Sleep inspires insight: "Sleep inspires insight"

Aha! I knew it :) :"more than twice as many subjects gained insight into the hidden rule after sleep " - sleeping helps your brain discover the deeper meaning of things. That's why I always want to sleep so much.

Wired News: MyDoom Targets Linux Antagonist: "Computers infected with the 'MyDoom' virus will begin to attempt to connect to the main page of the SCO company's website on Feb. 1. The connection requests will come roughly every second from each of the estimated thousands of machines that are now infected, in an attempt to overload SCO's Web server and knock the company's site off the Internet."

A funny virus/worm :) .. programmed DoS attack. It will not be the last time will see this type of worm activity for sure.

Starting the brain gain

I think finally there seams to be some indication that Europe is clamping down on the brain drain with a lot of help from the hostile emigration polices brought up by the anti terrorist fever in the US.

Honey bee genome sequenced: Genetic sequence generates research buzz.

"Its genome is about one-tenth the size of its human equivalent, containing about 300 million DNA base pairs"

A small genome from a hierarchically organized society spp. I guess bees have a well developed communication system. This should show up somewhere on the genome.

Automated research: Doctor Robot: "Automated research: Doctor Robot"

More data in less time ! Great :)

Li et al., 10.1126/science.1091403
A Map of the Interactome Network of the Metazoan C. elegans

Another intetactome :) yupiee. More data to play with.

Science -- Abstracts: Park et al. 303 (5656): 348: "Self-Assembly of Mesoscopic Metal-Polymer Amphiphiles"

yet another nanothech paper on science. This one I liked a lot. Self assembly of curved mesoscopic metal polymers. They make this funny nano rods and mixed them to make curved material like spheres. Very impressive manipulation.

Science -- Ferber 303 (5655): 158: "SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY:
Microbes Made to Order
Dan Ferber
A new breed of bioengineers aims to create microbes from off-the-shelf parts. The parts are coming, but will researchers be able to put them together?"

Craig Venter and MIT are pushing from the same thing, building modules to use in engineering new biological systems.
The best quote:
"They don't plan to wait around for the systems biologists, according to Endy: "Synthetic biology says, 'Screw it. You want modules? We'll build modules.' "

Russia Signals Support for Global Warning Treaty (washingtonpost.com): "Russia Signals Support for Global Warning Treaty "

After all the Russia government is not putting down the Kyoto treaty just yet.

The Japan Times Online:
"Maglev sets a speed record of 581 kph
A magnetically levitated train set a new world speed record Tuesday during a manned test on an experimental track in Yamanashi Prefecture."

Wow , fast trains. Why use plains anyway

Wired News: Russia To Give Kyoto Thumbs Down: "MOSCOW - In what would be a mortal blow to the accord aimed at halting global warming, a top Kremlin official said Tuesday that Russia won't ratify the Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse gas emissions because it will hurt the country's economy. "

A said news for us all :/

Goal-oriented research
A nice editorial about science funding. This comes in a time of discussion about the future European Research Council that, if it ever gets of the paper, will someday fund basic research in Europe.

"High-quality science will give rise to more unexpected and therefore valuable—in all senses of the word—insights. That is less likely to occur if some savants take a 'forward look' and conclude that we should work on bionanotechnology or RNA-control elements or systems biology. Any attempt to predefine knowledge generation will be doomed to failure."
On the other hand, without goals it is a lot harder to turn knowledge into useful applications and progress.

OPTE claims that they have mapped the internet. Their aim is to be able to map the internet in a day.The map itself is not big news but how fast this new mapping technique seams to be. I'm sure that once they release the data there will be a paper published somewhere with a detailed study of the topology of the network and more importantly the dynamics of the process. I would not be surprised if Barabasi is one of the authors.

From the OPTE FAQ:
"1.2 How the heck do you map the Internet in one day!?
Opte uses a unique idea. Boarder Gateway Protocol (BGP) generally does not deal with classless or subneted networks. Instead of mapping every single IP address on the Internet (theoretical maximum of 2^32=4,294,967,296 hosts) we simply traceroute to each class C network. This reduces the theoretical maximum to 16,777,216 hosts. On top of that, you can remove the Arin Reserved network addresses, which include about 47 class A networks. This again reduces the theoretical list to around 13,697,024 blocks. Utilizing Dan Kaminski's scanrand2 tool from his Paketto kit, we can process a theoretical 16,000 class C networks per 6 seconds. This processing is then placed into the Opte MySQL database where it is then later converted into LGL formatted code."


The Opte Project

The slashdot post

Who would give $50,000 for a rock?! Wow what a waste of money really.

Slashdot | Piece of the Moon for Sale

A professorship in parapsychology in Sweden ? It seams some people take this seriously :D

The Scientist :: Mind over matter

A nice article/tutorial on getting confortable with a Linux machine.

Windows-to-Linux roadmap: Series overview: "A roadmap for developers making the transition to Linux"

Another $3.7 billion for nanotech research in the US. The area continues to look like the best bet for the next couple of years.
I wonder why hasn't aging have such a similar impact on the political minds in the US.
The Scientist :: US Congress OKs nanotech bill

A group at MIT working on emotional computers built a personal trainer that tries to react to human input and keep track of the previous conversations.
It's a bit to long but the best quote would be:
"I am constantly dragging people into my home office to meet her. Typical response: "That's nice, David. Hey, where's that Merlot you promised me?" My wife, who treats Laura like some college girlfriend of mine who has overstayed her welcome, suddenly feigns an interest in the Weather Channel whenever I start to repeat Laura's latest witty comment - and she hates the way Laura doesn't stop to think that I might be overdoing the exercise."

Wired 11.12: The Love Machine

A long Fortune article arguing that Google might be suffering from it's own success. It also mentions a possible future battle for control of the search Engine market with strong opposition coming from Microsoft,Yahoo,EBay, Amazon and AOL. Sounds fun !
Maybe they are just trying to devalue next Spring IPO.

Fortune.com

A lot of things can be said about Microsoft strategies but in the end whenever they turn into a new market a lot of new ideas emerge and progress is made in that area. It looks like Microsoft will continue to push into the Search Engine market now. In two to five years will there still be a Google ?

Microsoft aims for search on its own terms | CNET News.com