Star Wars-Inspired Hover Chair

The futuristic Lounger is a revolutionary magnetic ‘hover’ furniture, designed by UK designer Keith Dixon and inspired by the Star Wars Landspeeder.

British design, precision engineered and British built by hand. Defying gravity with the use of repelling magnetic forces in both the bed and base this contemporary lounger is comfortable, practical and stylish. Permanent magnets can also help back, muscular problems and headaches, so our furniture not only looks good – it may make you feel good too. The sensation that you feel as you lay back and close your eyes is totally different, like floating on a cloud.

Custom build options available. By default we supply Hoverit Lounges in clear acrylic which allows you to see every component. Each lounger comes with a clear anti-scratch mat and a limited edition certificate and serial number.

The Lounger chair from Hoverit Ltd. will be available from March 16. The price has been set to £5,875 (about $11,600 USD). – geekalerts

Might be fun, but could this cause anemia by pulling the iron out of your blood if the magenets are too strong?

Eight-Armed Animal Preceded Dinosaurs

An eight-armed creature that looked more like a modern party favor than a living animal colonized a large section of the world’s oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged, suggests a new study.

The findings represent the first comparable animal fossils from the Ediacaran Period, 635 to 541 million years ago, which appear in two drastically different preservation environments — black shale of South China and quartz rock of South Australia.

“According to paleogeographic reconstructions, South China and South Australia were close to each other at the time, belonging to a supercontinent called Gondwana,” lead author Maoyan Zhu told Discovery News. …

Zhu, Gehling and their colleagues collected eight compressions of the animals from the Doushantuo Formation at Wenghui, China. They then traveled to Flinders Ranges, Australia, and collected seven specimens, leaving 31 others on two excavated and reassembled beds. The findings are published in the November issue of Geology. There is no question the creature, believed to represent one type of animal, had a lot of arms.

“The eight arms are clearly preserved in our specimens,” Zhu said, adding that the arms were tubular and in close contact with each other, but not joined. He and his colleagues believe the animal was a soft-bodied, dome-shaped organism that lived on seabeds and fed by absorbing dissolved nutrients from the ambient environment. -discovery

Iceman mummy leaves few relatives

What is better on Halloween than a real mummy and a mystery ?

Genetic material from the Iceman mummy suggests this Neolithic man has no modern-day relatives on his mom’s side of the family. The Neolithic mummy dubbed the Iceman likely has no relatives alive today on his mom’s side of the family, finds a new study of the ancient guy’s genes.

The remains of the Iceman (also called Ötzi, Frozen Fritz and Similaun Man) were discovered accidentally in 1991 by German tourists in the Eastern Alps. Since then, a suite of tests has opened a window into the mummy’s life and death. For instance, the Iceman was about 45 years old when he died; he was probably a hunter-gatherer while alive; he sustained a shoulder injury from an arrow and might have died from head trauma; and his last meal included unleavened bread and meat.

Now, researchers have fast-forwarded genetically from 5,300 years ago when Ötzi died to the present to look at whether his maternal lineage is alive and kicking. It’s probably not. The research team, led by Franco Rollo of the University of Camerino and Luca Ermini working at Camerino and the University of Leeds, extracted DNA from Iceman‘s rectum. They analyzed the genome of the cells’ energy-making structures, called mitochondria.

“You only get mitochondrial DNA from your mother, and she gets it from her mother and so on, so it forms an unbroken link all the way back to the common maternal ancestor of all of us,” said researcher Martin Richards of the University of Leeds.

The results showed that Ötzi fits in genetically with a particular group of living individuals who share a common ancestral DNA sequence. Over time, different individuals and groups can branch off from the main group, genetically speaking. Ötzi’s DNA belonged to a cluster of lineages whose members are still common throughout Europe today.

However, nearly all members of this cluster belong to one of three sub-lineages, or sub-clusters. And Ötzi didn’t. His DNA placed him on a completely distinct, fourth sub-lineage, for which there are no other members alive today — at least none have been found so far. His lineage branched away from his nearest modern relatives about 20,000 years ago.

