One of the greatest new types of gadget to come into play recently is the digital camera. There are a lot of reasons why digital cameras are so much better than film based cameras, and they all come down to the computer technology that goes into digital cameras. Digital cameras can capture images on special chips that can pick up light and color and convert it into digital data. That digital data is then stored on some kind of computer storage device, which is most often based on flash memory technology these days, though in the past digital cameras have stored pictures on things like floppy disks as well (as preposterous as that may seem to us today). The flash memory can either be built into the camera or be a detachable form memory card or memory stick. Many cameras have combinations of both forms of storage media and pictures from both can be transferred onto a computer for editing, posting on the Internet, or printing out into the form of a more traditional photograph.
One of the greatest new types of gadget to come into play recently is the digital camera. There are a lot of reasons why digital cameras are so much better than film based cameras, and they all come down to the computer technology that goes into digital cameras. Digital cameras can capture images on special chips that can pick up light and color and convert it into digital data. That digital data is then stored on some kind of computer storage device, which is most often based on flash memory technology these days, though in the past digital cameras have stored pictures on things like floppy disks as well (as preposterous as that may seem to us today). The flash memory can either be built into the camera or be a detachable form memory card or memory stick. Many cameras have combinations of both forms of storage media and pictures from both can be transferred onto a computer for editing, posting on the Internet, or printing out into the form of a more traditional photograph.
The ability to transfer digital photos to a computer is what really makes digital cameras so much better than their film based ancestors. That's because there's so much that can be done with a photo once it's on a computer. For example, you can edit the photo to take out any of the dreaded "red eye" effect that still invariably shows up in some photos despite the best efforts of camera makers to avoid it to begin with. There are also plenty of other special effects that can be added to pictures though even relatively common software programs. For example, a picture can be made to look much older by adding a sepia filter to it and making it a little fuzzy so that it appears slightly out of focus. Besides changing the overall appearance of a digital photo, photo editing programs can also change what's in the photos. For example, it's possible to "clone" trees in a picture and paste them over utility poles. It's also possible to paste the heads of some people onto the bodies of other people or to put people into photographs in order to make it look like someone was in a place where they've never actually been. This can be especially useful for family reunion photos where not everyone could make it to the reunion.
Once a photo has been loaded onto a computer and any editing has been completed, there are a number of things that can be done with it. For example, it's possible to post the photo on the Internet, either on your own web site or on a photo sharing site. It's also possible to email it to specific people, or you can print it out so that you can assembled an actual physical photo album. The thing that the digital camera does best though is allow its owner to take numerous photos and eliminate the ones that aren't up to his or her standards without the expense of developing all of those photos. In that sense, digital cameras are much more economical than film cameras, and better for the environment when you look at how toxic photo developing is.
Kamis, 09 Oktober 2008
BlackBerry Storm has touch screen you can feel
This photo provided by Research in Motion Ltd., shows the company's new touch-screen phone, the Storm. With the new model being announced Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2008 the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone. This photo provided by Research in Motion Ltd., shows the company's new touch-screen phone, the Storm. With the new model being announced Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2008 the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone. (AP Photo/Research in Motion Ltd.)
By Peter Svensson
AP Technology Writer / October 8, 2008
NEW YORK—Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, is taking on Apple Inc. with a touch-screen phone that puts a new twist on the technology.
RIM is known for its e-mail-oriented phones with large keypads. With the new model announced Wednesday, the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone.
But RIM has listened to users who find the iPhone's glass screen awkward to type on because its virtual buttons provide no tactile feedback. The Storm's whole screen is backed by springs, and when pressed, it gives under the finger.
The long-rumored Storm will be available from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and from Vodafone Group PLC overseas before the holidays, the companies said. No price has been disclosed yet.
In an unusual twist, the phone will work both on Verizon Wireless' network and on Vodafone's, even though they use incompatible technologies. Like a few other Verizon Wireless handsets before it, the Storm will be equipped with radios to handle both networks, making international roaming a possibility. The iPhone, carried by AT&T Inc. in the U.S., can already roam internationally.
