Clipmarks | Silkweaver's Pops

The bigges World Body painting Festival - Beautiful!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:11:31 GMT

clipped by: einbar

World Body Painting Festival 2008 in South Korea

Daegu in South Korea is playing host to the World Bodypainting Festival, it's the largest bodypainting event on the planet.

The main festival is held every year in Seeboden, Austria, but expanded into Asia for the first time this year with a bonus exhibition. It lasts until 31 August.

The World Bodypainting Festival is the biggest annual event of the body painting culture and community. The festival is the first of its kind in the world and has become the “Mecca of Bodypainting”. It draws over a hundred artists and models, and thousands of visitors, from all over the world every year.

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Multitasking has its timings

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:12:59 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: The question, though is when will we be able to influence it?

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Multitasking Can Be Efficient At Certain Optimal Times

"We typically sacrifice efficiency when we multitask. However, there are times when we're quite good at it. Unfortunately, not much has been known about how to predict when these periods of time will occur," Leber said.

using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research confirmed that multitasking is, on average, inefficient. However, the brain scans allowed the researchers to predict when people would be poor multitaskers and optimal multitaskers

"What is so striking about this result is that brain activity predicted multitasking performance before participants even knew whether they would be asked to switch or repeat tasks," Leber said.

"It may take more time before our research translates to real-world benefits for each of us."

according to Leber. Ideally, we should reserve task juggling for known periods of optimal multitasking

Tags: neuroscience, multitasking

Bacteria-human communication

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:25:48 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: I think this double face of the pim gene, points to cellular levels where bacteria and human cell communicate and regulate co- benefitial existence.
some say that the importance of this connection goes even beyond mere protection and peaceful co existence. interesting...

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

How Friendly Bacteria Avoids Immune Attack To Live Happily In The Gut

Multicellular animals live peacefully in close contact with a multitude of microorganisms that inhabit their bodies. Humans, for example, have more microorganisms within the body than cells

with just the intestine containing up to 100 trillion microbes, a number about 10 times greater that all our cells.

Still, although we remain fully immune competent - so capable of responding to infection by pathogenic microorganisms - we do not react against these “friendly” bacteria.

But how do these two opposite immune responses against bacteria so similar exist simultaneously?

The activation of this immune pathway is triggered by peptidoglycans – sugars found on the bacterial wall – and results in the activation of a molecule called Relish

“Friendly” bacteria, on the other hand, despite containing peptidoglycans in their wall exist peacefully

The new found gene– pims

a negative regulator of the immune response

granting tolerance

Tags: biology, bacteria

16 Websites to Super Charge Your English Vocabulary

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:35:15 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dumblittleman.com

It won't be an exaggeration if I say that English is the language of this world. Although Mandarin (Chinese) tops the list of most widely spoken languages in the world, we know that it's English which connects people around the world. Hence it won't harm to get a deeper understanding of this ubiquitous language and work towards improving your grammar and vocabulary.

Visuwords
Visuwords is an awesome visual tool to find new words and improve your vocabulary. When you look up a word in this tool, it shows a neat graph which connects that word to various other words based on different relationships between them. You can hover over each word to get its definition and also zoom-in and zoom-out using your mouse wheel. It's certainly an excellent dictionary plus thesaurus.

Dictionary.com

Thesaurus.com

Definr

Merriam-Webstar Online

MetaGlossary

Thsrs

Wordsmith

BBC Learning English

ESL Quizzes

Ninjawords

About.com's Quizzes

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

AskOxford

Urban Dictionary

Alpha Dictionary

Tags: language, english, vocabulary

Say wow! the flying jellyfish

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:49:00 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: airshipworld.blogspot.com

Last year Festo surprised everyone with their amazing prototype of the Air_ray a manta ray that swims through the air and the b-IONIC Airfish. We reported on it in a great post which was titled "Airships are just like fish in the sky" Festo is currently at the Hannover Messe 2008 and they brought an just as stunning new project with them. We present the Air Jelly, a jellyfish that swims through the air. Currently the information about the AirJelly is only available in German at the Festo Website but the pictures speak for them self, of course we also provide you with a direct link to the autotranslated Page in English about the AirJelly
The Video on the Website of Festo did not work for me so I uploaded it to YouTube just in case you can not see the "Flim" on the Festo website:

Tags: robotics, jellyfish

Futurese- English in 3000 AD

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:13:57 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: So how far will another thousand years take it?

Clip Source: www.xibalba.demon.co.uk

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that... what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time? For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:

Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú taéce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelaérede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ...

We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...

Tags: language, future

Wrong Woman; Wrong Message

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:46:12 GMT

clipped by: debbyski
clipper's remarks: Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

Some great camouflage pics

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:45:55 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: These are beautiful images, what is so catching for me is how it touches a wish to blend in, to go sometimes unnoticed...
a clipmarksless...

