send one of her children to a golf school previously attended by Tiger Woods.

In an interview by Knoxville TV station WATE, she said, “To my kids and to my husband, I will always be Terri.” As to the opinion of her husband and children, she said, “He thinks it’s funny. As long as they get to call me mom, they don’t care.”

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

In late 2010 a geological expedition to Antarctica drilled through the Ross Ice Shelf so they could send an ROV under it. What they found was unexpected: Sea anemones. In their thousands they were doing what no other species of sea anemone is known to do — they were living in the ice itself.

Discovered by the ANDRILL [Antarctic Drilling] project, the team was so unprepared for biological discoveries they did not have suitable preservatives and the only chemicals available obliterated the creature’s DNA. Nonetheless Marymegan Daly of Ohio State University confirmed the animals were a new species. Named Edwardsiella andrillae after the drilling project that found it, the anemone was finally described in a PLOS ONE paper last month.

ANDRILL lowered their cylindrical camera ROV down a freshly-bored 270m (890ft) hole, enabling it to reach seawater below the ice. The device was merely being tested ahead of its planned mission retrieving data on ocean currents and the sub-ice environment. Instead it found what ANDRILL director Frank Rack of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, a co-author of the paper describing the find, called the “total serendipity” of “a whole new ecosystem that no one had ever seen before”.

The discovery raises many questions. Burrowing sea anemones worm their way into substrates or use their tentacles to dig, but it’s unclear how E. andrillae enters the hard ice. With only their tentacles protruding into the water from the underneath of the ice shelf questions also revolve around how the animals avoid freezing, how they reproduce, and how they cope with the continuously melting nature of their home. Their diet is also a mystery.

E. andrillae is an opaque white, with an inner ring of eight tentacles and twelve-to-sixteen tentacles in an outer ring. The ROV’s lights produced an orange glow from the creatures, although this may be produced by their food. It measures 16–20mm (0.6–0.8in) but when fully relaxed can extend to triple that.

Genetic analysis being impossible, Daly turned to dissection of the specimens but could find nothing out of the ordinary. Scientists hope to send a biological mission to explore the area under the massive ice sheet, which is in excess of 600 miles (970km) wide. The cameras also observed worms, fish that swim inverted as if the icy roof was the sea floor, crustaceans and a cylindrical creature that used appendages on its ends to move and to grab hold of the anemones.

NASA is providing funding to aid further research, owing to possible similarities between this icy realm and Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Biological research is planned for 2015. An application for funding to the U.S. National Science Foundation, which funds ANDRILL, is also pending.

The ANDRILL team almost failed to get any samples at all. Designed to examine the seafloor, the ROV had to be inverted to examine the roof of ice. Weather conditions prevented biological sampling equipment being delivered from McMurdo Station, but the scientists retrieved 20–30 anemones by using hot water to stun them before sucking them from their burrows with an improvised device fashioned from a coffee filter and a spare ROV thruster. Preserved on-site in ethanol, they were taken to McMurdo station where some were further preserved with formaldehyde.

((Wikinews)) How did you come to be involved with this discovery?

Marymegan Daly: Frank Rack got in touch after they returned from Antarctica in hopes that I could help with an identification on the anemone.

((Wikinews)) What was your first reaction upon learning there was an undiscovered ecosystem under the ice in the Ross Sea?

MD I was amazed and really excited. I think to say it was unexpected is inaccurate, because it implies that there was a well-founded expectation of something. The technology that Frank and his colleagues are using to explore the ice is so important because, given our lack of data, we have no reasonable expectation of what it should be like, or what it shouldn’t be like.

((Wikinews)) There’s a return trip planned hopefully for 2015, with both biologists and ANDRILL geologists. Are you intending to go there yourself?

MD I would love to. But I am also happy to not go, as long as someone collects more animals on my behalf! What I want to do with the animals requires new material preserved in diverse ways, but it doesn’t require me to be there. Although I am sure that being there would enhance my understanding of the animals and the system in which they live, and would help me formulate more and better questions about the anemones, ship time is expensive, especially in Antarctica, and if there are biologists whose contribution is predicated on being there, they should have priority to be there.

