Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Face tube a new challenge for you tube drom face book

Twitter’s not the only one Facebook is battling for control of news and content distribution. With Pages getting quieted down in the feed, Facebook wants to make its home for businesses less like a newspaper that come to you and more like TV channels you turn on. That’s why it’s YouTube that’s getting flattered by the social network with a new design for the Video section of Facebook Pages.

All businesses will soon be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a live comment feed atop their Page, and cobble together playlists of more of their videos. This makes the Videos tabs of Pages look and feel a lot like YouTube Channels. TechCrunch spotted the new design and features on ABC News’ Page, and the company confirms it testing the format with a handful of Pages, and plans to roll it out to them all in the coming weeks.

Facebook’s new design for Pages’ Videos tabs, with Featured Videos and Playlists

Teaching 1.35 billion old dogs new tricks is no easy feat, but Facebook is trying to turn Pages into destinations that business link to and people voluntarily visit. It’s a plot that sees Facebook fighting on all fronts. It’s given local business Pages contact details, reviews, and OpenTable integrations like Yelp. It’s opened communications channels and curation of evergreen content to compete with Google indexed websites. Now it’s poking at YouTube and television.

Current YouTube Channel design with…Featured Videos and Playlists

Pages will get the new design automatically. If they don’t select a featured video or make playlists, their videos will just show up in a chronological list, but with titles, length, Like counts, and view counts visible. Finally, Facebook is making the Videos tab more than just a mass of clips squashed into a photo album the way it does now, which looks pretty terrible.

Facebook’s existing design of Videos tabs, with no Featured Videos, Playlists, or even titles on the thumbnails.

Facebook suddenly got serious about video consumption over the last year, first making videos auto-play, then introducing auto-play video ads. It gave video more room in the News Feed, and users gobbled it up (though it sometimes gobbled up their data plans). From May to July, video views per month increased 50%, and Facebook hit 1 billion views per day by September.

Still, Facebook is embarrassingly behind when it comes to video creation. A year ago I wrotehow its lack of tap-and-hold-to-capture, multi-shot recordings, editing features, filters, or stabilization make Facebook look horribly ancient compared to Vine, Snapchat, and its own Instagram.

Hopefully, this Pages Video redesign and an accompanying one I’d bet comes to user profiles will be the last things it does on how videos are displayed before it catches up on capture. The more organic video content, the more Facebook can slip in video ads and absorb the TV ad spend shifting to digital.

Facebook needs Pages to be more than ever-churning content rivers. Competition for space in the News Feed led to a big organic reach drop for Pages, and their admins are pissed. Now Facebook has to prove Pages and their Likes are still valuable.

Facebook Challenges YouTube Channels With New Features For Pages

A new microscope attachment can allow smartphone users to take acloser look at fluorescently labeled DNA.

Electrical and bioengineer Aydogan Ozcan of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have developed a smartphone attachment that can estimate the lengths of DNA molecules in a sample, according to a study published this month (December 10) in ACS Nano. The unit—which weighs less than 190 grams, costs only $400, and runs on three AAA batteries—can reveal copy-number variations and other genetic features of disease, making it a potential tool for diagnostic field tests,Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) reported.

The researchers demonstrated the smartphone microscope’s utility by analyzing purified solutions of fluorescently labeled DNA molecules. By putting the solution between two coverslips, they effectively stretched the DNA into straight lines; then, a compact blue laser within the fluorescence microscope attachment shone on the DNA, and the smarphone took a series of photos that were sent to a remote server to calculate the strand lengths. Testing the setup on DNA molecules that ranged from 10,000 to 48,000 base pairs, the team found that the smartphone microscope could estimate length within about 1,000 base pairs, similar to the error of conventional bench-top fluorescence microscopes, according to C&EN.

Other groups are also hoping to make smartphone microscopes, to bring the power of microscope-based diagnostics to parts of the world lacking the necessary infrastructure—often the places most in need of strategies to quickly diagnose infectious diseases. Ozcan compares the movement to the personal computer revolution. “If you look at the early computers, they were bulky, they were extremely expensive,” he told The Scientist last year. Now, “[computers] are portable . . . and almost anyone can afford them. The same thing is going on today [with microscopy]. We are miniaturizing our micro- and nano-analysis tools. We’re making them more affordable; we’re making them more powerful.”

