Ever wished you could run some of your daily chores at the flick of a switch? Well, this may soon become reality thanks to an open source home automation and networking platform from IST project HOMETALK.
HOMETALK set out to overcome the problems posed by existing home networking, automation and control systems that automate procedures such as turning on the washing machine. As Christos Georgopoulos, CEO inAccess Networks, Greece, provider of a smart Home Gateway to the project explains: “
If a University of California, Berkeley, physicist’s vision of Jupiter is correct, the giant planet will be in for a major global temperature shift over the next decade as most of its large vortices disappear.
But fans of the Great Red Spot can rest easy. The most famous of Jupiter’s vortices – which are often compared to Earth’s hurricanes – will stay put, largely because of its location near the planet’s equator, says Philip Marcus, a professor at UC Berkeley’s De
Saddle-shaped structure provides the spring to generate powerful punch
Forget boxers Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley. The fastest punches are delivered by a lowly crustacean – the stomatopod, or mantis shrimp.
With the help of a BBC camera crew and the loan of a high-speed video camera, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have recorded the swiftest kick, and perhaps most brutal attack, of any predator. The shrimp flail their club-shaped front leg at peak speeds
HIV-AIDS did not come from oral polio vaccine contaminated with chimpanzee virus, reports a research team led by a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist.
Belief that polio vaccine can spread AIDS has hampered the World Health Organization’s efforts to stamp out polio. In Nigeria, several states recently banned use of the vaccine. Nigeria now has the highest number of polio cases in the world.
Although scientists agree that HIV comes from a chimpanzee simian immunodeficie
As the spring foliage grows, each plant, like an entrepreneur, builds its leaves according to an economic strategy. Some plants live like the proverbial hare, following a “live fast, die young” strategy; their leaves produce and consume energy quickly but soon “burn out” or fall victim to bad weather or hungry herbivores. Other leaves are more tortoiselike, taking a “live slowly and last long” approach. A new study has revealed the global continuum of leaf economics, documenting where 2,548 species g
Penn State acousticians put their new prototype for a compact chiller, based on “green” technology that substitutes sound waves for environment-damaging chemical refrigerants, on first public display in conjunction with Earth Day in New York City.
The roll-out took place at a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in New York City where the chiller was hooked up to a standard ice cream sales freezer cabinet and successfully kept the creamy merchandise in delicious condition. Ben & Jerry’s partn
A simple, inexpensive blood test performed at birth to screen for immune disorders could dramatically increase the chance of survival for babies born with such potentially fatal disorders as severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID).
Physicians at Duke University Medical Center have performed stem cell transplants in 136 infants with SCID in the past 22 years. The survival rate for 38 infants receiving transplants in the first 3.5 months of life is 97 percent, but the rate drops to 69
The Arecibo Observatory telescope, the largest and most sensitive single dish radio telescope in the world, is about to get a good deal more sensitive
Today (Wednesday, April 21) the telescope got a new “eye on the sky” that will turn the huge dish, operated by Cornell University for the National Science Foundation, into the equivalent of a seven-pixel radio camera.
The complex new addition to the Arecibo telescope was hauled 150 meters (492 feet) above the telescope’s
Cornell’s Birdhouse Network Seeks Bird Enthusiasts to Help Monitor the Impact of Invasive Bird Species
In the mid-1800s, little brown birds called House Sparrows were introduced into the United States from Europe to alleviate homesickness for the Old World and because they were believed to control insect pests. Since then, these adaptable birds have made themselves quite comfortable here-spreading their wings across all of North America in vast numbers. Their surging populations have
Freshwater from melting ice sheets set the stage several thousand years ago for production of natural gas along the margins of sedimentary basins.
Now researchers at the University of Michigan and Amherst College are reading chemical signatures of water in those areas to pinpoint places where gas is most likely to be found. Their most recent work is described in a paper published in the May/June issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Natural gas forms when organic ma
Grasses typify the Great Plains, so it’s not surprising that more than 108 species of grasshoppers are at home on the range in the central United States.
However, a grasshopper that doesn’t love grass lives in Kansas too, a recent discovery at Kansas State University’s Konza Prairie Biological Station shows. This newfound hopper prefers trees.
The first specimen was actually collected in September 2001 by a student from Fort Riley Middle School, according to Valerie
In a major study conducted at 20 centers in the United States and Europe, a bioartificial liver developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center reduced mortality significantly among patients suffering from acute liver failure, the dramatic loss of liver function that can cause death in days or even hours. Study results are published in the May issue of Annals of Surgery.
This is the first large-scale, prospective, randomized, multi-center trial examining the effectiveness of any art
These images from ESA’s Mars Express show the western flank of the shield volcano Olympus Mons in the Tharsis region of the western Martian hemisphere.
These images were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) during orbit 143 from an altitude of 266 kilometres. They were taken with a resolution of about 25 metres per pixel and are centred at 222° East and 22° North. North is to the right.
The images show the western flank of Olympus Mons and the escarpment at lower left ris
UCL scientists have made the first ever recordings of the brain’s smallest cells at work sensing the outside world. Their findings could help unlock the secrets of the cerebellum, a key motor control centre in the brain which, when damaged, can lead to movement disorders such as ataxia and loss of balance.
Paul Chadderton and colleagues at UCL’s Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research used a method called patch-clamping to measure the activity of a single granule cell in an intact brain.
Health care professionals make contact with an average of 35 patients daily. If you calculate that the hand wash takes 2 minutes, including the time to find a basin, more than one hour of the work day is used for washing.
Hospital infections cost the world thousands of lives. An important cause is unclean hands. A new device will clean hands completely in a fraction of the time used for a typical hand washing.
The newly developed hand-wash device contains two main components: disinf
A team from CERN and Caltech has set a new Internet2 Land Speed Record by transferring data across nearly 11,000 kilometres at an average rate of 6.25 gigabits per second (Gbps), nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, from Los Angeles, USA, to Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) is an open and ongoing competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks.
The mark of 68,431 terabit-metres per second, which used the same IPv4 protoc
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