BendDesk

What is BendDesk?

For most people from many different disciplines a desk is the main workspace. A typical desk is composed of at least one or more vertical displays that show digital content and a larger horizontal area, containing input devices, such as mouse and keyboard, paper-based documents, and everyday objects. These two areas are clearly separated which makes it hard to move documents from one surface to the other. Furthermore, each area employs a different interaction technique. For example, we use the mouse for drawing on vertical displays but physical pens to annotate paper-based documents. BendDesk is our vision of a future workspace that allows continuous interaction between both areas.

BendDesk is a multi-touch desk environment that seamlessly combines a vertical and a horizontal surface with a curve into one large interactive workspace. This workspace can be used to display any digital content like documents, photos, or videos. Multi-touch technology allows the user to interact with the entire surface using direct manipulation and multi-touch gestures. We took special care for ergonomics. Users can comfortably sit at the desk and place everyday objects on it. Have a look at the video!

Scientists attach barcodes to mouse embryos – human ones coming soon

Spanish scientists have attached silicon barcode labels to embryos and oocytes

Fans of the film Blade Runner may remember a scene in which the maker of an artificial snake is identified by a microscopic serial number on one of its scales. Well, in a rare case of present-day technology actually surpassing that predicted in a movie, we’ve now gone one better – bar codes on embryos. Scientists from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), along with colleagues from the Spanish National Research Council, have successfully developed an identification system in which mouse embryos and oocytes (egg cells) are physically tagged with microscopic silicon bar code labels. They expect to try it out on human embryos and oocytes soon.

The purpose of the system is to streamline in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures. If egg cells and embryos can be quickly and easily identified, then things should run much smoother, and success rates should be higher.

The labels, which had been declared biologically innocuous in an earlier study, are microinjected into the perivitelline space of mouse embryos – the perivitelline space is a region between the cell membrane and the zona pellucida, which is a cover that surrounds the embryo’s plasma membrane. The embryo exits the zona pellucida before entering the uterus, so the bar code would be shed at that point.

In the UAB lab studies, labeled embryos were shown to develop normally up until the blastocyst stage, which precedes implantation. The researchers also studied how well the labels stayed on throughout the development cycle, how easily they could be read with a standard microscope, how they could be eliminated after the shedding of the zona pellucida, and how well they could stand up to the freezing and thawing of their host embryo.

There were some problems with embryos being able to free themselves from the labels when they shed the zona pellucida. The scientists are therefore now looking at modifying the surface of the labels, so they could be mounted on the outside of the covering, instead of being injected into the perivitelline space. They are also working on an automated bar code reading system.

Permission has been given by the Government of Catalonia’s Department of Health for UAB to begin testing its system with human oocytes and embryos from several fertility clinics in Spain.

The research was recently published in the journal Human Reproduction.

Source: http://www.gizmag.com/barcodes-on-embryos/17017/

New Age Deception The Soul Harvest Agenda

Domain name provider forces Wikileaks offline

The website of whistle-blowing organisation Wikileaks has been shut down by the company providing it with domain name services.

EveryDNS.net said it had terminated services because Wikileaks.org had come under massive cyber attacks.

It said the attacks threatened its infrastructure and endangered access to thousands of other websites.

Wikileaks says it has faced disruption since it began publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.

The memos, which discuss US diplomatic relations and military activities, have been causing controversy across the world.

In a post on Twitter, Wikileaks acknowledged that its domain had been “killed” by EveryDNS.net.

It was not clear how long disruption to the site would last for.

In a statement on its website, EveryDNS.net said it had issued a 24-hour termination notice to Wikileaks which ended at 0300 GMT on 2 December.

It said the domain wikileaks.org had become the target of “multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks”.

“These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites,” it said.

“Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider,” it added.

Wikileaks says its website has been under attack since it began publishing more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables.

It turned to the online store Amazon to host its site but the company ended the agreement on Wednesday – a move welcomed by US officials.

Wikileaks said its site is now being hosted by servers in Europe.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11907641

NASA Finds New Life Form

By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo

Hours before its special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth. This changes everything.

At its conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While Wolfe-Simon and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2 p.m. EST but, while this life hasn’t been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don’t know about you, but I’ve not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that’s without counting yesterday’s announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor trillions of Earths.

For more current in-depth coverage, read Science News.

Erasing traumatic memories may soon be possible

Scientists have found that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to delete memories forever. The research has drawn interest — and concern — from some involved in mental healthcare.

Reporting from Baltimore —
Soldiers haunted by scenes of war and victims scarred by violence may wish they could wipe the memories from their minds. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say that may someday be possible.

A commercial drug remains far off — and its use would be subject to many ethical and practical questions. But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to erase memories forever.

“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” said Richard L. Huganir, professor and chair of neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He said his finding on the molecular process “raises the possibility of manipulating those mechanisms with drugs to enhance behavioral therapy for such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The research has drawn interest — and concern — from some involved in mental healthcare.

Kate Farinholt, executive director of the mental health support and information group National Alliance on Mental Illness of Maryland, said many people suffering from a traumatic event might benefit from erasing a memory. But there are a lot of unanswered questions, she said.

“Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” she said. “But completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences?”

Research already had shown that a specific form of behavior therapy seemed to erase painful memories. But relapse was possible because the memory wasn’t necessarily gone.

By looking at that process, Huganir and postdoctoral fellow Roger L. Clem discovered a “window of vulnerability” when unique receptor proteins are created. The proteins mediate signals traveling within the brain as painful memories are made. Because the proteins are unstable, they can be easily removed with drugs or behavior therapy during the window, ensuring the memory is eliminated.

Researchers used mice to find the window, but think the process would be the same in humans. They used electric shocks to condition the rodents to fear a certain tone. The sound triggered creation of the proteins, called calcium-permeable AMPARS, which formed for a day or two in the fear center, or amygdala, of the mice’s brains.

The researchers are working on ways to reopen the window down the road by recalling the painful memory and using medication to eliminate the protein.

Huganir, whose report on erasing fear memories in rodents was published online last month by Science Express, also thinks that the window may exist in other centers of learning and may eventually be used to treat pain or drug addiction.

There are medications also targeting the amygdala and used with behavior therapy that can lessen the emotional response to painful memories, such as propranolol, a beta blocker commonly used to treat hypertension.

Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, said that permanently erasing memories in humans, if it could be done, wouldn’t be a lot different ethically than behavior modification.

He also said that PTSD sufferers, such as service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, frequently experienced more than one traumatic event, and trying to eliminate all the memories could significantly alter a person’s personality and history.

“I don’t know what it means to erase that much of a person’s life,” he said. “You’d leave a giant hole in a person’s history. I tend to doubt you’d even be able to.

“Certainly, there may be appropriate applications,” he said. “But human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.”

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-protein-memories-20101202,0,7759822.story