Measuring DNA with a Smartphone a Next Generation Technology…

Amazon's holiday Appstore promotion is now live, and includes over $220 worth of apps that are being given away for free. The highlights from the giveaway include apps like Plex and Fleksy Keyboard, and games such as Angry Birds Space, Colin McRae Rally, Worms 3, Cogs and more.

Here's a list of all the content that is available for free until December 26:

Fun & Games

Age of Zombies: Season 2 ($0.99)Angry Birds Space (Ad-Free) ($0.99)Angry Birds Space HD (Fire Edition) ($2.99)Anomaly Warzone Earth HD ($3.99)COGS ($2.99)Colin McRae Rally ($1.99)Construction Simulator 2014 ($2.99)Farming Simulator 14 ($2.99)Five Nights at Freddy's ($2.99)Quell Reflect ($1.99)RPG Soul Historica ($3.99)Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ($2.99)Terraria ($4.99)Tetris ($2.99)To-Fu Fury ($1.99)Worms 3 ($4.99)

Music & Entertainment

djay 2 ($2.99)iReal Pro - Music Book & Play Along ($12.99)Plex ($4.99)TuneIn Radio Pro ($9.99)Ultimate Guitar Tabs and Tools ($7.99)

Photo

InstaPlace ($1.99)Color Splash FX ($0.99)Photo Transfer App ($1.99)PicShop - Photo Editor ($2.99)ShutterFolio, an app for Shutterfly ($2.99)

Health & Fitness

Endomondo Sports Tracker PRO ($4.99)Just 6 Weeks ($1.99)The Muscular System Manual: The Skeletal Muscles of the Human Body ($64.99)

Utilities

Calculator Pro ($0.99)ElectroDroid Pro ($2.71)Fleksy Keyboard ($1.99)InstaWeather PRO ($1.99)Jump Desktop (RDP & VNC) ($9.99)Mirroring360 - AirPlay Receiver ($6.99)My Alarm Clock ($1.99)Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 8th edition ($30.99)Root Explorer ($3.99)Splashtop Remote Desktop ($4.99)Wolfram|Alpha ($2.99)

The following games will be available at a discounted price of $0.99 (down from $6.99):

Wheel of FortuneLeo's FortuneThe Amazing Spider-ManThe Dark Knight RisesAngry Birds Star Wars Premium HDAngry Birds Seasons HD

Amazon is also discounting in-app purchases in titles such as Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds Stella, Episode – Choose Your Story and The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth. To download the content, you're going to need to install Amazon's Appstore, which can be done from here.

Along with the deals on apps, Amazon is offering discounts on TV shows, movies and books in addition to Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon Fire TV andmuch more. Head on over to Amazon's Appstore from the link below to check out all the content on offer.

Up to $220 worth of apps are now free via Amazon's Appstore Christmas bundle

Automatic security update for mac users

BOSTON (Reuters) - Apple Inc has pushed out its first-ever automated security update to Macintosh computers to help defend against newly identified bugs that security researchers have warned could enable hackers to gain remote control of machines.

The company pushed out the software on Monday to fix critical security vulnerabilities in a component of its OS X operating system called the network time protocol, or NTP, according to Apple spokesman Bill Evans.NTP is used for synchronizing clocks on computer systems.

The bugs were made public in security bulletins on Friday by the Department of Homeland Security and the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. Carnegie Mellon identified dozens of technology companies, including Apple, whose products might be vulnerable.

When Apple has released previous security patches, it has done so through its regular software update system, which typically requires user intervention.

The company decided to deliver the NTP bug fixes with its technology for automatically pushing out security updates, which Apple introduced two years ago but had never previously used, because it wanted to protect customers as quickly as possible due to the severity of the vulnerabilities, Evans said.

"The update is seamless," he said. "It doesn’t even require a restart."

Apple does not know of any cases where vulnerable Mac computers were targeted by hackers looking to exploit the bugs, he added.

Apple pushes first ever automated security update to Mac users

Comets, stem cells and cosmic dust are among the year's top stories: 2014. 

By Nature




Keith Vanderlinde/NSF
The BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole may have spied gravitational waves — or dust.
This year may be best remembered for how quickly scientific triumph morphed into disappointment, and even tragedy: breakthroughs in stem-cell research and cosmology were quickly discredited; commercial spaceflight faced major setbacks. Yet landing a probe on a comet, tracing humanity’s origins and a concerted push to understand the brain provided reasons to celebrate.


