Posted on 05 November 2007 by Mat
A toddler born with eight limbs and believed by some to be the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Vishnu, is set to undergo a 40-hour operation to remove half of her limbs.
Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a ‘parasitic twin’ and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs.
Posted on 03 July 2007 by Mat
I knew cats were no good.
Half of the world’s human population is infected with Toxoplasma, parasites in the body-and the brain. Remember that. Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite found in the guts of cats; it sheds eggs that are picked up by rats and other animals that are eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts in the bodies of the intermediate rat hosts, including in the brain.
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey (Associate Director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute) noticed links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in human beings, approximately three billion of whom are infected with T. gondii:
* Toxoplasma infection is associated with damage to astrocytes, glial cells which surround and support neurons. Schizophrenia is also associated with damage to astrocytes.
* Pregnant women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma are more likely to give birth to children who will develop schizophrenia.
* Human cells raised in petri dishes, and infected with Toxoplasma, will respond to drugs like haloperidol; the growth of the parasite stops. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic, used to treat schizophrenia.
Posted on 02 July 2007 by Mat
“The bottom line: some analysts claimed that the iPhone launch would be a failure if Apple failed to sell 100,000 iPhones during the first weekend. Based upon the limited data we have, we believe that number was exceeded in just the first two to three hours. Blackfriars’ prediction is that Apple will sell 500,000 iPhones this weekend, and based upon limited sales rates reported, that number now looks quite achievable. The only question is whether the demand and iPhone supply is great enough that they might push past the million unit mark this weekend.â€
Posted on 05 June 2007 by Mat
[coolplayer width="480" height="340" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="GBK" download="0" mediatype=""]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psh9OxnDR7o.
[/coolplayer]
Covered in a grey putty-like silicone skin the baby bot can roll around and ’speak’. It can even take a few steps if encouraged enough.
Built by Japanese scientists Minoru Asada and Hiroshi Ishiguro (who famously created an android twins of himself), the robot called CB2 weighs 33kg and stands 130cm tall.
It has 197 tactile sensors embedded in its outer layer and 51 compressed air-powered actuators, which allow it to react to touch.
When CB2’s shoulders are tapped, it blinks as if surprised, stops moving, and turns its gaze toward the person who touched it. It will also try and grab a toy dangled in front of it.
Posted on 02 April 2007 by Mat
CUPERTINO, California—April 2, 2007—Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
Posted on 01 April 2007 by Mat
In a major reversal of the music industry’s longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce Monday that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.
The London-based music company is to make its announcement in a press conference that will feature Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. EMI is to sell songs without the software — known as digital rights management, or DRM — through Apple’s iTunes Store and possibly through other online outlets, too.
Posted on 27 March 2007 by Mat
Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.
Posted on 22 February 2007 by Mat
THEY usually struggle to reach 60 miles per hour, but one Mottram firm helped ensure that a Robin Reliant could fly.
When programme makers from Top Gear wanted to attach a Reliant to a rocket, they turned to Stalybridge man Colin Rowe.
Colin works for Stockport firm, The Rocket Men, whose engineering skills proved crucial to the project.
[coolplayer width="315" height="238" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="GBK" download="0" mediatype=""]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJefEWBiQCo
[/coolplayer]
The rocket had to be designed, materials sourced, parts lasered, space frame welded, tested, car stripped out, adapted and then flown in just four months.
With such a tight schedule The Rocket Men turned to a Hattersley firm to help out – Mottram Engineering on Hattersley industrial estate.
Peter Bryan and his team helped source many of the materials and offered space in their factory premises so the rocket could be built on site.
The 27m³ rocket was the largest flown from the UK. Every internal element possible was stripped out of the Reliant Robin to reduce its weight. Lighter wheels were added, as were wings, rocket motors and flight systems to enable the car to be flown remotely once it separated from the rocket.
Its final flying weight was reduced to 250kg – just over a third of its usual road weight.
Posted on 19 February 2007 by Mat
NEW YORK - XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. have agreed to merge, the two companies said Monday.
The deal would consolidate the only two companies in the emerging business of subscription-only satellite radio, and is sure to face tough scrutiny from federal regulators. Investors and analysts have been speculating about a deal for months.
The two companies said in a statement that Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius, would become chief executive of the new company while Gary Parsons, the chairman of XM, would remain in that role. XM’s CEO Hugh Panero will remain to oversee closing the of the deal, they said.
(thanks Duke)
Posted on 12 February 2007 by Mat
Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.
Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.
Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.
Posted on 29 January 2007 by Mat
…Funnily enough, Macs are great machines for running Vista. They’re new, they’re fast and they exceed Vista’s demanding specs. They can even run OS X and Windows at the same time.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been running Vista on a quad-Xeon Mac Pro. Click the link to see how it’s working out.
The Mac Pro is a very fast and capable OS X machine, but it’s an even faster Windows Vista machine.
Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it’s faster than OS X – it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly.
(The Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips; 3GBs of RAM; and a medium-range NVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card)
I’m especially delighted with Vista’s “glass†Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine.
