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-Keyboard-enhanced personal digital assistant (KPDA) -13.5 oz -jot notes, sketch, wirelessly connect to PC - w/ PCMCIA Type II expand memory , communicate via e-mail/fax - 1800BESHARP
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Biology - One Microbe's Meat
-Arsenic kills wi/ hours. Interferes directly w/ generation of energy in cells. shutting down all life processes. -Any organism that can survive in arsenic is unusual, one that thrives on it is extraordinary. -@MIT, @ 100yr old toxic waste site found isolated MIT-13 (name of new bacteria) wi 4 days bacteria ate arsenic V and replaced it w/ arsenic III. Anarobic, they use arsenic in much the same way we use oxygen to help release energy from food. -Oxygen kills them.
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Divding the Spoils
-Contentious math of division applies to many things, a mathematician and a political scientist came up w/ a procedure that can make divding anything fair and envy-free. -Two players : 1 cut you choose. -3 Players : The cutting 1. Bob cuts cake into 3 equal pieces (that look equal to him) 2. Carol picks one that she thinks is bigger than the other 2 trims that piece just enough to make it equal to the piece she sees as the second largest creating a tie (in her eyes for the largest piece) 3 players : The choosing 1. In reverse order, Ted picks a piece 2. since he didn't pick C', carol must take it. Bob gets A -which hasn't been touched since he cut it. - 4 players : Bob cuts the cake into 5 pieces Carol trims D and E , creating D' and E' in a 3way tie, in her view for the largest piece. Ted decides to trim E' creating E'' and a two way tie. Then Alice picks- followed by Ted, Carol and Bob. The extra piece ensures that everyone gets a chance to pick a piece he or she had decided was largest. The left overs are divided at the end.
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Power Lunch
BRIEF w/ a couple mil microbes and a bit of sugar Peter Bennetto makes electricity to run a watch a car, a city! -Plastic chamber divided by polymer film. -On one side sits a solution ferricyanide (or buffered oxygen) on the other nitrogen bubbles from a broth of organic chemicals. In that broth are trillions of single - celled microbes eating. HISTORY -Luigi Galvani tied electricity to living things. -respiration yields free electrons, which O2 absorb w/ H2O. -Catabolism - carbohydrates disassembled into usable parts. -At atomic level electrons lost/gains = redox (reduction-oxidation) reaction. LIVING BATTERY -In each of the plastic chamber's 2 sides hangs a screen of carbon cloth w/ wires. Bugs in the broth eat, electrons are liberated flow out of the broth up the wires in the carbon cloth through an external circuit, back to the carbon cloths wires in the otherside absorbed by O2 or FeCN. (This is the conventional setup for an electrochemical cell!) -volt-potential of higher w/ living battery. Bug turns larger % of fuel into energy than zinc/lead. Approaches lithium battery (ideal but expensive). -E. coli make 90% of sucrose meal into CO2 + H2O near theoretical max. -Bugs thick skin - double layer of lipids, (where catabolic process is), use mediators (able to piece cell's lipid walls draw off loose electrons. -Find Food -Find bug -Waste = H+ ions - -a room-size reactor w/ mill liters of liquid + 10tons of microorganism = 1 MW of power from 200kg of carbohydrates/hr -Bioreactor waste refinery. Microbial energy cell consume waste products that now pollute. -Since the biofuel cell is regenerative (bugs reproduce) no recharging is necessary. -Unlike oil sugar is cheap and replenishable. -ZZ
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Crisis in the Cosmos
-70jyears ago - discovered universe is expanding -30years ago cosmic microwave background feeble universe-wide glow (main evidence for Big Bang) 1. Big chunk of the universe 1bil lt-yrs across is moving in 1 direction @ 435miles/sec. Even w/ dark matter can't get matter moving that fast! 2. Hubble allowed astronomers to make measurement of the age of the universe 8-12mil years old. But stars in globular star cluster in central bulge are at least 14bil years old. MEASURE AGE OF UNIVERSE -Wendy freedman measure the dist from earth to galaxy M100 -> hope to ultimately deduce how much the universe has expanded. Hubble 1929 rate that galaxies separate is constant. Hubble constant. -Redshift gives velocity of movement away. We know how far, so we can calculate rate. from the expansion rate we can then determine how long ago it was that the universe was a single point. VARIABLE CEPHEIDS judge distances w/ variable cepheids. Varies in luminosity regularly. Period proportional to star's intrinsic brightness. The longer the period the brighter the cepheid. Hubble can pick out cepheid. M100 @ 56millt-yr (w/ variable cepheid measurement) dimming via distance told virgo = 300mil lt yrs away dist / hubble constant (expansion speed/ mega parsec) = 80+-17 -> uniserve = 8- 12 bil years old. ADAPTIVE OPTICS Adaptive optics - computer controlled flexible mirror that compensates for atmospheric blurring BAYESIAN ANALYSIS better than averaging -> statistical method for probable values. STAR'S AGE Can get star's age since know how long it takes to burn H -> He -> Li SLIDING a Billion lt-years worth of matter sliding sideways across the universe. PROJECT WARPFIRE Look for cosmic convergence. To measure age of the universe. @ some large distance motions of galaxies due to gravitational influence would become negligible vs motion of expansion of universe. 7 SAMURAI -100mil lt-years. mid-1980's discovery of the great attractor. All galaxies are moving wi/ little clusters but in concert to a point in the sky. supercluster. Essentially postman and lauer have discovered a giant river in space, they've observed a 100 or so galaxies are like so many boats each w/ its own local motion all being carried downstream in a giant galactic river. DARK MATTER Omega = 1 matter to expand. >1 eventual collapse <1 expand forever LOPSIDED Universe is lopsided? CMD (Comsic backround radiation) uniform. expansion hitter in 1 direction than another?
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