Space race expands

Asian nations soared into space this year. The Indian Space Research Organisation put a mission into orbit around Mars — the first agency to do so on its first try. Japan launched the Hayabusa-2 probe, its second robotic voyage to bring back samples from an asteroid. And even as China’s lunar rover Yutu (or Jade Rabbit) stopped gathering data on the Moon’s surface, mission controllers took the next step in the country’s lunar exploration programme by sending a test probe around the Moon and back to Earth.
But for commercial spaceflight, it was a bad year. Virgin Galactic’s proposed tourism vehicleSpaceShipTwo disintegrated during a test flight in California and killed one of its pilots. That came just three days after a launch-pad explosion in Virginia destroyed an uncrewed private rocket intended to take supplies to the International Space Station. The accident wiped out a number of research experiments destined for the station, whose managers are trying to step up its scientific output. Problems on the station also delayed the deployment of a flock of tiny Earth-watching satellites, nicknamed Doves, which are part of the general trend of using miniature ‘CubeSats’ to collect space data.
On a bigger scale, the European Space Agency successfully launched the first in its long-awaited series of Sentinel Earth-observing satellites.

Comets call

After a decade-long trip, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in August and settled into orbit. Three months later, Rosetta dropped the Philae probe to 67P’s surface, in the first-ever landing on a comet. Philae relayed science data for 64 hours before losing power in its shadowy, rocky landing site.
Meanwhile, a flotilla of Mars spacecraft — probes from India, the United States and Europe — had an unplanned close brush with comet Siding Spring, which zipped past the red planet in October at a distance of 139,500 kilometres — about one-third of the distance from Earth to the Moon. NASA rovers continued to trundle along on the Martian surface: Curiosity finally reached the mountain that it has been heading towards since landing in 2012, and Opportunity passed 40 kilometres on its odometer, breaking a Soviet lunar rover’s distance record for off-Earth driving.

Human origins decoded

The search for planets beyond the Solar System also got a huge boost. In February, the team behind the now mostly defunct Kepler spacecraft announced that it had confirmed the existence of 715 extrasolar planets, the largest-ever single haul. Kepler data also revealed the first known Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star, a step closer to the long-sought ‘Earth twin’.
Considering that they have been dead for around 30,000 years, Neanderthals had a hell of a year. Their DNA survives in non-African human genomes, thanks to ancient interbreeding, and two teams this year catalogued humans’ Neanderthal heritage. Scientists learnt more about the sexual encounters between Homo neanderthalensis and early humans after analysing the two oldest Homo sapiens genomes on record — from men who lived in southwest Siberia 45,000 years ago and in western Russia more than 36,000 years ago, respectively. The DNA revealed hitherto-unknown human groups and more precise dates for when H. sapiens coupled with Neanderthals, which probably occurred in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of dozens of archaeological sites in Europe, meanwhile, showed that humans and Neanderthals coexisted there for much longer than was once thought — up to several thousand years in some places.
Genomes old and new charted the emergence of agriculture. Contemporary Europeans carry DNA inherited from light-skinned, brown-eyed farmers who migrated from the Middle East beginning 7,000–8,000 years ago, in addition to more-ancient ancestry. The achievements of these early farmers — domestication of crops such as wheat and barley — are also being understood through genome sequencing. In July, a consortium reported a draft copy of the gargantuan wheat genome, which contains 124,000 genes and 17 billion nucleotides. Another group released the genomes of 3,000 rice varieties.
Genomes of the future may soon carry added information. Scientists in California engineeredEscherichia coli bacteria to include two chemical nucleotides in their genome in addition to the four that all other life forms use. The next step is to harness the expanded genetic alphabet to produce new kinds of protein. An effort to synthesize an entire yeast genome produced its first chromosomethis year.


At the one-year mark, there is no telling when the Ebola epidemic in West Africa will end.

Ebola toll rises

The Ebola epidemic that ravaged West Africa this year is the largest since the virus was discovered in 1976 — and it exposed major gaps in the world’s ability to respond to emerging infectious diseases. By mid-December, around 6,800 people had died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The first case in the epidemic is thought to be that of a two-year-old in Guinea, who died in early December 2013. A genetic analysis of viral samples suggests that the epidemic began with a single animal-to-human transmission.
Early on, much media attention was focused on experimental drugs, including the antibody cocktail ZMapp, but infectious-disease experts have emphasized the need to expand access to treatment and to implement basic epidemiological measures such as tracing contacts of infected people.
Fears that the epidemic would expand to other countries have proved unfounded; small numbers of cases in Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States were isolated quickly, and onward spread was limited.
November brought encouraging results from the first safety trials of an experimental Ebola vaccine in healthy human volunteers, with efficacy trials of this and other vaccines set to begin in West Africa early in 2015. Experimental drugs as well as treatments that involve dosing Ebola patients with ‘convalescent’ blood and serum from survivors are also in tests. But major questions about the virus’s biology remain to be answered.