Posted on 15 January 2007 by Mat
An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name “iPhone” appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it.
Posted on 04 January 2007 by Mat
Think only nerds and creepy guys who live alone in the woods have ideas in the patent office? Think again. Here’s a bunch of famous folks who also have their very own patents.
Posted on 19 December 2006 by Mat
Fans of the old TechTV will enjoy this episode of Revision3’s “In Digital” video blog. (If you can tolerate Will Wheaton, its worth a watch)
What started as a holiday gift guide with our friends from the glory days of TechTV turned into a hodgepodge of rants, raves, and other interesting ideas. There’s some gift ideas mixed in there somewhere. At the very least, TechTV fans will see lots of familiar faces.
Posted on 06 October 2006 by Mat
A 60-year-old man with acute pancreatitis developed persistent hiccups after insertion of a nasogastric tube. Removal of the latter did not terminate the hiccups which had also been treated with different drugs, and several manoeuvres were attempted, but with no success. Digital rectal massage was then performed resulting in abrupt cessation of the hiccups. Recurrence of the hiccups occurred several hours later, and again, they were terminated immediately with digital rectal massage. No other recurrences were observed. This is the second reported case associating cessation of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage. We suggest that this manoeuvre should be considered in cases of intractable hiccups before proceeding with pharmacological agents.
(thanks Knighthawk)
Posted on 05 May 2006 by Mat
Here’s a little trick for getting the new Yahoo Mail Beta. It works, and the new setup is pretty sweet. If you use Yahoo Mail, you should do this. If you don’t, you might wanna try it anyhow. I haven’t used my Yahoo Mail in years, but I think I might start now.
Here’s how you can get Yahoo mail beta….
just follow the steps1. First goto yahoo mail
2. then click on the options
3. then goto your account information on the left hand side
4. then click on edit member information
5. then click on preferred content and change it Yahoo - United Kingdom
6. then click finished
7. go back to yahoo mail and you will see “It’s the New Yahoo! Mail Beta… and you’re invited.”
8. Click on “Try Beta Now”
9. Once you click on that you should be able to see the yahoo mail new interface. from there on its upto you…
10. Switch back to United States region, and it still works!
Posted on 05 April 2006 by Mat
MIAMI (Reuters) - The New Testament says that Jesus walked on water, but a Florida university professor believes there could be a less miraculous explanation — he walked on a floating piece of ice.
ADVERTISEMENT
click here
Professor Doron Nof also theorised in the early 1990s that Moses’s parting of the Red Sea had solid science behind it.
Nof, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, said on Tuesday that his study found an unusual combination of water and atmospheric conditions in what is now northern
Israel could have led to ice formation on the Sea of Galilee.
Nof used records of the Mediterranean Sea’s surface temperatures and statistical models to examine the dynamics of the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis know now as Lake Kinneret.
The study found that a period of cooler temperatures in the area between 1,500 and 2,600 years ago could have included the decades in which Jesus lived.
A drop in temperature below freezing could have caused ice thick enough to support a human to form on the surface of the freshwater lake near the western shore, Nof said. It might have been nearly impossible for distant observers to see a piece of floating ice surrounded by water.
Nof said he offered his study — published in the April edition of the Journal of Paleolimnology — as a “possible explanation” for Jesus’ walk on water.
Posted on 29 September 2005 by Mat
Finally the world catches up with the Door From Hell. For all the die-hard fans, you might remember us talking about the Moller Skycar waaaaay back when we were still a PRINT publication.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - If that Hummer is draining your cash at the gas pump, Neiman Marcus Group Inc. (NYSE:NMGA - news) has the perfect holiday gift: A fuel-efficient, $3.5 million “Skycar” that flies 350 miles per hour and burns environmentally friendly alcohol.
The M400 Skycar prototype is a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that gets 21 miles per gallon and is designed to be “as safe, affordable and easy to use as an automobile.
“A limited number of M400s is expected to be available within the next three years, but you can purchase the actual prototype for yourself or your favorite commuter now,” Neiman Marcus said in the catalog.
Delivery is not included.
Posted on 23 May 2005 by Mat
Systm release tonight!
From the creators of thebroken comes a new downloadable tech show: “Systm” (pronounced system). While Systm is a general interest HOW-TO show, thebroken will continue to have 40′z and hacking 
Episode #1 will be released tonight at 8:00PM PST! To celebrate, we will be throwing a house party starting at 6:00PM. We’ll fire up our live webcam of the festivities along with an IRC chat room. Chat with Kevin, Dan, Keith and Ron (systm/thebroken crew) along with other TechTV staffers (Leo, Pat, Yoshi, Martin, Alex, and others (Ramzi) have all been invited).
Visit the website now: http://systm.org
—
When is thebroken episode 4 coming out?
After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we’ll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!
More info:
http://www.kevinrose.com
http://systm.org
- thebroken crew
Copyright © The Door From Hell.Original News Theme by 
.