The addition of a touch-screen phone to the BlackBerry lineup, the mainstay of e-mail-addicted executives and managers, is a testament to the effect of the iPhone. RIM's share of the U.S. smart-phone market has stayed above 50 percent, but the iPhone has clearly helped expand that market.
Over the last year, technology buyers at large corporations have found their employees demanding a touch-screen phone, said Mike Lanman, chief marketing officer of Verizon Wireless.
"Everybody eventually leaves work ... and becomes a person," Lanman said.
The iPhone's facility with Web browsing and movie playing are big reasons for its appeal. The Storm will initially lack an equivalent of Apple's iTunes movie store, though shorter clips will be available through Verizon Wireless' VCast service.
As a Web browser, the Storm more closely emulates the desktop experience than the iPhone does. That's because the screen can distinguish between light touches and firm presses. A light touch can move around a cursor, while a firm press activates a link, much like moving a mouse cursor has a different effect from clicking a mouse button, said Mike Lazaridis, RIM's co-chief executive.
Verizon Wireless is the last of the four national U.S. brands to unveil a flagship touch-screen model. AT&T has the iPhone, Sprint Nextel Corp. sells the Samsung Instinct, and T-Mobile USA just announced the G1, the first phone to run Google Inc.'s software. Verizon Wireless does have other touch-screen phones in its lineup, but none that it has promoted with as much vigor as other carriers have.
By Peter Svensson
AP Technology Writer / October 8, 2008
NEW YORK—Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry, is taking on Apple Inc. with a touch-screen phone that puts a new twist on the technology.
RIM is known for its e-mail-oriented phones with large keypads. With the new model announced Wednesday, the Storm, RIM is for the first time giving up the physical keypad in favor of a large screen, just like the one on Apple's iPhone.
But RIM has listened to users who find the iPhone's glass screen awkward to type on because its virtual buttons provide no tactile feedback. The Storm's whole screen is backed by springs, and when pressed, it gives under the finger.
The long-rumored Storm will be available from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and from Vodafone Group PLC overseas before the holidays, the companies said. No price has been disclosed yet.
In an unusual twist, the phone will work both on Verizon Wireless' network and on Vodafone's, even though they use incompatible technologies. Like a few other Verizon Wireless handsets before it, the Storm will be equipped with radios to handle both networks, making international roaming a possibility. The iPhone, carried by AT&T Inc. in the U.S., can already roam internationally.
The addition of a touch-screen phone to the BlackBerry lineup, the mainstay of e-mail-addicted executives and managers, is a testament to the effect of the iPhone. RIM's share of the U.S. smart-phone market has stayed above 50 percent, but the iPhone has clearly helped expand that market.
Over the last year, technology buyers at large corporations have found their employees demanding a touch-screen phone, said Mike Lanman, chief marketing officer of Verizon Wireless.
"Everybody eventually leaves work ... and becomes a person," Lanman said.
The iPhone's facility with Web browsing and movie playing are big reasons for its appeal. The Storm will initially lack an equivalent of Apple's iTunes movie store, though shorter clips will be available through Verizon Wireless' VCast service.
As a Web browser, the Storm more closely emulates the desktop experience than the iPhone does. That's because the screen can distinguish between light touches and firm presses. A light touch can move around a cursor, while a firm press activates a link, much like moving a mouse cursor has a different effect from clicking a mouse button, said Mike Lazaridis, RIM's co-chief executive.
Verizon Wireless is the last of the four national U.S. brands to unveil a flagship touch-screen model. AT&T has the iPhone, Sprint Nextel Corp. sells the Samsung Instinct, and T-Mobile USA just announced the G1, the first phone to run Google Inc.'s software. Verizon Wireless does have other touch-screen phones in its lineup, but none that it has promoted with as much vigor as other carriers have.
Three Physicists Share Nobel Prize
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: October 7, 2008
An American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries among elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.
Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Makoto Kobayashi, 64, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, 68, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.
Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances. “It’s the lamppost we search under,” said Michael Turner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.