Monkeys: Niu et al., Cell. River: Pete Mcbride/Natl Geographic Soc./Corbis. Pills: Andrew Aitchison/Corbis. Submersible: AIVL/WHOI. Medal: Stefan Zachow. Volcano: Lukas Gawenda/imageBROKER/Corbis

Big dust bust

The BICEP2 experiment flexed its muscles in March, when astronomers reported evidence of gravitational waves from the Big Bang — seeming confirmation of cosmic inflation, the initial exponential expansion of the Universe. But it quickly emerged that the BICEP2 radio telescope, located at the South Pole, may actually have detected a signal distorted by cosmic dust; this theory is supported by results from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, announced in September. The BICEP2 and Planck teams are set to release a joint analysis soon that should provide a definitive answer to the gravitational-wave quandary.
China advanced plans for an electron–positron supercollider to study the Higgs boson, and is considering an even more ambitious goal: a next-generation super proton–proton collider at the same, as-yet-unbuilt facility.
Graphene showed new-found vulnerability, as scientists discovered that the material — the world’s thinnest and strongest — allows protons to pass through it. This suggests new applications in hydrogen fuel cells, or perhaps a membrane that can collect hydrogen from air. (On a lighter note,Nature Materials published a recipe in April for how to make graphene in a kitchen blender — but for various disappointing yet practical reasons, the recipe is not recommended for home use.)

HIV hopes dashed

For HIV researchers, 2014 brought a steady stream of bad news. Last year, physicians said that the ‘Mississippi baby’, a child born with HIV, was cured by aggressive early treatment with antiretroviral drugs. But in July, researchers announced that the child, now four years old, had detectable levels of HIV in her blood. Her story echoed that of two men treated in Boston, Massachusetts, who had been virus-free for several years after bone-marrow transplants; in December 2013, word came that they had relapsed.
In July, the International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, was rocked by the loss of six delegates, including famed clinical virologist Joep Lange of the University of Amsterdam. They died en route to the meeting when their plane — Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 — was shot down over Ukraine.
A few promising results emerged this year, such as the debut of a treatment that makes immune cells resistant to HIV by editing their DNA, and the discovery of two HIV-infected Australian men whose stem-cell treatments for cancer rendered their virus undetectable — so far.

Brain gains

Unprecedented advances in nanotechnology and computing have helped to drive the emergence of ambitious projects to understand the brain. This year, many such efforts reached major turning points — not all of them positive. In July, the European Union’s flagship project to model the brain in a supercomputer faced a mutiny. In a protest letter to the European Commission, more than 150 key scientists charged that the billion-euro Human Brain Project had become autocratic and was veering away from its scientific goals; they threatened to withdraw their cooperation unless the programme’s management was overhauled. The sides are now in mediation, and a revised research plan is expected early in 2015.
More peaceably, the US BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative awarded its first grants this year. Japan joined the global brainwave in October, when it announced a bold ten-year project called Brain/MINDS (Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies) that will map the marmoset brain to aid studies on human neurological and psychiatric diseases.

David McNew/Getty
A dry California waited for an El Niño to bring rain.

Mercury rising

For many climate scientists, the past several months have been a frustrating exercise in waiting for an El Niño — a powerful warming event in the eastern Pacific that was forecasted, but which never arrived. Even so, 2014 is likely to rank as the hottest since modern records began about 140 years ago — just beating 1998, 2005 and 2010, which are in a statistical dead heat.
Scientists still debate the causes of the relatively slow warming trend over the past 15 years. One thought-provoking study published this year attributes the warming pause to periodic changes in ocean circulation that carry heat to the deeper layers of the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Another analysis argues that the slowdown has been driven by warming of the Atlantic Ocean, which then caused the eastern Pacific to cool.
On the policy front, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrapped up its fifth assessment report in November, warning of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems” if greenhouse-gas emissions continue. The United States and China seemed to declare a climate truce, with fresh pledges to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions — raising hopes that developed and developing nations will meet their goal of agreeing on a new international climate treaty at talks in Paris in 2015.

