PATNA: Thousands of Hindus rushed Friday to a temple in Patna after claims by devotees that they had seen the trident of an idol of Shiva shaking and revolving, temple officials said.
The devotees were offering prayers at the temple, in Patna, in a bid to propitiate the god amid fears that doomsday is imminent, a priest said.
By Tina Hesman
Of the Post-Dispatch
Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.
Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he’s really just “the man behind the curtain,” he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially “Thomas Edison in a box,” said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler’s chief cheerleaders.
“His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,” the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. “His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!”
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone announced the 1GB data capacity stamp-sized plastic media, “Info-MICA” o?n the 12th. They used both trial media and drive during the demonstration. While the media is intended for replaceable seminconductor ROM, it can also clearly be used for cellular phones, portable audio/video players, and music/video as a storage medium. They are aiming for putting an actual product o?n the market during 2005.
Info-MICA (Information-Multilayered Imprinted CArd) uses “thin film hologram” to create a large volume, recordable, plastic resin media.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP)—Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.
The development could help open the way for cleaner-burning technology at home and on the road.
WASHINGTON—Researchers from South Korea say they have cloned human embryos and extracted from them stem cells in a development that experts hope could spark a medical revolution.
The experiment, which is reported in Friday’s edition of the respected American magazine Science, is viewed as a major advance towards growing patients’ own replacement tissue to treat diseases.
Previous attempts to clone a human embryo to produce stem cells are believed to have failed—despite claims to the contrary—and the report is likely to revive controversy around the world over the technique.
Critics have attacked such experiments as unethical because of the destruction of the embryos, however tiny. The U.S. government is trying to outlaw all cloning both in America and around the world.
In the experiment, scientists from Seoul National University said they collected 242 human eggs and succeeded in creating the 30 blastocrysts—early-stage embryos containing about 100 cells.
232: Number of American combat deaths in Iraq between May 2003
and January 2004
501:
Number of American servicemen to die in Iraq from the beginning of the war—so far
0: Number of American combat deaths in Germany following the Nazi surrender to Allies in May 1945
0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to be photographed
0: Number of funerals or memorials President George Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq
100: Number of fundraisers attended by George Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003
13: Number of meetings between George Bush and Tony Blair since he became president
10 million: Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, setting an all-time record for simultaneous protest
2: Number of nations that President George Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into the White House
9.2: Average number of US soldiers wounded in Iraq each day since the invasion began
1.6: Average number of American soldiers killed in Iraq per day since hostilities began
16,000: Total number of Iraqis that have been killed since the start of war
10,000: Approximate number of Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the conflict
$100 billion: Estimated cost of the war in Iraq to American citizens by the end of 2003
A stash of mind-altering drugs and a near-death experience… just what a physicist needs to uncover the true nature of the universe, says Stephen Battersby
“FOR twelve hours I moved in and out of dimensions of both space and time. The incomprehensible became comprehensible. Realities within realities blossomed and faded. From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, unbounded and unfettered mind flashed across landscapes of incredible depth and beauty…time ceased, there was no past or future.”
Well, a little brown mushroom can certainly change your outlook on life. The above is an anonymous account, posted on a website earlier this year, of the effects of consuming a hallucinogenic fungus called a psilocybe. The fungus induces what most people would consider to be an altered state of consciousness, an experience of a crazy, mixed-up universe.
SAN DIEGO, California (AP)—A tiny corkscrew that spears blood clots lodged deep within the brain appears to be a promising new tool for stopping strokes.
A doctor who tested the approach said Thursday that in some cases, it immediately reversed paralysis and loss of speech when used in the first hours of a stroke.
Nearly 90 percent of all strokes result from clots that block the brain’s arteries, cutting off circulation and starving brain cells. The goal of the new device is to extract these clots before they do permanent harm.
DENVER—A woman was shaken but unhurt after a wild, 75-mile ride at speeds over 100 mph that began when her brakes failed and her car accelerated out of control.
Police finally stopped the car on Interstate 70 in west Denver by getting a cruiser in front of it, slowing gently till their bumpers touched, then bringing both vehicles to a stop.
‘It had a mind of its own,’ 20-year-old Angel Eck said Sunday. The car ‘kept accelerating, and my foot wasn’t even down on the gas.’
Eck was westbound on I-70 in Limon Friday night when her 1997 Pontiac Sunfire began racing out of control. Nothing she tried would slow the car down.
She flipped on her hazard lights and dodged traffic while trying her cell phone, but she was out of her service area.
A new portable system for analyzing the walking patterns of people with Parkinson’s disease has been developed by researchers in the US and Japan. The system, described in the Institute of Physics publication Journal of Neural Engineering, will help doctors monitor the progress of the disease in patients and so tailor their therapy and drug regime more accurately than previously possible.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder of the central nervous system. Its symptoms include: uncontrollable trembling, difficulty walking, and postural problems that often lead to falls. These symptoms are usually controlled with dopamine agonist drugs. However, these can have a number of side-effects, such as jerking movements. It is also known that the body builds up a tolerance to the drug.
LONDON (Reuters)—A London teenager was sentenced on Monday to 200 hours of community service for hacking into the computer system of a U.S. physics research laboratory to store his personal collection of music and film files.
Joseph James McElroy, 18, of Woodford Green, told Southwark Crown Court in London that he hacked into 17 computer systems at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago over a two-week period in June 2002 to store and exchange hundreds of gigabytes worth of computer files with his friends.
(AP)—Russian and American scientists say they have created two new ‘superheavy’ elements that will reside at the extreme end of chemistry’s periodic table of elements.
Just a few atoms of the newly discovered elements, 113 and 115, existed for split seconds after being created in a particle accelerator. They represent unusual forms of matter with properties that go well beyond those of the 92 elements that occur naturally on Earth.
The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched a new campaign against DJs in an attempt to control copyright infringement.
They have already confiscated $100,000?s worth of mix CDs from independent record stores across the US.
DJ mix CDs, sold in almost every independent record store are on the whole unlicensed and technically illegal to distribute. However, DJs and producers alike often rely upon these illegal mixes in order to gain credibility, and to promote themselves to the general public.
The practice is in fact approved of by most producers who see it as fundamental to the survival of the dance scene – even if it is their tracks that are being copied and played without permission.
This latest attack by the RIAA is therefore hypocritical ? they claim that their pursuit of copyright infringement is primarily in the interest of the artist, yet most dance producers actually approve of and rely upon this illegal distribution.