legomylibrum

But Google changed their TOS to forbid the app's actions a little over two weeks after the apps' changes were released. So you could say it's more like, "Google changes terms of service in order to remove Amazon app from their store".

While 454 may not have much traction anymore, Ion Torrent is coming out with a new series of devices (the Proton iirc?) and they're competing pretty well with Illumina in the cheap sequencing market. It's something, anyways.

I was thinking of trying to make a smartphone-powered ultrasound awhile back and looked into it, and these devices don't look too complicated. You put a piezo in a little box, and cycle it to send/receive vibration in the form of sound. The software to decode the signal into an image is the hard part. But if it's Rothberg behind this...well, I'll take his word for it being a hard thing to make low-cost.

Well, you know what they say; a gun in the first act goes off in the second. Given these tools, the agencies equipped with them are not going to sit around not using them.

I cannot believe that things like this still happen in today's world, although I'd be surprised if it wasn't a little bit embellished. This piece reminds me a little bit of the documentary about the Russian mafia, Thieves By Law (I'm pretty sure it's on youtube, go watch it). Aging master criminals who want their stories to be told to a world that they know is eager to hear about them. How fortunate that we have such an accessible medium to distribute their tales.

That's also in diet and non-carbonated sugary sodas; it's used as a preservative in just about everything.

I was talking about the top-tier Division 1 schools, mostly because I can't see anybody having a problem with intramural or Division 3 sports. Scholarships aren't awarded, they don't have huge budgets, their coaches generally aren't grossly overpaid, and they're a good way for students to get exercise, meet people, and relax.

I'm no fan of how enormous college sports have become, but fwiw they are enormous sources of income and despite the extravagant stadiums and suchlike, they often pay for valuable research, courses, and amenities.

What's troubling about them is the exploitation of the student athletes; the ones that make money give a lot back to the university as a whole.

Oh, it gets better.

"The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened – even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order – to me does not make any sense."

This comes up every now and then. If people want to randomly zap their brains that's their prerogative, but let's call a spade a spade. I sincerely doubt that anybody will ever improve their brain by shocking their scalp.

The underlying idea is sound; deep brain stimulation, which this is sort of analogous to, is a surprising if short-lived panacea to a wide range of conditions. Applied randomly it's as likely to exacerbate a negative effect as it is to treat one, but it is generally performed by a trained neural surgeon while the patient reports on how well it's working, and it doesn't last too long anyways.

TDCS is like deep brain stimulation in that it applies a current to your brain, but the effect borders on homeopathic. It's imprecise, the charge is (happily) too weak to bring about any real change in the brain from the scalp, and I doubt it's anything more than a placebo, best case.

I'm sorry, but since when is itar-tass a remotely reliable source?

I don't think you would use TCP for an MMORPG; UDP is more common in games because a dropped frame here and there doesn't matter to most games, and it's worth the lower overhead.

I don't know if Ebola qualifies, but there are 'orphan drug' laws in many places that help pay for the development of medicine to treat rare diseases or conditions.

>In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant in terms of what was actually achieved.

You're absolutely right; this study is neither novel nor groundbreaking.

On the sending side, forget 90%, success rates of 99% are easy to achieve with some types of BCI systems such as SSVEP or P300. As for the information detected, you might have heard of the P300 speller[1] which demonstrated an easy way to accurately spell out words using a BCI headset.

On the receiving side we see why they opted for binary communication. The 'telepathy' was nothing more than a flash of light being visible for a value of '1', achieved by blasting a region of the brain associated with vision with magnetic fields about as strong as an MRI. That sounds cool, but it is a technique that has been in use for over a decade[2].

So tl;dr, what these researchers have achieved is essentially stringing together two or three decades-old technologies in a not terribly original way.

[1]: http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Applications/Brain-Computer-... [2]: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.long

Al-Jazeera has some good ones too, and they often make specials that really dig into an issue and provide both sides of the issue as well as the context in which the whole thing is happening. I've been really impressed with their coverage in general.

But, and this is pretty annoying, a lot of the documentaries and stories that they play are not new and used to be available, along with a live stream of the channel, on their website. There's nothing wrong with recycling the content; that stuff takes awhile to make and demanding new editions every day is a big part of what made the 24-hour news cycle into what it is today. But now that I've cut the cord I do miss their coverage.

Anyways, AJ is a solid news channel so I wouldn't be too too upset about the acquisition.

You can always opt out. You'll get a pat-down instead and they'll make you wait 5-10 minutes, but I always do that unless I'm running very late. If enough people do, they usually get fed up and open the metal detectors.