In 1976 forty undergraduate men at Rutgers University in New Jersey set aside their modesty for science. The men took part
in a study designed to shed light on the paradox observed by Shakespeare that alcohol “provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” Previous researeh had shown that by most physical measures alcohol is [...]
We now know that alcohol is a much more interesting drug than the simple depressant it is commonly thought to be. It
produces complicated, often paradoxical effects in the brain that mix and overlap with one another to create an equally
complex intoxication. Drinking alcohol can push one’s mental state in practically any direction, from a stimulated, [...]
We’ve now seen that ethanol is molecular garbage made by yeasts when they burn glucose under the duress of suffocation. As remote as this situation is from daily life, there is, in fact, an interesting connection between yeast and humans. It turns out that we have almost exactly the same cellular machinery in our bodies [...]
In the mid-1980s, citizens of the Soviet Union were faced with a nationwide shortage of sugar so serious that this basic foodstuff was rationed like gasoline. The cause of the shortage lay not in the usual culprits of inefficient state-run production, inadequate imports, or dilapidated distribution systems. No, it was zelyony zmei—the green dragon. That [...]
So far I have discussed mobile robots, robots thai can move about under their own control. Another area of robotics research is the ope mi ion of robot arms, ‘these robots arc usually designed to operate from some kind of base (il can move) and pick something up and move it to another location. In [...]
In ihe first experiment in this book. I gave you some idea how difficult il is to create a robot based on the human form. I mentioned that there would he problems getting the robot to walk, but didn’t go into del ail because 1 didn’t know of a way to get the robot to [...]
In the 19541s, scientists determined that the most likely body shape an alien from space would have would be a biped, the same as humans. A biped consists of (wo arms and two legs arranged symmetrically around a vertical line.The reasoning behind ihis conclusion was largely based on the scientists* familiarity with iheir own bodies: [...]
A true robot is a machine thai can he ”taught,*” programmed like a computer, to make different kinds of motions and perform a variety of jobs. … Machines that do one job only and cannot be “retrained” are not true robots, either.
The New Book of Knowledge, /IKKRobotics Λ field of engineering concerned with [...]
It’s nice to wallow in the past from time ^^fe^^fe 10 time- lt’s a practice I find myself indulging in increasingly as the years pass and I have more to be nostalgic about. And for the most part a nice, cosy rose-tinted glow accompanies my visions of the past. That” s what’s supposed to happen, [...]
It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft IaIa was considered a dirty word. Dare to ^i^F^i^F defend the company and the
outpouring of scorn was enough to leave you wondering whose puppy you’d just shot.
To be fair, the software giant hadn’t done itself many favours. Its response to antitrust investigations stopped marginally short of certifiable paranoia, [...]
Former Sun boss Scott McNealy may once have advised that we have “zero privacy - get over it”, but it seems the British public isn’t ready to surrender its personal information that easily. In the past couple of months alone, a series of companies that were attempting to profit from people’s personal data have become [...]
Η After years of outright denials, Google lobbed a brick through Microsoft’s Windows with the announcement of its own desktop OS. Dubbed Chrome - like its web browser - the lightweight OS will sit on top of a Linux kernel and will focus on web, rather than client-side, applications. Chrome OS will run on both [...]
Microsoft has caved in to EU pressure and confirmed it will offer a selection of browsers with Windows 7. Users will be greeted with a “ballot screen” at installation offering Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera as alternatives to Internet Explorer 8. The company says it is waiting for EU approval before implementing the scheme.
The move [...]
Ofcom has officially crowned Virgin Media as Britain’s fastest ISP - but despite months of laborious research, it has failed to workout who is Britain’s fastest ADSL provider.The telecoms regulator teamed up with SamKnows Broadband to put specially adapted routers into more than 1,600 homes, carrying out 60 million performance tests over a six-month period.
Virgin [...]
There’sa lotoftalkatthe moment IaIa about seeing an end to “Moore’s Law”, and having ritually humiliated myself several times before by predicting such an end this stirs up some memories. In Byte back in 1997,1 suggested that VLSI feature sizes (that is, the size of chip transistors) might plateau at around 0.1 micron. That proved roughly [...]
Now, I’m not one to blow my own IaIa trumpet, but I predicted last year that ^iW^iW with Chrome, Google’s long-term play
was probably more about the operating system than the browser market (see issue 169, p9). I wouldn’t claim that makes me any sort of a gifted prophet, since the signs were pretty obvious. [...]
When I got to the gym one day, I noticed that this guy I had been crushing on for forever was there. Since I was captain of the cross-country team at the time, I got on the treadmill and decided to show off. I set the machine to a sprint and was running pretty quickly [...]
id you know that there’s actual scientific proof that guys are total suckers for sultry, smoky eyes? A study revealed that men are most drawn to a woman when her eyes are shaded darker than the rest of her face. To create the sexiest eye effect imaginable, reach for a range of soft, shimmery charcoal [...]
Quite often, digital cameras are offered with a digital zoom to boost their zoom capability to 2x, 4x, 6x, or even more. The digital zoom is just a marketing ploy to persuade the uninitiated camera buyers to pick the highest digital magnification camera over other competing digital camera
models. There is absolutely no advantage to using [...]
The flash built into your SLR is generally completely automatic. It usually takes advantage of through-the-lens (TTL) metering for good exposure accuracy. Through-the-lens metering means that the camera reads the exposure through the lens and then communicates the required flash exposure to the flash unit. An external, dedicated flash unit is generally more powerful than [...]
The 31st Used Camera Show 2009 took place for six days earlier this year at the Exhibition Floor of the Matsuya department store, Ginza, Tokyo. Exhibitors were drawn from 19 large Tokyo used camera shops, members of the Imported Camera Society (ICS), which sponsors the show. This year total gross sales were about $1.5 million, [...]