One example of an obvious symmetry is a snowflake, which looks the same when you rotate it one-sixth of a turn. Another is Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says the laws of physics are the same no matter what speed. However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, inspired by studies of superconductivity, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of elementary particle physics might be hidden, or “broken” in actual practice. “You have to look for symmetries even when you can’t see them,” Dr. Turner said.
The principle of symmetry breaking is now embedded in all of modern particle physics. The $8 billion Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator soon to go into operation outside Geneva, was designed largely to find a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is theorized to be responsible for breaking the symmetry between electromagnetism and the so-called weak nuclear force, imparting mass to many particles that in theory are massless.
Imagine a pencil balanced on its point on a table — one of physicists’ favorite examples. To the pencil while it is still on its point, all directions along the table are the same. But the standing pencil is unstable and will eventually fall onto the table pointing in only one direction.
Applying this notion to a puzzle in the subatomic realm, Dr. Nambu explained why a particle known as the pion, which carries the strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, was much lighter than the protons and neutrons inside it. If it were not so light, the strong force would not extend far enough to stick nuclei heavier than hydrogen together, said Daniel Friedan, a physicist at Rutgers.
The fact that the pion is light, he said, explains why there is a variety of atoms in the world. “There is a variety of atoms because there is a variety of nuclei,” Dr. Friedan wrote in an e-mail message.
In 1972, Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa, extending work by the Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, showed that if there were three generations of the elementary particles called quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, the principle of symmetry breaking would explain a puzzling asymmetry known as CP violation.
At the time, only three kinds of quarks were known: the up and down quarks, which make up most ordinary matter, and the strange quark. In 1974, the so-called charmed quarks were discovered. The last pair, the bottom and top quarks, were discovered in 1977 and 1994, completing the three generations of two quarks each predicted by Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa.
The CP violation — C and P stand for charge and parity, or “handedness” — was discovered in 1964 by the American physicists James W. Cronin and Val L. Fitch — a discovery that also won a Nobel Prize. Until then, physicists had assumed that exchanging positive for negative and left-handed for right-handed in the equations of elementary particles would result in the same answer.
The fact that nature operates otherwise, physicists hope, is a step toward explaining why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, one of the questions that the Large Hadron Collider is also designed to explore.
Published: October 7, 2008
An American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries among elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.
Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Makoto Kobayashi, 64, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, 68, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.
Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances. “It’s the lamppost we search under,” said Michael Turner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.
One example of an obvious symmetry is a snowflake, which looks the same when you rotate it one-sixth of a turn. Another is Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says the laws of physics are the same no matter what speed. However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, inspired by studies of superconductivity, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of elementary particle physics might be hidden, or “broken” in actual practice. “You have to look for symmetries even when you can’t see them,” Dr. Turner said.
The principle of symmetry breaking is now embedded in all of modern particle physics. The $8 billion Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator soon to go into operation outside Geneva, was designed largely to find a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is theorized to be responsible for breaking the symmetry between electromagnetism and the so-called weak nuclear force, imparting mass to many particles that in theory are massless.
Imagine a pencil balanced on its point on a table — one of physicists’ favorite examples. To the pencil while it is still on its point, all directions along the table are the same. But the standing pencil is unstable and will eventually fall onto the table pointing in only one direction.
Applying this notion to a puzzle in the subatomic realm, Dr. Nambu explained why a particle known as the pion, which carries the strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, was much lighter than the protons and neutrons inside it. If it were not so light, the strong force would not extend far enough to stick nuclei heavier than hydrogen together, said Daniel Friedan, a physicist at Rutgers.
The fact that the pion is light, he said, explains why there is a variety of atoms in the world. “There is a variety of atoms because there is a variety of nuclei,” Dr. Friedan wrote in an e-mail message.
In 1972, Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa, extending work by the Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, showed that if there were three generations of the elementary particles called quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, the principle of symmetry breaking would explain a puzzling asymmetry known as CP violation.
At the time, only three kinds of quarks were known: the up and down quarks, which make up most ordinary matter, and the strange quark. In 1974, the so-called charmed quarks were discovered. The last pair, the bottom and top quarks, were discovered in 1977 and 1994, completing the three generations of two quarks each predicted by Dr. Kobayashi and Dr. Maskawa.