Clip Source: www.wonderfulworldofanimals.net

Some creatures have their own way to hide

Tags: animals, camouflage

New clues on "The Great Dying"

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:55:48 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks:

The lessons of the Permian-Triassic massacre are "directly applicable to the present," said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.

Clip Source: www.chron.com

An estimated 95 percent of all marine species and up to 85 percent of land creatures perished, according to Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover.

Scientific sleuths, however, now think they're making progress toward pinning down what caused the extinction of most plants and animals on Earth some 251 million years ago.

The perpetrator wasn't an asteroid or comet, like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and inspired movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Instead, it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous outpouring of hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect, oxygen-starved oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.

Tags: earth, mass extinction, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, atmosphere, geology, science

'Autonomous' Helicopters Teach Themselves To Fly

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:05:05 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers.

The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

The stunts are "by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter,"

The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of "apprenticeship learning," in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.

Tags: ai

Scientists Develop New Computational Method To Investigate Origin Of Life

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:33:15 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage," said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web.
Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Scientists at Penn State have developed a new computational method that they say will help them to understand how life began on Earth. The team's method has the potential to trace the evolutionary histories of proteins all the way back to either cells or viruses, thus settling the debate once and for all over which of these life forms came first.

"We have just begun to tap the potential power of this method," said Randen Patterson, a Penn State assistant professor of biology and one of the project's leaders. "We believe, if it is possible at all, that it is within our grasp to determine whether viruses evolved from cells or vice-versa."

The team is focusing on an ancient group of proteins, called retroelements, which comprise approximately 50 percent of the human genome by weight and are a crucial component in a number of diseases, including AIDS.

Tags: life, computers, science

A wandering mind able to project themselves into imaginary situations - can do important work'..

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:07:08 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: ...scientists are learning - and may even be essential
"Einstein, for instance, was notorious for his wandering mind ".

Clip Source: www.boston.com

A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don't really want to think. It's a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They've demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind - so fundamental, in fact, that it's often referred to as our "default" mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections.

If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California,

what lives in a 'lost world' five kilometres beneath the Caribbean?.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:41:24 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, are set to explore the world's deepest undersea volcanoes and find out what lives in a 'lost world' five kilometres beneath the Caribbean.

The team of researchers led by Dr Jon Copley has been awarded £462,000 by the Natural Environment Research Council to explore the Cayman Trough, which lies between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. This rift in the Caribbean seafloor plunges to a depth of more than 5000 metres below sea level. It contains the world's deepest chain of undersea volcanoes, which have yet to be explored.

"The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on our planet, so we need to understand its patterns of life," says Dr Copley. "Deep-sea exploration has also given us new cancer treatments and better fibre-optic cables for the internet, both thanks to deep-sea creatures."

"The Cayman Trough may be a 'lost world' that will give us the missing piece in a global puzzle of deep-sea life,"

Between Earth's atmosphere and the void ,at the very edge of space, thin blue clouds hovering ...

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:47:07 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: A weirdly wonderful sight appeared to astronauts...

Clip Source: www.space.com

A weirdly wonderful sight appeared to astronauts aboard the International Space Station this summer — thin blue clouds hovering at the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and the void.

The noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds are at an altitude of 47 to 53 miles (76 to 85 km), where meteors and bright aurora lights are not uncommon and the atmosphere gives way to the blackness of space. The clouds remain a scientifically baffling phenomenon more than 120 years after their discovery.

"It's lovely," said Gary Thomas, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado after looking at a photo taken from the space station. "And it shows just how high these clouds really are – at the very edge of space."

A House Fit for a Hobbit?

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:46:44 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: Why are we doing this?
1.It's fun
2.Our society is almost entirely dependent on the availability of increasing amounts of fossil fuel energy. This has brought us to the point at which our supplies are dwindling and our
ecological catastrophe. We have no viable alternative energy source and no choice but to reduce our energy consumption. The sooner this change can be begun, the more comfortable it will be.

Clip Source: www.trendspotting.com.au

A House Fit for a Hobbit?

Clip Source: www.simondale.net

Clip Source: www.trendspotting.com.au

It takes a little self belief and a lot of determination to make eco-building work. Fortunately for Welsh family members Simon, Jasmine, Cosmo and Elfie, this self belief resulted in a self-built eco-home, both close to nature and cost efficient. Features of The Low Impact Woodland Home include a skylight to allow natural light in, solar panels to fuel lights and electronics, a refrigerator cooled from underground air, water supplied from a nearby spring, and a roof water collection for use in the garden.

Clip Source: www.simondale.net

Take one baby, a toddler and a building site. Mix well with a generous helping of mud, combine with 6 weeks of solid welsh rain whilst living under canvas.

Clip Source: www.simondale.net

Why are we doing this?

It's fun. Living your own life, in your own way is rewarding. Following our dreams keeps our souls alive.

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