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And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated "virtual" realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren't living in-or even existing because of-a simulation?

ScienceDaily (May 9, 2011) - Mayo Clinic researchers have designed a new tool for identifying protein function from genetic code. A team led by Stephen Ekker, Ph.D., succeeded in switching individual genes off and on in zebrafish, then observing embryonic and juvenile development. The study appears in the journal Nature Methods.

The hackers that brought down Sony's Playstation Network for more than a month used stolen credit cards to rent computing power from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to carry out their attack. Personal information, credit cards, and passwords from millions of customers were seized by hackers during the attack. Because computing power can be rented from EC2 anonymously, hacking using the service can be hard to trace. Tracing the attack may require the FBI seeking a search warrant to access Amazon's detailed records of which IP addresses accessed the service at which time, and tracing those IP addresses to homes or businesses. The Playstation Network remains down in Japan due to government concerns over its security.

"And what if science becomes - or has become - lower-yield? Is that a reason to reconsider funding policies? Rationally, looking at the cost-benefit may already have effects on resource and funding allocations. Is it unreasonable to assume that science will continue to produce large, demonstrable advances and insights of the size and importance of the major breakthroughs?"

I think the comments under the linked article sufficiently refute it.

Engineers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique to optically modulate the frequency of a laser beam and create a signal that is disrupted significantly less by environmental factors, says Dr. Rainer Martini. The research provides for enhanced optical communications, allowing mobile units not tied to fiber optic cable to communicate in the range of 100 GHz and beyond, the equivalent of 100 gigabytes of data per second. Eventually, the team hopes to extend the reach into the terahertz spectrum. The frequency or amplitude modulation of middle infrared quantum cascade lasers has been limited by electronics, which are barely capable of accepting frequencies of up to 10 GHz by switching a signal on and off.  Marini and his team have developed a method to optically induce fast amplitude modulation in a quantum cascade laser to control the laser's intensity. Their amplitude modulation system employed a second laser to modulate the amplitude of the middle infrared laser, using light to control light. The current detector is only capable of detecting frequencies up to 10 GHz, but Dr. Martini is confident that a new detector will make the system capable of much higher frequencies. With an optical system that is stable enough, satellites may one day convert to laser technology, resulting in a more mobile military and super-sensitive scanners, as well as faster Internet for the masses, says Martini. Ref.: "Optically induced fast wavelength modulation in a quantum cascade laser," Applied Physics Letters, July 7, 2010.

May 4, 2011: Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity.Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B)."The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

ScienceDaily (June 28, 2011) - Inkjet printers, a low-cost technology that in recent decades has revolutionized home and small office printing, may soon offer similar benefits for the future of solar energy.

ScienceDaily (July 5, 2011) - Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.

The studies found:People who perceive their car as a reflection of their self-identity are more likely to behave aggressively on the road and break the law.People with compulsive tendencies are more likely to drive aggressively with disregard for potential consequences.Increased materialism, or the importance of one's possessions, is linked to increased aggressive driving tendencies.Young people who are in the early stages of forming their self-identity might feel the need to show off their car and driving skills more than others. They may also be overconfident and underestimate the risks involved in reckless driving.Those who admit to aggressive driving also admit to engaging in more incidents of breaking the law.A sense of being under time and pressure leads to more aggressive driving.

Hortonworks, IBM and Red Hat today announced they're banding together to build a consistent hybrid computing architecture for big data workloads. Dubbed the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative, the program pledges simplicity of deployment and freedom of movement for data apps. The rapid ascent of cloud computing platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud has given enterprises abundant new options for storing data and deploying processing-intensive applications, such as deep learning and real-time stream processing. Throw in the progress being made at the edge, with sensors and speedy ARM chips collecting and processing massive amounts of data, and you have the makings of a computing revolution. While the computing possibilities in the cloud and on the edge may appear bountiful, the reality is that the underlying architectures for building apps that can span these three modes are just starting to come together. Enterprises today face a dearth of repeatable patterns to guide their developers, administrators, and architects, who are tasked with building, deploying and maintaining hybrid that span not just the cloud and the edge, but traditional on-prem data centers too. Hybrid computing architecture for big data workloads https://goo.gl/GQVXjs

Hybrid computing architecture for big data workloads https://goo.gl/GQVXjs

If you're looking for a way to send and receive money, you may be considering the Cash App. The CashApp is a mobile payment service that allows users to transfer money to one another. You can also use the Cash App to pay for goods and services at certain businesses. And, if you have a Cash Card, you can use it like a debit card, too. If you're thinking about signing up for the CashApp, you may be wondering how much it costs. Well, the good news is that the Cash App is free to download and use.

You are invited to participate in The International Conference on Technological Advances in Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (TAEECE2013) that will be held in Konya, Turkey on May 9-11, 2013. The event will be held over three days, with presentations delivered by researchers from the international community, including presentations from keynote speakers and state-of-the-art lectures.

You may encounter this error code, when you try to download from the Windows phone store or restore a backup on your phone. It just prompts you with an alert stating "There is a problem completing your request. Try again later. "

"Scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet. "

short summary of some probabilistic responses to the problem of induction

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.