Google OS: the end of the hard drive? Good luck with that.

Google today unveiled more details of Chrome OS, a lightweight, browser-based operating system for netbooks.

With a strong focus on speed, the Chrome OS promises nearly instant boot times of about 7 seconds for users to login to their computers.

“We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast … to boot up like a TV,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management for Google.

The first Chrome OS netbooks will be available in late 2010, Pichai said. It will not be available as a download to run and install. Instead, Chrome OS is only shipping on specific hardware from manufacturers Google has partnered with. That means if you want Chrome OS, you'll have to purchase a Chrome OS device.

Google is currently working with unnamed computer manufacturers to define specifications for these computers, which Pichai said will include larger netbook-style computers with full-size keyboards, large trackpads and large displays.

Chrome OS netbooks will not have traditional hard disk drives — they will rely on non-volatile flash memory and Internet-based storage for saving all of your data.

All the applications will be web-based, meaning users won’t have to install apps, manage updates or even backup their data. All data will be stored in the cloud, and users won’t even have to bother with anti-virus software: Google claims it will monitor code to prevent malicious activity in Chrome OS web apps.

“Chrome OS is a totally rethought computer that will let you focus on the Internet, so you can stop worrying about your computer,” according to a Google promotional video shown at the event, held at the Google campus in Mountain View, California.

via Google OS: the end of the hard drive? – CNN.com.

Dumb terminals are an old idea. Every so often some “new” technology tries to move us back in that direction, but the fact is, people don’t want to give up their hard drives.  1) Ownership is a fundamental human drive, and 2) we all know that a hard drive is way more reliable than an Internet connection.

Killers who killed victims to sell their body fat arrested in Peru

Peruvian police say they have broken up a group who they claim killed people in order to steal their body fat.

Officers say a gang in the remote jungle had been killing people for their fat, draining it from their corpses and offering it on the black market for use in cosmetics.

Eusebio Felix Murga, director of Criminal Police, told a news conference in Lima that the criminal organisation which trafficked “human fat” had been disbanded.

Pictures from a Peruvian police handout video show officers in Huanuco province leading suspects to the spot where they allegedly buried their victims, and unearthing and measuring buried remains.

However, medical experts have expressed doubts about an international black market for human fat, as in most countries it could be obtained so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate it.

- via itn

Four people were arrested in Peru in an investigation into the killing of people for their body fat, which was perhaps sent to Europe to be used in cosmetics.

International authorities said they are looking for at least five other people in the alleged ring, which would lure victims with a job offer and kill them. Body was fat was extracted and sold for about $60,000 a gallon.

The disappearances of 60 people have been linked to the alleged scheme. Peruvian investigators said one of the suspects has been killing for human fat for more than 30 years.

They said they suspected the body fat was being sent to Europe, although no hard link was developed. Some of the at-large suspects are Europeans.

Such fat is regularly used to treat wrinkles but it is usually extracted from another part, such as the stomach or buttocks, of the patient's body. One doctor told The Times of London to use fat from another person could result in a risk of “life-threatening consequences.”

via Fat killers – UPI.com.

World around us: Michael Jackson’s ‘face’ on baby scan

An image captured in a baby scan has been claimed to be the ‘double’ of Michael Jackson.

Parents-to-be Dawn Kelley and William Hickman were looking at the ultrasound scan of their unborn baby when they realised it looked like the late pop singer.

Mr Hickman, 29, a window cleaner, said: “I showed my daughter Ami, who’s six, and she saw it straight away, so I thought ‘well if she can see it too it’s not just me seeing things’.”

Mother-of-six Miss Kelley, 34, went for her 20-week scan at Sunderland Royal as normal last month, but doctors could not see the foetus’s stomach or diaphragm.

A few weeks later she was sent to Grindon Lane Walk in Centre for a closer look.

The more powerful scanner there is normally used to examine internal organs so the images it produces much more detailed.

Mr Hickman said: “We were looking at the pictures again, and I just saw Jacko there.

“None of us are really Michael Jackson fans. I mean I like him, but we’re not crazy about him or anything.”

via World around us: Michael Jackson’s ‘face’ on baby scan.

The new miracle cure for injuries?

Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie has flown to Serbia for a novel form of treatment – placenta fluid is to be dripped on his injured ankle. Why is he doing this and will it work?

It is not unusual for sports starts to look for super cures for their injuries.

England footballer Wayne Rooney used an oxygen tent prior to the 2006 World Cup to help him recover from a broken foot and six years ago runner Paula Radcliffe rubbed oil from the belly of an emu to ease injuries sustained in a collision with a cyclist.