Stem-cell drama

The year started out with a stem-cell boom. In January, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, announced a surprising discovery: an unexpectedly fast and easy way to make pluripotent stem cells by immersing mature cells in acid or applying physical pressure. But the studies, published in Nature, were found to contain manipulated figures and images, and efforts to replicate them failed. The papers were retracted in July. In August, a co-author from the CDB — Yoshiki Sasai, a pioneer of regenerative medicine — took his own life.
In September, the beleaguered CDB got a bit of good news, as centre ophthalmologist Masayo Takahashi led the first clinical trial of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Fresh hope was also given to the world’s first clinical trial of embryonic stem cells to treat spinal-cord injury, which was restarted after an abrupt shutdown in 2011.
In another advance, Douglas Melton of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, worked out how to create insulin-creating β-cells from stem cells — a finding that could lead to new treatments for type 1 diabetes if researchers can keep the immune system from attacking the cells. Meanwhile, ‘right-to-try’ laws have emerged in several US states, allowing the use of unproven stem-cell therapies; in Japan, new clinical guidelines allow stem-cell treatments to enter the clinic without a rigorous efficacy trial — raising bioethical concerns.

Frightening finds

What biohazards live in your refrigerator? On 1 July, US government researchers found six vials of 60-year-old smallpox virus in a storage room at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland.
The discovery drew attention to biosafety lapses at US government laboratories, including revelations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that its researchers had mishandled anthrax spores and accidentally shipped dangerous H5N1 influenza virus to another laboratory. In August, an NIH ‘safety sweep’ produced a 100-year-old box that contained dangerous pathogens and the toxin ricin.
The incidents renewed debate on whether the benefits of some pathogen research are outweighed by its potential dangers. In mid-October, the White House shocked researchers by announcing that it would not fund new ‘gain-of-function’ studies that engineer pathogens — such as influenza virus — to become more deadly or transmissible. It also asked researchers to pause ongoing gain-of-function experiments. The NIH went a step further — it ordered about 20 projects that it funds to halt while two advisory groups examine the risks and benefits of such research over the next year.

365 days: 2014 in science Top Stories

edX Courses And $1,000 From Amazon Web service


aws_logo
If you’ve got more time than money and have a startup idea that you think you have the skills to build, a new partnership between Amazon Web Services and online education portaledX will hook you up with $1,000 in credit for completing one of two courses on entrepreneurship.
Unless you’ve already taken some classes on building a startup, you’re not going to be able to completely BS your way through MITx’s Entrepreneurship 101 or 102 on edX. You actually have to pass the course, so expect to put at least tens of hours into the class. But once you make your way through the coursework, you automatically receive $1,000 in credit to spend on processor time and/or storage in Amazon’s cloud.
You also get a few more bonuses meant for those more comfortable with code than administrating infrastructure, including credit for instructor-led training and web classes on using AWS, free support at Amazon’s premium tier, and “office hours” with Amazon specialists who can help figure out how to architect your app or service for Amazon’s instances.
EdX has a FAQ page on the partnership that also links directly to the classes you can take to be eligible for the free credit. Classes start on January 9, so you can look through the course summaries before committing.

Amazon Web Services Will Give You $1,000 In Credit For Completing These edX Courses

Google Project : TANGO 




Google  Project Tango, an Android-based prototype 5″ phone and developer kit with advanced 3D sensors out of its Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) hardware skunkworks group.
Using its sensors, the phone doesn’t just track motion, but it can actually build a visual map of rooms using 3D scanning. The company believes the combination of these sensors with advanced computer vision techniques will open up new avenues for indoor navigation and immersive gaming, among many other things.
Starting today, Google will allow developers to sign up for access to these phones, but the first run will be limited to a hand-vetted group of 200 developers. Developers will have to provide Google with a clear idea of what they want to build with the device and the company expects to allocate all devices by March 14th, 2014. It will allocate the devices to developers who want to build apps for “indoor navigation/mapping, single/multiplayer games that use physical space, and new algorithms for processing sensor data.”
Developers will be able to write apps in Java, C/C++ and with the help of the Unity Game Engines. The company notes that the APIs for the phone remain a work in progress.
“Project Tango strives to give mobile devices a human-like understanding of space and motion through advanced sensor fusion and computer vision, enabling new and enhanced types of user experiences – including 3D scanning, indoor navigation and immersive gaming,” said Johnny Lee, ATAP’s technical program lead.
bg4
The idea behind Project Tango is to see what kind of applications developers will dream up for this technology. Google hopes that it can unlock new kinds of smart, vision-based applications based on the 3D sensing and vision technology that it has built into the phone. By giving applications an almost human-like understanding of space, developers will be able to create applications that simply weren’t possible before.
The phones are outfitted with a compass and gyros, just like any other phone, but in addition, they feature Kinect-like visual sensors that can scan the room around the phone.
It’s worth noting that the idea here isn’t to create Leap Motion-like, gesture-based interfaces. It’s about how the apps developers can create when they know exactly where a phone is in space.
In its announcement, Google asks: “What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping? What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building?”

