This is a video of some guy pronouncing the longest word in the world, which is the chemical name for titan (aka connectin), a human protein, and the largest known protein. It takes brobro 3-hours and 33 minutes to pronounce the whole thing, and it looks like he nods off several times in the process.
via Geekologie

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… Read More → "The world’s longest word takes three-and-a-half hours to pronounce"

Hurricane Sandy brought 13-foot storm surge into the New York City’s subway tunnels.

Right now, there’s a bit of Martian soil sitting in the Curiosity rover’s sample analysis tool that some Earthlings are getting pretty excited about. If the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory find what they think they’ve found, it’ll be “one for the history books,” according to the team.

NPR’s Joe Palca caught up with John Grotzinger, principal investigator for … Read More → "Mars Curiosity team could share ‘one for the history books’ soon"

Using the world’s fastest supercomputer and a new scalable, ultra-low power computer architecture, IBM has simulated 530 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses – matching the numbers of the human brain – in an important step toward creating a true artificial brain.

Cognitive computing

The human brain, arguably the most complex object in the known universe, is a truly remarkable power-saver: it can simultaneously gather thousands of sensory inputs, interpret them in real time as a whole and react appropriately, abstracting, learning, planning and inventing, all on a strict power budget … Read More → "IBM supercomputer used to simulate a typical human brain"

Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are funding it. Power companies are interested in it. Young bright minds are working on it. So what is it? That would be the next-generation of a technology called compressed air energy storage, which sucks up air, compresses it on demand, and stores it in tanks or underground caverns. When power is needed, the air is released.

The technology might sound like some boring power infrastructure system — and it is. Basically. But air energy storage technology could also enable grid storage cheaply enough to help the solve … Read More → "Meet the next generation of air energy storage players"

The world’s oldest working digital computer, often referred to as “The Witch”, has been given a new lease of life. A team of computer scientists has restored it to its former glory—and now it’s on display for all to see.

The computer was originally designed and developed all the way back in 1949 at the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Weighing in … Read More → "The world’s oldest working computer has been resurrected"

A reluctance to apply strict examination requirements to software opened up the floodgates to questionable software patents in the late 1990s. The requirements of the U.S. patent code that police scope and notice were not considered significant hurdles in software. Perhaps most significantly, the Section 112 requirements of written description and definiteness were not applied vigorously to software.

But borrowing from the … Read More → "Let’s tame software patent claims: lessons from bioinformatics"

The smallest gesture can hide a world of meaning. A particular flick of a baton and a beseeching gesture can transform the key moment of a concert from mundane to ethereal. Alas, computers are seriously handicapped in understanding human gestural language, both in software and hardware. In particular, finding a method for describing gestures presented to a computer as input data for further processing has proven a difficult problem. In response, Microchip Technologies has developed … Read More → "World’s first e-field-based 3D gesture-recognition chip developed"

Typically when NASA discovers a distant planet, as close as we get to seeing that planet is an artist’s rendering. NASA has been able to snap a rare direct photo of a planet that has been dubbed a Super-Jupiter. The planet is 13 times more massive than Jupiter, which is the largest planet in our own solar  … Read More → "NASA snaps rare direct photo of a Super-Jupiter planet Kappa Andromedae b"

A study by the OECD (pdf) concluded that international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods could have accounted for up to USD 250 billion in 2007. The OECD estimates that the share of counterfeit and pirated goods in world trade is close to 2%. And these figures do not even include domestically produced and consumed products, or non-tangible pirated digital products. Industry segments for which counterfeits are a significant problem include pharmaceuticals, airplane parts, auto parts, and designer clothing.Recent developments in nanotechnology have enabled significant improvement in the field of anti-counterfeiting measures. One company for instance is working … Read More → "Anti-counterfeiting with DNA nanotechnology"