But the news that Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie is heading to Serbia to get placenta fluid applied to an ankle injury has astonished many.

The 26-year-old hurt his ankle while playing for the Dutch national side in a match against Italy.

He was left with torn ankle ligaments after a challenge 10 minutes into the contest.

Scans revealed a partial tear would keep him out of action for six weeks.

Rapid recoveries

But a Dutch journalist close to the national squad said he could be back in as little as four weeks if the treatment works.

TV and radio reporter Rob Fleur said a woman who specialises in the treatment had been recommended to Van Persie by former team-mates Dutch midfielder Orlando Engelaar and Serbian forward Danko Lazovic.

They both claim to have had rapid recoveries from similar injuries after travelling to Belgrade to see the specialist. …

via BBC News – The new miracle cure for injuries?.

Researcher: Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin

A Vatican researcher claims a nearly invisible text on the Shroud of Turin proves the authenticity of the artifact revered as Jesus’ burial cloth. The claim made in a new book by historian Barbara Frale drew immediate skepticism from some scientists, who maintain the shroud is a medieval forgery. Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, said Friday that she used computers to enhance images of faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the shroud

A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.

Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.

She asserts that the words include the name “(J)esu(s) Nazarene” — or Jesus of Nazareth — in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

“Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object,” Frale said Friday. “Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription.”

The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen's fibers at the time of his resurrection.

The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a protective chamber in a Turin cathedral and is rarely shown. Measuring 13 feet (four meters) long and three feet (one meter) wide, the shroud has suffered severe damage through the centuries, including from fire. ….

via Researcher: Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin – Yahoo! News.

Dream killer freed by judge

A “devoted husband” who said he killed his wife because he thought she was an intruder has been freed by a judge, who told him he bore no responsibility.

Brian Thomas, 59, admitted killing Christine, 57, in their camper van, but blamed his rare sleep disorder.

Jurors were told they could reach only not guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity verdicts on a murder charge.

The Swansea Crown Court judge told the jury to declare Mr Thomas, of Neath, not guilty over the Ceredigion death.

The High Court judge, Mr Justice Davis, described Brian Thomas as a “decent man and devoted husband”.

The judge said that from his understanding of his character from what had come out in court he may go away with a sense of guilt about what happened but he underlined a second time: “In the eyes of the law you bear no responsibility for what happened.”

Mr Thomas's brother Raymond called him a loving husband and a family man and said: “Justice has prevailed”.

Raymond Thomas, speaking on the court steps, said: “This is absolutely wonderful.

He went on: “Family and friends are truly delighted by the outcome today. They were a loving couple and always like that together.

‘Highly unusual’

The case, which followed Mrs Thomas’s death in the coastal town of Aberporth, was described as “highly unusual” by prosecuting barrister Paul Thomas.

Jurors were told at the start of the trial that they could reach only two verdicts for the murder charge – not guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity.

The court heard that tests commissioned by both the prosecution and the defence were carried out on Mr Thomas as he slept following his claims of a sleep disorder.

Both sleep experts agreed his behaviour was consistent with automatism, which meant at the time he killed his wife, his mind had no control over what his body was doing.

But the jury has been told there are two types of automatism: insane automatism and non-insane automatism, which they will have to decide between for their verdict.

In court on Friday morning, however, the prosecution told the jury that it was no longer seeking a special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity and that there would be no purpose in sending Mr Thomas to a psychiatric hospital. …

via BBC News – Camper van ‘dream killer’ Brian Thomas freed by judge.

More than powerful! German research computer QPACE is the most energy efficient in the world

At the 2009 Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon (USA), the high-performance computer QPACE (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell) was recognized today as the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. QPACE is at the head of the Green500 list, which provides a global ranking of energy-efficient supercomputers. QPACE was developed by an academic consortium of universities and research centers as well as the German IBM research and development center in Böblingen within the framework of a state-sponsored research association. Within the consortium, the development effort was led by the University of Regensburg, while the research centers DESY and Jülich also assumed central responsibilities. Additional members included the University of Wuppertal, the University of Ferrara (Italy), the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) as well as the companies Eurotech, Knürr, Zollner and Xilinx. The QPACE core team consists of approximately 20 researchers and developers.