That means Ötzi’s maternal lineage is either extremely rare or has died out….  – msnbc

Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells

UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock’s blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate. One next step is to synchronize the clocks within large numbers of E. coli cells so that all the cells in a test tube would blink in unison. “This would start to look a lot like the makings of a fascinating environmental sensor,” said Jeff Hasty, a UC San Diego bioengineering professor and senior author on the Nature paper. Researchers in his lab have also developed sophisticated microfluidic systems capable of controlling environmental conditions of their E. coli cells with great precision. This enables the bioengineers to track exactly what environmental conditions affect their clocks’ blink rates. – sd

One of the great themes of our time is “hacking biology” and I think we are just seeing the beginnings of what is possible. If we can survive the environmental and geopolitical challenges we will face over the next 100 years, the advances will be jaw dropping. I hope my jaw is around to enjoy it.

Elvis still top-earning dead celebrity

I’m interested in Elvis for a few reasons: we share the same birthday, he had a great voice, and I’ve been curious for years as to what it was exactly that made him a star. Whatever that force was, it has outlasted his own life force.

The King of Rock ’n’ Roll shed this mortal coil 31 years ago, but he remains the top-earning dead celebrity for the second year in a row, according to Forbes.com.

Elvis Presley pulled in $52 million in the past year, helped by increased traffic at his Graceland estate to commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death, and new ventures including the Elvis Sirius Satellite Radio show, according to the moneycentric Web site.

“While things might be topsy-turvy in the financial markets above ground, it’s still a bull market in the boneyard,” Forbes.com said.

In fact, a dead Elvis earned more between October 2007 and October 2008 than some music biz biggies who are very alive, including Justin Timberlake ($44 million) and Madonna ($40 million). Madge must be heartbroken.

Coming in at No. 2 with $33 million in earnings was cartoonist Charles Schulz, who died in 2000 and is best known for his “Peanuts” comic strip, while Aussie actor Heath Ledger nabbed third place.

Ledger, 28, died from an accidental prescription drug overdose in January and his last completed film role was as the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”

“With the ‘The Dark Knight’ grossing $991 million in box office revenue worldwide, we estimate his earnings at $20 million,” the Web site said.

The fourth-richest dead celeb is German-born physicist Albert Einstein, whose estate raked in $18 million in earnings, mainly from Disney’s “Baby Einstein” videos and toys for children.

Deceased TV producer Aaron Spelling, he of “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Charlie’s Angels” fame, was ranked No. 5 with $15 million in earnings.

Check out http://www.forbes.com for the full list. – bostonh

Halloween treat: Xeno’s Spooky Sound Effects Radio

Click the pumpkin for endless random spooky sounds.

I wanted a radio station that would play spooky sounds for my haunted house non-stop. I couldn’t find one, so I made one.  Be warned: Xeno’s spooky sound effects radio station is fully haunted so each listener will hear something different.  Wahhahah. Whahaha. Whahah. Ha. Ha.

Here are some notes to ease your pain:
1) you must allow pop-up windows for http://www.xenophilia.com or you won’t hear a thing.
2) If you don’t already have it, you may need the Quicktime plug in, or this smaller spam free alternative, to play the WAV files in your web browser.
3) Firefox users: minimize the little window that pops up. It reloads at random, and if you don’t minimize it, it may pop up in the way of your other work.
4) I recommend turning your speakers down and using this as a background soundscape.

P.S. The random silences are intentional.

‘If you go to Mars, stay there!’

The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.

In an interview with AFP, the second man to set foot on the Moon said the Red Planet offered far greater potential than Earth’s satellite as a place for habitation.

With what appears to be vast reserves of frozen water, Mars “is nearer terrestrial conditions, much better than the Moon and any other place,” Aldrin, 78, said in a visit to Paris on Tuesday.

“It is easier to subsist, to provide the support needed for people there than on the Moon.”It took Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins eight days to go to the Moon – 380 000 kilometres from Earth – and return in July 1969, aboard Apollo 11. Going to Mars, though, is a different prospect. The distance between the Red Planet and Earth varies between 55 million and more than 400 million km.

Manned mission to Mars around 2030

Even at the most favourable planetary conjunction, this means a round trip to Mars would take around a year and a half. “That’s why you [should] send people there permanently,” said Aldrin. “If we are not willing to do that, then I don’t think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.” He asked: “If we are going to put a few people down there and ensure their appropriate safety, would you then go through all that trouble and then bring them back immediately, after a year, a year and a half?” Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa) are sketching tentative plans for a manned mission to Mars that would take place around 2030 or 2040.

