10 billion. We can count up to 10 billion. But we won't. Because it's boring. But Apple's doing it, in their 10 billion song countdown. I remember when everybody laughed at the iPod and iTunes. Nobody is laughing now. [Apple]
Indianapolis, IN -- The Libertarian Party of Indiana will hold its nominating convention April 23-25, 2010. The convention will serve as a time to nominate libertarians for the party's ballot, workshop on topics such as fundraising and campaign tips, noted speakers and a time to meet Libertarians from around Indiana. Saturday night will also feature a debate for candidates seeking the chairmanship of the national Libertarian Party.
The convention will be held at the Drury Inn Suites at 82nd & Shadeland in Indianapolis. Registration and hotel information will be posted at LPIN.org by March 1, 2010.
It’s a big year for South Africa: Less than four months remain until the first matches of the World Cup, when much of the planet’s attention will turn to the country. But being under the spotlight of international sport makes it difficult to hide a country’s less glamorous bits, as China and Canada have found out trying to shield pollution and addiction problems from the glare of the last couple Olympiads. In June, the microscope will turn to South Africa and its ongoing AIDS crisis.
This month one of the country’s health leaders has renewed his call for blanket HIV testing and anti-retroviral drug dispersal to all patients, which he says can stop the AIDS epidemic once and for all–without having to find a vaccine against the virus or a cure for the disease.
Brian Williams’s idea isn’t new. The former World Health Organization figure, who is now one of South Africa’s top health officials, came out with a paper more than a year ago explaining his model for how effective universal testing and immediate therapy could be. But this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego he expounded on his proposal: “The epidemic of HIV is really one of the worst plagues of human history…. I hope we can get to the starting line in one to two years and get complete coverage of patients in five years. Maybe that’s being optimistic, but we’re facing Armageddon” [The Guardian].
The anti-retrovirals given to HIV-positive people have saved millions of lives, Williams says, but have done little to stop transmission, partly because of how many people don’t know they have HIV. Facing such a tall order, Williams is optimistic. If a full-on testing and treatment project were to begin today, he says we could stop the transmission of the disease within five years. If patients take [anti-retrovirals] when they should, the amount of virus in their bodies can fall by 10,000 times, to a level at which they are extremely unlikely to pass the virus on [The Guardian].
However, he knows the price of testing and treating everyone. The cost in South Africa alone would be $3 billion to $4 billion per year, he said. But the plan would save money from the first day because of all of the people today who have to be hospitalized, and because of all of the young people who die in the prime of their lives, he said [CNN]. South Africa already has the world’s largest program of giving out anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS, because the country has the world’s largest caseload.
While more health officials consider Williams’ idealistic strategy, he and his colleagues stress that it should be done in conjunction with ongoing research into new treatments and practical measures, like South Africa’s efforts to beef up its condom supply in preparation for the footballers and their supporters who will descend on the country this summer.
Related Content:
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80beats: Beware of Hype: AIDS “Cure” is Good Science, But Won’t Halt the Epidemic
80beats: South African Health Minister Breaks With Past, Says HIV Causes AIDS
Image: flickr / troismarteaux
“More science, less fiction” is the message from the scientific community to Hollywood, even as the sci-fi film Avatar continues to rake in cash at the box office. Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz took to the stage at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to encourage more science in movies, but also to beg filmmakers not to bungle up their facts. For example, a movie should only be permitted to break one law of physics, he suggested.
Perkowitz, a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange set up to advise Hollywood, singled out the giant space bugs in the film Starship Troopers for special scrutiny. He pointed out that if a real bug was scaled up to the size of the on-screen insects, it would collapse under its own weight. Perkowitz has come up with a set of scientific guidelines for Hollywood, and also encourages filmmakers to fact-check their scripts in a more deliberate manner so that audiences don’t dismiss a movie as absurd and stay away from the box office.
The Guardian reports:
The proposals are intended to curb the film industry’s worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene.
Perkotwitz hopes the new guidelines will prevent studio execs from making script snafus like those in the movie The Core, in which scientists drill to the center of the Earth to detonate a nuclear device aimed at restarting the rotation of the planet’s core. Perkotwitz said the science in the film “was out to lunch,” and blamed its obviously unsound premise for its box office failure. Many scientists have noted that the idea that the Earth’s core could stop spinning is deeply implausible, and have also reminded audiences that anyone who traveled to the core would be instantly vaporized by the heat.
The Tom Hanks vehicle Angels and Demons also got an “F” from Perkowitz for its science. In that movie, Hanks’ character, Robert Langdon, has to protect the Vatican from going kaboom. The weapon in question is an antimatter bomb, confined in a glass vial by a magnetic field produced by a small battery. Perkowitz told The Guardian: “The amount of antimatter they had was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider…. You can’t contain it using an iPod battery.”