The CP violation — C and P stand for charge and parity, or “handedness” — was discovered in 1964 by the American physicists James W. Cronin and Val L. Fitch — a discovery that also won a Nobel Prize. Until then, physicists had assumed that exchanging positive for negative and left-handed for right-handed in the equations of elementary particles would result in the same answer.
The fact that nature operates otherwise, physicists hope, is a step toward explaining why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, one of the questions that the Large Hadron Collider is also designed to explore.
Three Chemists Win Nobel Prize
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 8, 2008
One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.
The fluorescent proteins are now routinely used for observing the growth and fate of specific cells like nerve cells damaged during Alzheimer’s disease.
The winners are Osamu Shimomura, 80, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School; Martin Chalfie, 61, a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University; and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego.
Each will receive a third of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Shimomura said he received a 5 a.m. phone call informing him he was a Nobelist. “The reaction was just surprise,” he said.
Dr. Tsien was not caught completely unaware. Last week, the Thomson Reuters news service listed him among its predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize winners. “I didn’t want to put any credence in it,” Dr. Tsien said, noting that the predictions for the physics and medicine prizes this week were wrong.
Dr. Tsien (pronounced chen) added that his work was “only one little piece” amid the work of many. “It wasn’t necessarily the case they had to give it to me,” he said. “Obviously, it’s pretty nice to hear.”
Dr. Chalfie never received the phone call from Sweden. “I slept through it,” he acknowledged at a news conference at Columbia. He said he had inadvertently turned down the ringer on his telephone a couple of days ago. He woke up at 6:10 in the morning and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment.
“I was a little bit annoyed that they weren’t answering their phone,” he said. “I then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook.”
Biologists have long observed that some sea creatures glow in the dark. In 1962, Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, isolated a specific glowing protein in the Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America.
The protein looked greenish under sunlight, yellowish under a light bulb and fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. Dr. Shimomura and Dr. Johnson called it the green protein, but now it is known as green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short.
The green fluorescent protein consists of a chain of 238 amino acids bent into a beer can-like cylindrical shape, and for two and a half decades it remained a little-known biological curiosity.
Dr. Chalfie first heard about the protein at a seminar in 1988, and thought he might be able to use it in his studies of Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent roundworm.
“It didn’t take much to realize that if I put that fluorescent protein inside this transparent animal, I would be able to see the cells that were making it,” he said. “And that’s what we set out to do.”
He thought that the fluorescent protein could be made to serve as a biological marker by splicing the gene that makes the protein into an organism’s DNA next to a gene switch or another gene.
“That serves as a lantern,” Dr. Chalfie said, and biologists would be able to see when specific genes turn on or off and where different proteins are produced.
He was not able to pursue the idea until Douglas C. Prasher, a scientist then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, found the G.F.P. gene and shared it with Dr. Chalfie in 1992. Dr. Chalfie said that within a month his group was able to insert the gene into E. coli bacteria.
In 1994, Dr. Chalfie and his collaborators reported that they had inserted the protein into six cells of the C. elegans worm. When placed under ultraviolet light, those cells shined green, revealing their location.
For many biologists, it was a surprise that inserting the G.F.P. gene was all that needed; many had thought that other jellyfish proteins would be needed to help G.F.P. fold into its light-emitting shape.
Dr. Tsien was thinking along similar lines as Dr. Chalfie, also contacting Dr. Prasher. But for the biology experiment he wanted to conduct, he needed two colors of fluorescent proteins. Dr. Tsien started mutating the G.F.P gene and looking at the resulting proteins. Some, he found, glowed blue instead of green.
“That was the first evidence you could change the color,” Dr. Tsien said.
Other scientists have since expanded the palette, enlisting similar proteins from corals to produce fluorescent reds. The multiple colors allow biologists to track different processes simultaneously. In one experiment, the brain of a mouse was transformed into a kaleidoscope of color by tagging different nerve cells with different fluorescent proteins.
The protein has even entered the world of art. In 2000, Eduardo Kac, an artist, displayed a green glowing rabbit named Alba, which he had commissioned a French laboratory to modify genetically with the G.F.P gene.