Tango’s Sensors

Google is using Movidius’ Myriad 1 vision processor platform for Project Tango. For the longest time, embedding these kinds of sensors into phones was not just prohibitively expensive, but because it tends to be computationally demanding, they would also drain a phone’s batteries rapidly. The latest generation of vision processors, however, uses significantly less power, which was likely a reason why Google was able to go ahead with this project. You can read more about the sensors in our post here.
cameras_tango
The project was headed up by Lee, who previously worked on Microsoft’s Kinect technology before he left for Google in early 2011. Today’s announcement also marks the first public hardware release from Google’s ATAP group, which was one of the few units of Motorola the company decided to keep, even as it is selling off the rest of the company.
Besides Tango, the group is also involved in Project Ara, the modular phone concept that has received quite a bit of attention, as well. Google considers ATAP to be its “moonshottech group” outside of Google[x] and its mission, as far as we can see, is to test advanced mobile technologies. The group is headed by Regina Dugan, a former DARPA director who joined Google in 2012.

Google Project Tango, an Android-based phone and developer kit with advanced 3D sensors


Google Project Ara preview


Google. Well, it's got a new idea for a phone. But not just any kind of phone.
You see Google's looked around at the last six years of smartphone design progress, from practical but dull multi-ported devices to hermetically sealed handsets of pure beauty, and decided to throw it all away.
Instead, it wants your future smartphone to be modular.
Project Ara - Google's working title for the endeavour - was announced in October last year, to a fair bit of scepticism. 
Yet now that the first prototypes have been shown off, along with a lengthy document explaining how it will work, there’s a very good chance that this could be the most significant and popular of all Google’s hardware projects.
And given that this is the company which brought us self-driving cars, a photograph of every single square metre of almost every street on Earth, personal heads-up displays and universal internet access delivered by dirigibles, that's saying something.
SO WHAT IS IT?
Project Ara is a concept for a modular phone handset which Google says it will be able to get on sale in January 2015.
At its heart, an Ara handset is a simple metal frame known as an 'endo' (short for 'endoskeleton'). These come in three sizes – mini, medium and large – which have grids of 10, 18 and 27 square spaces on the back, arranged in groups of 1, 2 or 4.
The front of an endo accepts a removable screen, while modules will be available to fill the slots on the back. So owners can fully customise their phone by adding in a 4G modem, for example, or a 5GHz WiFi module, or removing things that they don't use such as a fingerprint reader.
More experimental phone owners might even look to add pico-projectors or remote controls, while the potential for adding in medical sensors for specialised use hasn't been overlooked either.

WHY MODULAR?

A fortunate accident just before the first Ara Developers Conference made the benefits of an Ara handset clear.
Google Project Ara review
The night before the first functioning prototype was due to go on stage for its debut, someone dropped it and broke the screen. But, as Project Ara head Paul Eremenko joked during the presentation, once the phone is on the market, it'll be a simple matter to replace the screen by swapping out the front module for a new one.
The same is obviously true for any other modules - if you're a big photography fan, and a new camera module is released, you'll be able to upgrade your phone without getting a whole new body; if you're a power user and want extra battery life, just add another one.
The Ara team say that this means less waste, and since parts can be updated rather than thrown away the average lifespan of a phone will increase from two to five years. The downside, of course, is that modular components may end up costing more than a mass produced all-in-one (although Google is aiming to produce a basic handset for a very reasonable US$50) and may not be as robust.

DESIGN

Google Project Ara - Design 2Google Project Ara - Design 3
While there's some concerns over the ability to make lots of highly compatible components – think back to the dark days of PC upgrades and driver conflicts – the method of connecting Ara parts together is very elegant. The modules and endos will literally stick together using 'electropermanent' magnets: powerful magnets that can be turned off and on. 
At this stage, the design calls for all components including the battery to be hot-swappable – ie removable without shutting the phone down. As a result, there's a backup battery inside the endo to keep the phone running no matter what.