TV shows that scored low on the science-o-meter included Heroes, for its dubious claims on invisibility. Meanwhile, Lost did well for its depiction of time travel.
And how did James Cameron’s visual extravaganza about blue-skinned Na’avi flying about on multi-colored prehistoric-looking birds fare? Avatar was actually pretty good, according to Perkowitz, and joins films like Gattaca on his list of movies that “reflect real issues of science and society, such as genetic engineering.”
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The 5 Best and Worst Science Based Movies of All Time
Science Not Fiction: Putting The Science in Science Fiction
Science Not Fiction: In Defense of Comic-Book SF
Image: Starship Troopers
Small flat-dwellers are accustomed to having one object perform two functions (my coffee table also stores bed linen, for example), but I've never seen a lamp become a garden.
While you can't grow a crop of tomatoes in Marko Vuckovi's Grass Lamp, the grass will flourish under the lamp's light and remind you the grass is always green—in a country house. [Yanko Design]
During the Frankly Speaking podcast, the hosts, who are Microsoft Australia Developer Evangelists spilled some details on how limited the hardware for Windows Phone 7...phones are going to be. There are precisely three chassis variants.
Chassis 1 is the phone we all saw on launch day—a huge touchscreen with a minimum 1GHz processor (read: Snapdragon) and a dedicated GPU, along with all of the other requirements we've talked about. They'll be the first out of the gate. Chassis 2 is the keyboard variant, with sliding keyboards and touchscreens, which are apparently more Palm Treo-like. What Chassis 3 is like is still a mystery, though.
While the three supported chassis are obviously pretty locked down, it'll be interesting to see how much of their own spin manufacturers will be able to rub on Windows Phone 7, given precisely how much they can't touch. [Frankly Speaking via ZDNet]
Process choice and architectural unification lowers total power consumption by 50%, increases capacity by 2x and drives down costs while improving designer productivity.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. has launched the Thermo Scientific Lumina, a new research-grade dual-monochromator scanning fluorescence spectrometer that offers a new level of clarity in fluorescence measurement.
A workshop on aberration corrected electron microscopy was sponsored recently by Carl Zeiss at Harvard University. The workshop attendance was unexpectedly high. Organizers had to move the roughly 100 attendees to a much larger lecture hall than originally planned.
Kompetenzen vernetzen: Unter diesem Leitspruch organisierten die Landescluster NanoMikro+Werkstoffe.NRW, EnergieForschung.NRW und EnergieRegion.NRW die Veranstaltung 'Neue Materialien in der Energietechnologie: Batterietag NRW'.
Space apparently has its own recipe for making carbon nanotubes, one of the most intriguing contributions of nanotechnology here on Earth, and metals are conspicuously missing from the list of ingredients. The finding is the surprising by-product of lab experiments designed by Joseph Nuth at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
While the dye sensitized photovoltaic cell is a fairly mature design, researchers are still trying to improve its efficiency with various techniques, including structuring nanoporous electrodes to provide higher surface area and better charge transport, replacement of the liquid electrolyte by a solid one in order to prevent the electrolyte evaporation, and ways to widen the narrow absorption spectra of molecular dyes. In a standard DSSC, an organic molecule adsorbed on the surface of a porous electrode absorbs light and then initiates the charge separation process eventually leading to generation of photocurrent. One major difficulty in such cells is that very few dyes can absorb a broad spectral range, essentially covering the solar spectrum. In contrast, broad spectral coverage is an inherent property of semiconductor nanocrystals. The latter, however, turn out to do a rather lousy job in separating the charges. Researchers in Israel have now presented a new configuration for quantum dot sensitized DSSCs via a FRET process.
Dialog raises level of power management integration to address needs of future portable devices such as smartphones, ebooks, netbooks.
First commercial application of Baytubes carbon nanotubes in Japan. New dispersion technology enables the full utilization of the electrical and thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, in partnership with The Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, has announced the establishment of the Kavli Prize Science Forum - a new biennial international forum meeting to facilitate high-level, global discussion of major topics on science and science policy.
Tronics, a leading global, manufacturer of integrated custom MEMS components, and Si-Ware Systems, an analog and mixed-signal ASIC solutions provider, today announced their partnership agreement for the development and commercialization of MEMS gyro sensors based on Tronics' custom gyro transducers and Si-Ware's electronic interfaces solutions.
The principal goal of the centre: easier and faster integration of the Company's leading-edge nanomaterials into Asian customers' microelectronic production and packaging processes.
A team of scientists at the Tyndall National Institute have designed and fabricated the world s first junctionless transistor that could revolutionise microchip manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.
Universitaetsmedizin und Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz starten Kooperation mit der Tsinghua University und der Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Peking
Ysing a ceramic material called zirconia, carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles of zirconia, a prothesis that will last more than 150 years can be produced.