QPACE was deployed mid 2009 with four racks each at the Research Center Jülich and at the University of Wuppertal. It is being used for the simulation of fundamental forces in elementary particle physics, especially in the research area of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). QCD describes, for example, how a proton is made up out of quarks and gluons. QPACE is being used by members of the Collaborative Research Center/ Transregio 55 “Hadron Physics from Lattice QCD,” which is located at the Universities of Regensburg and Wuppertal and supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Spokesperson of the research association is Prof. Dr. Andreas Schäfer; Principal Investigator of the QPACE project is Prof. Dr. Tilo Wettig. Both teach physics and perform research at the University of Regensburg.

For a long time, in the world of supercomputers performance was solely associated with speed. This notion led to the development of computers that use enormous amounts of energy. Energy efficiency usually was ignored. Not until the advent of increased discussions about the scarcity of natural resources and energy over the past years did this aspect gain in importance for the development of supercomputers. Along with the Top500 list of the fastest computers, the Green500 list of supercomputers with the least energy use emerged as criterion for the rating and ranking of computer performance. Both lists are updated and presented twice a year at the international Supercomputing conference. The QPACE supercomputer comes in at place 110 on the TOP500 list and has a computing power of 55 teraflop/s.

The heart of QPACE is the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhancement of the Cell/B.E. processor, which originally was developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the Sony PlayStation 3. With its nine processor cores, the chip can carry out a very large number of calculations simultaneously and at a high speed. The novel concept of QPACE consists of connecting processors by a network of programmable units, called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), to an efficient scalable computer. Each of the QPACE installations in Jülich and Wuppertal can reach a maximum performance of 100 TeraFlops (double precision). That equates to 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) computing operations per second. As a result of the scalability of the network, it is in principle possible to increase the performance to the PetaFlops scale (one quadrillion operations per second).

- via EurekaAlert

via More than powerful! German research computer QPACE is the most energy efficient in the world.

Corn DNA decoded, more genes than humans

In recent years, scientists have decoded the DNA of humans and a menagerie of creatures but none with genes as complex as a stalk of corn, the latest genome to be unraveled.

A team of scientists led by The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published the completed corn genome in the Nov. 20 journal Science, an accomplishment that will speed efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet the world’s growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.

“Seed companies and maize geneticists will pounce on this data to find their favorite genes,” says senior author Richard K. Wilson, Ph.D., director of Washington University’s Genome Center, who led the multi-institutional sequencing effort. “Now they’ll know exactly where those genes are. Having the complete genome in hand will make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions.”

Corn, also known as maize, is the top U.S. crop and the basis of products ranging from breakfast cereal to toothpaste, shoe polish and ethanol. The corn genome is a hodgepodge of some 32,000 genes crammed into just 10 chromosomes. In comparison, humans have 20,000 genes dispersed among 23 chromosomes.

The $29.5 million maize sequencing project began in 2005 and is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. departments of agriculture and energy. The genome was sequenced at Washington University’s Genome Center. The overall effort involved more than 150 U.S. scientists with those at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and Iowa State University in Ames playing key roles. …

The genetic code of corn consists of 2 billion bases of DNA, the chemical units that are represented by the letters T, C, G and A, making it similar in size to the human genome, which is 2.9 billion letters long.

But that’s where much of the similarity ends. The challenge for Wilson and his colleagues was to string together the order of the letters, an immense and daunting task both because of the corn genome’s size and its complex genetic arrangements. About 85 percent of the DNA segments are repeated. Jumping genes, or transposons, that move from place to place make up a significant portion of the genome, further complicating sequencing efforts.

A working draft of the maize genome, unveiled by the same group of scientists in 2008, indicated the plant had 50,000-plus genes. But when they placed the many thousands of DNA segments onto chromosomes in the correct order and closed the remaining gaps, the researchers revised the number of genes to 32,000.

via Amaizing: Corn genome decoded.

Free tix to twilight – new moon – review

My friend had two free tickets to the 2nd movie in the “Twilight” series. I saw this movie tonight without having read the books and without seeing the first movie.

It seemed to be a movie about a pretty teen waif girl and some pale people with strange eyes, then it was a movie about a guy who keeps taking his shirt off. Then it was a movie about a guy who cuts his hair and gets a tattoo and takes his shirt off. And then, it was a movie about a group of guys who take their shirts off and turn into werewolves… oh … and there was some kissing and a few fight scenes and ghostlike special effects.

The ending made people gasp in surprise, about where it ended compared to the book, I think.

There were so many teenage girls at this movie in Sacramento that they closed down the men’s restroom to turn it into a woman’s restroom in the theater.

I was moderately entertained by the story but for my own tastes, the Underworld movies are more my speed if I’m looking for vampires fighting werewolves.

Free tix to twilight, originally uploaded by xeno735.