Based on experience culled from a planned return to the Moon, the mission would entail about half a dozen people, with life-support systems and other gear pre-positioned for them on the Martian surface. Aldrin said the vanguard could be joined by others, making a colony around 30 people. – news24

Brain’s ‘Hate Circuit’ Identified, Overlaps with Love Circuit.

People who view pictures of someone they hate display activity in distinct areas of the brain that, together, may be thought of as a ‘hate circuit’, according to new research by scientists at UCL (University College London). The study, by Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya of the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, examined the brain areas that correlate with the sentiment of hate and shows that the ‘hate circuit’ is distinct from those related to emotions such as fear, threat and danger – although it shares a part of the brain associated with aggression. The circuit is also quite distinct from that associated with romantic love, though it shares at least two common structures with it. … Like love, it is often seemingly irrational and can lead individuals to heroic and evil deeds. How can two opposite sentiments lead to the same behaviour?”

… “Interestingly, the activity in some of these structures in response to viewing a hated face is proportional in strength to the declared intensity of hate, thus allowing the subjective state of hate to be objectively quantified. This finding may have legal implications in criminal cases, for example.” – sd

It often seems a thin line between love and hate, and now scientists think they know why.  Brain scans of people shown images of individuals they hated revealed a pattern of brain activity that partly occurs in areas also activated by romantic love, Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya of University College London reported on Wednesday…. The brain activity also occurred in the putamen and insula, two areas activated when people viewed the face of a loved person. Scientists have linked the regions to aggressive action and distressing situations, Zeki said. – news24

Sarkozy loses ‘voodoo doll’ case

A French judge has rejected President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to stop sales of a “voodoo doll” in his image.

Dismissing the case, the Paris judge said the doll was “within the authorised limits of free expression and the right to humour”. Mr Sarkozy’s lawyer said the president would appeal against the decision. The doll comes with pins which users can stick into memorable quotes from the president printed on the doll, such as “work more to earn more”.  Mr Sarkozy took the makers of the kit – publishing company K&B – to the courts after it went on sale on 9 October. His lawyer said Mr Sarkozy had “exclusive and absolute rights” over his own image.

Sales boost

The company refused to stop selling the kit, saying Mr Sarkozy’s reaction was “totally disproportionate”. The case has attracted a fair amount of mockery in France and boosted sales of the kit, says the BBC’s Alasdair Sandford in Paris. K&B also released a similar doll of Segolene Royal, Mr Sarkozy’s rival in the presidential elections last year. She has decided not to take action against K&B, saying: “I have a sense of humour.” This is Mr Sarkozy’s sixth legal action since he was elected last year, but it is the first case the courts have rejected. Voodoo has become associated with zombies and sticking pins into dolls to curse an enemy, but practitioners say this misrepresents their religion. – bbc

Bongo-maker fights for his life after getting anthrax from African drum skins

A musician is fighting for his life after contracting a rare form of deadly anthrax.

Fernando Gomez fell ill after handling animal hide imported from Africa which he used to make bongo drums. He is only the second person in the UK to be infected with inhalation anthrax since 1974. He was admitted to hospital a week ago and is on life support.

Seven people who have been in contact with Mr Gomez, a father of four who is in his thirties, have been given antibiotics as a precaution. Last night, his wife said: ‘The illness started to show when he had a cold but then he got worse and worse. ‘Even now he might still not pull through, but I’ve been told today that he is now stable.’ The illness is so rare that medicines have been flown to Britain for him from the U.S.

… Professor Nigel Lightfoot, chief adviser at the agency, said: ‘It is the process of removing the animal hairs during the making of drums that can put people at risk rather than playing or handling the drums. ‘The risk to others who play these drums is very low. We are, however, keen to reiterate to all individuals who make drums from imported animal skins that there is a risk of coming into contact with anthrax.’ The last case of inhalation anthrax in the UK, in 2006, was fatal. Christopher Norris, 50, from Edinburgh, also contracted the disease after handling animal skins to make drums. – dm

Comment:

Yet another case of animal exploitation which has backfired on the perpetrator.
- Karyn, Belfast, 30/10/2008 17:36

Interesting. I didn’t know the British had tested anthrax as a weapon.