((Wikinews)) These animals are shrouded in mystery. Some of the most intriguing questions are chemical; do they produce some kind of antifreeze, and is that orange glow in the ROV lights their own? Talk us through the difficulties encountered when trying to find answers with the specimens on hand.

MD The samples we have are small in terms of numbers and they are all preserved in formalin (a kind of formaldehyde solution). The formalin is great for preserving structures, but for anemones, it prevents study of DNA or of the chemistry of the body. This means we can’t look at the issue you raise with these animals. What we could do, however, was to study anatomy and figure out what it is, so that when we have samples preserved for studying e.g., the genome, transcriptome, or metabolome, or conduct tests of the fluid in the burrows or in the animals themselves, we can make precise comparisons, and figure out what these animals have or do (metabolically or chemically) that lets them live where they live.

Just knowing a whole lot about a single species isn’t very useful, even if that animal is as special as these clearly are — we need to know what about them is different and thus related to living in this strange way. The only way to get at what’s different is to make comparisons with close relatives. We can start that side of the work now, anticipating having more beasts in the future.

In terms of their glow, I suspect that it’s not theirs — although luminescence is common in anemone relatives, they don’t usually make light themselves. They do make a host of florescent proteins, and these may interact with the light of the ROV to give that gorgeous glow.

((Wikinews)) What analysis did you perform on the specimens and what equipment was used?

MD I used a dissecting scope to look at the animal’s external anatomy and overall body organization (magnification of 60X). I embedded a few of the animals in wax and then cut them into very thin slices using a microtome, mounted the slices on microscope slides, stained the slices to enhance contrast, and then looked at those slides under a compound microscope (that’s how I got the pictures of the muscles etc in the paper). I used that same compound scope to look at squashed bits of tissue to see the stinging capsules (=nematocysts).

I compared the things I saw under the ‘scopes to what had been published on other species in this group. This step seems trivial, but it is really the most important part! By comparing my observations to what my colleagues and predecessors had found, I figured out what group it belongs to, and was able to determine that within that group, it was a new species.

((Wikinews)) It was three years between recovery of specimens and final publication, why did it take so long?

MD You mean, how did we manage to make it all happen so quickly, right? 🙂 It was about two years from when Frank sent me specimens to when we got the paper out. Some of that time was just lost time — I had other projects in the queue that I needed to finish. Once we figured out what it was, we played a lot of manuscript email tag, which can be challenging and time consuming given the differing schedules that folks keep in terms of travel, field work, etc. Manuscript review and processing took about four months.

((Wikinews)) What sort of difficulties were posed by the unorthodox preservatives used, and what additional work might be possible on a specimen with intact DNA?

MD The preservation was not unorthodox — they followed best practices for anatomical preservation. Having DNA-suitable material will let us see whether there are new genes, or genes turned on in different ways and at different times that help explain how these animals burrow into hard ice and then survive in the cold. I am curious about the population structure of the “fields” of anemones — the group to which Edwardsiella andrillae belongs includes many species that reproduce asexually, and it’s possible that the fields are “clones” produced asexually rather than the result of sexual reproduction. DNA is the only way to test this.

((Wikinews)) Do you have any theories about the strategies employed to cope with the harsh environment of burrowing inside an ice shelf?

MD I think there must be some kind of antifreeze produced — the cells in contact with ice would otherwise freeze.

((Wikinews)) How has such an apparently large population of clearly unusual sea anemones, not to mention the other creatures caught on camera, gone undetected for so long?

MD I think this reflects how difficult it is to get under the ice and to collect specimens. That being said, since the paper came out, I have been pointed towards two other reports that are probably records of these species: one from Japanese scientists who looked at footage from cameras attached to seals and one from Americans who dove under ice. In both of these cases, the anemone (if that’s what they saw) was seen at a distance, and no specimens were collected. Without the animals in hand, or the capability of a ROV to get close up for pictures, it is hard to know what has been seen, and lacking a definitive ID, hard to have the finding appropriately indexed or contextualized.

((Wikinews)) Would it be fair to say this suggests there may be other undiscovered species of sea anemone that burrow into hard substrates such as ice?

