Video: Surfer rides ‘biggest wave of all time’

Professional surfer McNamara, 44, was riding large waves with Andrew Cotton and Al Mennie as part of a study with the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute to understand why the waves in the deep-water canyon off Nazare reach such gigantic heights.Three mammoth waves appeared and Cotton towed McNamara onto the shoulder of one.”Everything seemed to be perfect, the weather, the waves,” said Mennie, who acted as lifeguard for the event”I had the best seat in the house as he dropped down the face of the biggest wave I’ve ever seen. It was incredible.”Most people would look scared but Garrett looked in control as he went down the most critical part of the wave”The previous world record was set in 2008 by Mike Parsons, who rode a 77-foot wave at Cortes Bank, a shallow reef that sits 100 miles off the coast of southern California.

via Video: Surfer rides ‘biggest wave of all time’ – Telegraph.

Bay bridge trying to rob me: no toll taker, fine in mail

This is absurd: On a trip to SF I selected a toll lane with a sign that said “FastTrack / Cash”. I had cash so I pulled up, stopped and held out my cash. No toll taker! What the heck?! I was pissed. I yelled at the toll taker in the next booth that the sign said Cash! He waved my forward, but he would not take my money.

I just got a photo of my license plate and a notice of toll evasion. I was in Lane 11 on 10/23/11 Sunday at 8:11:58. The fine is only $30, but that’s not the point. I’ll contest it, of course … and end up spending $500 of my time clearing my good toll paying name because someone needs to stop this highway robbery!

Unfortunately, I was alone in the car. I’m hoping they have records of what signs they displayed on what lanes when, because I didn’t get a photo, obviously, of the sign in the lane I selected. Has anyone else been a victim of this bridge robbery fastTrack Cash scam?

Sound Search for the Cloud

While new applications continue to emerge, the developers believe MediaMined^TM may aid not only with new audio creation in the music and film industries, but also help with other, more complex tasks. For example, the technology could be used to enable mobile devices to detect their acoustic surrounding and enable new means of interaction. Or, physicians could use the system to collect data on such sounds as coughing, sneezing or snoring and not only characterize the qualities of such sounds, but also measure duration, frequency and intensity. Such information could potentially aid disease diagnosis and guide treatment.

“Teaching computers how to listen is an incredibly complex problem, and we’ve only scratched the surface,” says LeBoeuf. “We will be working with our launch partners to enable intelligent audio-aware software, apps and searchable media collections.”

via NSF

Imagine Research adds a set of ears to cloud computing. We create software to automatically identify, understand, and index sounds, making the content in media files searchable. Our MediaMined platform is the world’s first sound object recognition and search platform.

Computers and are deaf. They have no idea what audio content they listening to, playing back, recording, or storing. Billions of tracks of audio/video can now be indexed, monetized, and discovered. MediaMined generates intelligent metadata. MediaMined Explore uses our proprietary sound signature and rhythmic signatures to index and search massive media archives.

Leading media companies rely on MediaMined to automatically index the acoustic content of video, audio, and live streams. This solution enables better content discovery, intelligent navigation within media files, and audio content-aware targeted ads.

MediaMined has already listened to millions of tracks for Lucasfilm, The Internet Archive, and major music providers.

“…very impressive – there is no other commercial technology which accomplishes this level of audio search…”
-Skywalker Sound, A Lucasfilm Company

via Imagine Research.

Tear drops may rival blood drops in testing blood sugar in diabetes

Michael Bernstein – Scientists are reporting development and successful laboratory testing of an electrochemical sensor device that has the potential to measure blood sugar levels from tears instead of blood — an advance that could save the world’s 350 million diabetes patients the discomfort of pricking their fingers for droplets of blood used in traditional blood sugar tests. Their report appears in ACS’ journal Analytical Chemistry.

Mark Meyerhoff and colleagues explain that about 5 percent of the world’s population (and about 26 million people in the U.S. alone) have diabetes. The disease is a fast-growing public health problem because of a sharp global increase in obesity, which makes people susceptible to developing type 2 diabetes. People with diabetes must monitor their blood glucose levels several times a day to make sure they are within a safe range. Current handheld glucose meters require a drop of blood, which patients draw by pricking their fingers with a small pin or lancet. However, some patients regard that pinprick as painful enough to discourage regular testing. That’s why Meyerhoff’s team is working to develop a new, pain-free device that can use tear glucose levels as an accurate reflection of blood sugar levels.

Tests of their approach in laboratory rabbits, used as surrogates for humans in such experiments, showed that levels of glucose in tears track the amounts of glucose in the blood. “Thus, it may be possible to measure tear glucose levels multiple times per day to monitor blood glucose changes without the potential pain from the repeated invasive blood drawing method,” say the researchers.

via Tear drops may rival blood drops in testing blood sugar in diabetes.

Weird world of water gets a little weirder

Strange, stranger, strangest! To the weird nature of one of the simplest chemical compounds — the stuff so familiar that even non-scientists know its chemical formula — add another odd twist. Scientists are reporting that good old H2O, when chilled below the freezing point, can shift into a new type of liquid. The report appears in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley explain that water is one weird substance, exhibiting more than 80 unusual properties, by one count, including some that scientists still struggle to understand. For example, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid,gas) at the same time. And the forces at its surface enable insects to walk on water and water to rise up from the roots into the leaves of trees and other plants. In another strange turn, scientists have proposed that water can go from being one type of liquid into another in a so-called “liquid-liquid” phase transition, but it is impossible to test this with today’s laboratory equipment because these things happen so fast. That’s why Kumar and Stanley used computer simulations to check it out.

They found that when they chilled liquid water in their simulation, its propensity to conduct heat decreases, as expected for an ordinary liquid. But, when they lowered the temperature to about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the liquid water started to conduct heat even better in the simulation. Their studies suggest that below this temperature, liquid water undergoes sharp but continuous structural changes whereas the local structure of liquid becomes extremely ordered — very much like ice. These structural changes in liquid water lead to increase of heat conduction at lower temperatures. The researchers say that this surprising result supports the idea that water has a liquid-liquid phase transition.

via Weird world of water gets a little weirder.

NASA Develops Super-Black Material That Absorbs Light Across Multiple Wavelength Bands

NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs on average more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it — a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology.

The team of engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported their findings recently at the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference, the largest interdisciplinary technical meeting in this discipline. The team has since reconfirmed the material’s absorption capabilities in additional testing, said John Hagopian, who is leading the effort involving 10 Goddard technologists.

“The reflectance tests showed that our team had extended by 50 times the range of the material’s absorption capabilities. Though other researchers are reporting near-perfect absorption levels mainly in the ultraviolet and visible, our material is darn near perfect across multiple wavelength bands, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared,” Hagopian said. “No one else has achieved this milestone yet.”

via NASA – NASA Develops Super-Black Material That Absorbs Light Across Multiple Wavelength Bands.