Structure and features

Ara frames
FrameSizeRear module slots
Mini45 × 118 × 9.7 mm2 × 5
Medium68 × 141 × 9.7 mm3 × 6
Large91 × 164 × 9.7 mm4 × 7
Ara phones are built using modules inserted into metal endo skeletal frames known as "endos". The frame will be the only component in an Ara phone made by Google.[10] It acts as the switch to the on-device network linking all the modules together. There will be two frame sizes available at first: "mini", a frame about the size of a Nokia 3310 and "medium", about the size of a LG Nexus 5. In the future, a "large" frame about the size of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 will be available. Frames have slots on the front for the display and other modules. On the back are additional slots for modules. Each frame is expected to cost around US$15. The data from the modules can be transferred at up to 10gigabits/sec per connection. The 2×2 modules have two connections and will allow up to 20gigabits/sec. This is to procrastinate the time of obsoletion by as much as possible.
Modules can provide common smartphone features, such as cameras and speakers, but can also provide more specialized features, such as medical devices, receipt printers, laser pointers, pico projectorsnight vision sensors, or game controller buttons. Each slot on the frame will accept any module of the correct size. The front slots are of various heights and take up the whole width of the frame. The rear slots come in standard sizes of 1×1, 1×2 and 2×2. Modules can be hot-swapped without turning the phone off.The frame also includes a small backup battery so the main battery can be hot-swapped. Modules are secured with electropermanent magnets. The enclosures of the modules are 3D-printed, so customers can design their own individual enclosures and replace them as they wish.
Modules will be available both at an official Google store and at third-party stores. Ara phones will only accept official modules by default, but users can change a software setting to enable unofficial modules. This is similar to how Android handles app installations.

1.Pico projectors

Handheld projector (also known as a pocket projectormobile projectorpico projector or mini beamer) is technology that applies the use of an image projector in an handheld device. It is a response to the emergence/development of compact portable devices such as mobile phonespersonal digital assistants, and digital cameras, which have sufficient storage capacity to handle presentation materials but little space to accommodate an attached display screen. Handheld projectors involve miniaturized hardware and software that can project digital images onto any nearby viewing surface.
The Nikon Coolpix S1000pjcompact camera projecting an image using its built-in projector

2.Night vision

Night vision is the ability to see in low light conditions. Whether by biological or technological means, night vision is made possible by a combination of two approaches: sufficient spectral range, and sufficient intensity range. Humans have poor night vision compared to many animals, in part because the human eye lacks a tapetum lucidum

3.Electropermanent magnets

An electropermanent magnet is a type of magnet which consists of both an electromagnet and a dual material permanent magnet, in which the magnetic field produced by the electromagnet is used to change the magnetization of the permanent magnet. The permanent magnet consists of magnetically hard and soft materials, of which only the soft material can have its magnetization changed. When the magnetically soft and hard materials have opposite magnetizations the magnet has no net field, and when they are aligned the magnet displays magnetic behaviour.
They allow creating controllable permanent magnets where the magnetic effect can be maintained without requiring a continuous supply of electrical energy. For these reasons, electropermanent magnets are essential components of the research studies aiming to build programmable magnets that can give rise to self-building structures.
Google plans to use electropermanent magnets in their upcoming modular phone "Project Ara". These magnets will be used to hold the modules into the exoskeleton without requiring a permanent power source.

Google Modular Phone - Project Ara A preview

Soursop; Is It A reall Killer Of Cancer‎ Cells ?

Soursop is the fruit of Annona muricata, a broadleaf, flowering, evergreen tree native to MexicoCubaCentral America, theCaribbean, and northern South America, primarily ColombiaBrazilPeruEcuadorVenezuela, and Puerto Rico. Soursop is also produced in some parts of Africa, especially in Eastern NigeriaSoutheast Asia and the Pacific. It is in the same genus as the chirimoya and the same family as the pawpaw.

The flavor has been described as a combination of strawberry and pineapple, with sour citrus flavour notes contrasting with an underlying creamy flavor reminiscent of coconut or banana.

The photo promotion listed below say that the sour soup is 10000 times power full killer of cancer cells than chemo therapy ? Is it really So?