MD I hope so! What fascinates me about sea anemones is that they’re able to do things that seem impossible given their seemingly limited toolkit. This finding certainly expands the realm of possible.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Troops are being deployed throughout Thailand as the government of Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in reaction to protesters supporting ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Armoured vehicles and bands of protesters are reportedly roving the streets of Bangkok and the prime minister has threatened to use force against the protesters.

The protesters are supporters of the National United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD). They demand the immediate resignation of the prime minister and fresh elections.

A group of protesters at the country’s Ministry of the Interior, which Xinhua says numbered in the “hundreds”, attacked the prime minister’s Mercedes but he was not inside at the time. The ministry building was stormed by protesters and several police and protesters were injured during the ensuing riot.

The state of emergency comes after mass protests and an invasion of the conference site by UDD red-shirted demonstrators forced the abandonment of the sixteen-member ASEAN summit in the resort town of Pattaya yesterday.

“The government has to declare the state of emergency to restore normality as soon as possible,” the Prime Minister was quoted as saying. This morning, the protesters were “infuriated” as the government arrested UDD leader and politician Arisman Pongruangrong, who led the Pattaya protest.

The protests come just months after the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy occupied airports in Bangkok, leading to the fall of the previous, Thaksin-aligned government. Thailand has had five prime ministers in the past 18 months since the Council for National Security relinquished power; the CNS took power in a 2006 military coup d’etat that deposed the Thaksin government.

Army spokesman Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd called the deployment of troops a “measure to restore order” and denied it was another coup.

Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, in charge of the security measures against the UDD, stated on television earlier: “Police and military officers must fully and forcefully carry out their jobs lest more damage is done. Actions must be taken promptly and order be restored as soon as possible. Your superiors and I will take responsibility for all your actions.”

Thailand has remained in turmoil since the ousting of now-fugitive ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra. A bloodless coup in 2006 saw him deposed, and he left the country to stay in the United Kingdom. While the courts in Thailand considered allegations of corruption against him and his wife, the UK government revoked his visa. In previous video conference and telephone addresses he has encouraged the red-shirted UDD protesters to oppose the current government.

Following the coup that deposed Thaksin, the various people involved in the populist Thai Rak Thai (TRT – lit. Thais love Thais) political party were forced to reform as TRT was outlawed. With significant support from the rural poor they won elections following the militarily appointed government stepping aside. Unrest following this, and charges of election fraud, toppled the new populist government.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

Singapore Airlines says that it will be compensated by Airbus for the additional delay in delivery of its new superjumbo A380‘s.

The double-deck commercial aircrafts’ delivery, originally due later this year, will be delayed until October 2007. The main fault has been found to be problems in the aircraft’s 500km of wiring. In a statement on the Airbus website, the company said that “the root cause of the problem is the fact that the 3D Digital mock-up, which facilitates the design of the electrical harnesses installation, was implemented late and that the people working on it were in their learning curve”.

Airbus is currently two years behind schedule. In a statement, SIA said that, “The delays are disappointing; all the more so because the flight test and certification programme is proceeding well, and the delays are down to production issues.”

Analysts are predicting that the compensations could well run into a few hundred million US dollars. SIA has stated that the compensation details will be kept confidential

Singapore Airlines is the first airline to fly the A380 and will be receiving the first four aircraft.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Cook Islands and Wakefield Trinity Wildcats rugby league player Adam Watene has died. The Wildcats announced the death of the 31-year-old earlier today. They reported he collapsed in the gym shortly after a training session.

A spokesman said, “The Wakefield Trinity Wildcats are sad to announce the sudden passing of Adam Watene. The circumstances surrounding Adam’s death were sudden and unexpected. Everyone at the Wildcats’ thoughts are with Adam’s family, and we ask for their privacy to be respected at this difficult time.”

Watene started his rugby league with the Castleford Tigers and was later signed by the Bradford Bulls. After a year of playing for the bulls of which he only made five first team appearances, he was allowed to sign for the Wakefield Trinity Wildcats. He played a total of 28 games in the two seasons he was with the club.

The Wildcats also said “There will be no further comment from the club at this stage.” Watene is survived by his wife and two children.