Scientists have also made green-glowing pigs and zebra fish, which they hope will aid research on stem cells and cancer.
Published: October 8, 2008
One Japanese and two American scientists have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology for watching the dance of living cells and the proteins within them.
The fluorescent proteins are now routinely used for observing the growth and fate of specific cells like nerve cells damaged during Alzheimer’s disease.
The winners are Osamu Shimomura, 80, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School; Martin Chalfie, 61, a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University; and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego.
Each will receive a third of the 10 million krona prize (about $1.4 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Shimomura said he received a 5 a.m. phone call informing him he was a Nobelist. “The reaction was just surprise,” he said.
Dr. Tsien was not caught completely unaware. Last week, the Thomson Reuters news service listed him among its predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize winners. “I didn’t want to put any credence in it,” Dr. Tsien said, noting that the predictions for the physics and medicine prizes this week were wrong.
Dr. Tsien (pronounced chen) added that his work was “only one little piece” amid the work of many. “It wasn’t necessarily the case they had to give it to me,” he said. “Obviously, it’s pretty nice to hear.”
Dr. Chalfie never received the phone call from Sweden. “I slept through it,” he acknowledged at a news conference at Columbia. He said he had inadvertently turned down the ringer on his telephone a couple of days ago. He woke up at 6:10 in the morning and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment.
“I was a little bit annoyed that they weren’t answering their phone,” he said. “I then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook.”
Biologists have long observed that some sea creatures glow in the dark. In 1962, Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, isolated a specific glowing protein in the Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that drifts in the ocean currents off the west coast of North America.
The protein looked greenish under sunlight, yellowish under a light bulb and fluorescent green under ultraviolet light. Dr. Shimomura and Dr. Johnson called it the green protein, but now it is known as green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P. for short.
The green fluorescent protein consists of a chain of 238 amino acids bent into a beer can-like cylindrical shape, and for two and a half decades it remained a little-known biological curiosity.
Dr. Chalfie first heard about the protein at a seminar in 1988, and thought he might be able to use it in his studies of Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent roundworm.
“It didn’t take much to realize that if I put that fluorescent protein inside this transparent animal, I would be able to see the cells that were making it,” he said. “And that’s what we set out to do.”
He thought that the fluorescent protein could be made to serve as a biological marker by splicing the gene that makes the protein into an organism’s DNA next to a gene switch or another gene.
“That serves as a lantern,” Dr. Chalfie said, and biologists would be able to see when specific genes turn on or off and where different proteins are produced.
He was not able to pursue the idea until Douglas C. Prasher, a scientist then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, found the G.F.P. gene and shared it with Dr. Chalfie in 1992. Dr. Chalfie said that within a month his group was able to insert the gene into E. coli bacteria.
In 1994, Dr. Chalfie and his collaborators reported that they had inserted the protein into six cells of the C. elegans worm. When placed under ultraviolet light, those cells shined green, revealing their location.
For many biologists, it was a surprise that inserting the G.F.P. gene was all that needed; many had thought that other jellyfish proteins would be needed to help G.F.P. fold into its light-emitting shape.
Dr. Tsien was thinking along similar lines as Dr. Chalfie, also contacting Dr. Prasher. But for the biology experiment he wanted to conduct, he needed two colors of fluorescent proteins. Dr. Tsien started mutating the G.F.P gene and looking at the resulting proteins. Some, he found, glowed blue instead of green.
“That was the first evidence you could change the color,” Dr. Tsien said.
Other scientists have since expanded the palette, enlisting similar proteins from corals to produce fluorescent reds. The multiple colors allow biologists to track different processes simultaneously. In one experiment, the brain of a mouse was transformed into a kaleidoscope of color by tagging different nerve cells with different fluorescent proteins.
The protein has even entered the world of art. In 2000, Eduardo Kac, an artist, displayed a green glowing rabbit named Alba, which he had commissioned a French laboratory to modify genetically with the G.F.P gene.
Scientists have also made green-glowing pigs and zebra fish, which they hope will aid research on stem cells and cancer.
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