The soursop is adapted to areas of high humidity and relatively warm winters; temperatures below 5 °C (41 °F) will cause damage to leaves and small branches, and temperatures below 3 °C (37 °F) can be fatal. The fruit becomes dry and is no longer good for concentrate.


In Indonesiadodol sirsak, a sweetmeat, is made by boiling soursop pulp in water and adding sugar until the mixture hardens. Soursop is also a common ingredient for making fresh fruit juices that are sold by street food vendors. In the Philippines, it is calledguyabano, derived from the Spanish guanabana, and is eaten ripe, or used to make juices, smoothies, or ice cream. Sometimes, they use the leaf in tenderizing meat. In Vietnam, this fruit is called mãng cầu Xiêm in the south, or mãng cầu in the north, and is used to make smoothies, or eaten as is. In Cambodia, this fruit is called tearb barung, literally "western custard-apple fruit." In Malaysia, it is known in Malay as durian belanda and in East Malaysia, specifically among the Dusun people of Sabah, it is locally known as lampun. Popularly, it is eaten raw when it ripens, or used as one of the ingredients in Ais Kacang or Ais Batu Campur. Usually the fruits are taken from the tree when they mature and left to ripen in a dark corner, whereby they will be eaten when they are fully ripe. It has a white flower with a very pleasing scent, especially in the morning. While for people in Brunei Darussalam this fruit is popularly known as "Durian Salat", widely available and easily planted. It was most likely brought from Mexico to the Philippines by way of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade.

Properties Of Sour Soup

Annonacin is a neurotoxin found in soursop seeds
The fruit contains significant amounts of vitamin Cvitamin B1 and vitamin B2.
Laboratory and field research suggests that soursop-derived substances may have potential for various future applications, since they have shown antileishmanial and cytotoxicantinociceptiveanti-inflammatory,  anti-diabetic  and anticancer effects in laboratory experiments. Large-scale studies in humans have not been done.

Neurotoxicity :annonacin

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center cautions, "alkaloids extracted from graviola may cause neuronal dysfunction and degeneration leading to symptoms of Parkinson's disease". The compound annonacin, which is contained in the seeds of soursop, is a neurotoxin associated with neurodegenerative disease, and research has suggested a connection between consumption of soursop and atypical forms of Parkinson's disease due to high concentrations of annonacin.
In 2010 the French food safety agency (Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des aliments) concluded that, based on the available research findings, "it is not possible to confirm that the observed cases of atypical Parkinson syndrome  are linked to the consumption of Annona muricata," calling for further study on potential risks to human health.

Alternative cancer treatment Drug or Chemo therapy; Is It True ?

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center lists cancer treatment as one of the "purported uses" of soursop.] According to Cancer Research UK, "Many sites on the internet advertise and promote graviola capsules as a cancer cure, but none of them are supported by any reputable scientific cancer organisations" and "there is no evidence to show that graviola works as a cure for cancer" and consequently they do not support its use as a treatment for cancer.
In 2008 a court case relating to the sale in the UK of Triamazon, a soursop product, resulted in the criminal conviction of a man under the terms of the UK Cancer Act for offering to treat people for cancer. A spokesman for the council that instigated the action stated, "it is as important now as it ever was that people are protected from those peddling unproven products with spurious claims as to their effects."
The Federal Trade Commission in the United States determined that there was "no credible scientific evidence" that the extract of soursop sold by Bioque Technologies "can prevent, cure, or treat cancer of any kind."
Cancer Research UK also released a statement about the alleged cancer "cure" that included these sentences: "Overall, there is no evidence to show that graviola works as a cure for cancer. In laboratory studies, graviola extracts can kill some types of liver and breast cancer cells that are resistant to particular chemotherapy drugs. But there haven’t been any large scale studies in humans. So we don't know yet whether it can work as a cancer treatment or not. Many sites on the internet advertise and promote graviola capsules as a cancer cure, but none of them are supported by any reputable scientific cancer organisations. We do not support the use of graviola to treat cancer."

The Final Note

While some side effects may exist, eating the fruit and taking supplements is not considered to be unsafe if you are within the limits of the recommended dosages. We are not doctors so please remember to consult a physician if you decide to take Graviola supplements. Although research is lacking and no conclusions have yet to be drawn, you may want to avoid the supplement if you have Parkinson’s disease or another disorder that affects your movements. The same goes if you are pregnant or nursing. While doctors and scientists have not issued a standard dose for Graviola.

Soursop : Is it an alternate to Cancer Drug or Chemo therapy ?

 
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