These protein sequences known as transcription factors vary from person to person and may influence our appearance as well as our disposition towards certain diseases.

"However, the bulk of the differences among individuals are not found in the genes themselves, but in regions we know relatively little about."

"Now we see that these differences profoundly impact protein binding and gene expression."

Genes vary by only about 0.025 per cent across all humans.

Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how these tiny differences affect our development.

Yet non-coding regions of the genome -- which account for approximately 98 per cent of our DNA -- vary in their sequence by 1 to 4 per cent.

Professor Snyder and his colleagues have found that unique changes among individuals in the sequence of DNA affect the ability of transcription factors to bind to the regions that control gene expression.

As a result, the subsequent expression of nearby genes can vary significantly.

"People have done a lot of work over the years to characterise differences in gene expression among individuals," said Professor Snyder.

"We're the first to look at differences in transcription-factor binding from person to person."

"These binding regions or chunks vary among individuals and they have a profound impact on gene expression."

Two individual studies were conducted that compared the binding patterns of transcription factors in chimpanzees and yeast respectively.

"We conducted the two studies in parallel and found the same thing," Professor Snyder said.

"Many of the binding sites differed."

"When we mapped the areas of difference, we found that they were associated with key regulators of variation in the population."

"Together these two studies tell us a lot about the so-called regulatory code that controls variation among individuals."

By reducing the cost of manuacture, it could pave the way for RFID tags to supplant bar codes.

They have also been incorporated into the new biometric passports introduced recently by the UK government.

But these devices are based on silicon and are too expensive for use in everyday applications such as tagging items in a supermarket.

Now researchers at Rice University in the US have colloborated with colleagues at Sunchon National University in Korea to create RFID tags that can be printed onto a roll of plastic.

Printable RFID tags are practical because they're passive in nature -- they power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain.

"If there's no power source, there's no lifetime limit," said Professor James Tour of Rice University.

"When they receive the RF signal, they emit."

Before the tags are ready of use outside the lab, researchers must find a way to reduce the size of the tags by two-thirds to match existing bar codes.

There are also issues around the range of the tags.

"Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it's getting farther all the time," Professor Tour said.

"The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a metre."

"But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store -- what's on the shelves, their dates, everything."

"At 300 meters, you're set -- you have real-time information on every item in a warehouse."

"If something falls behind a shelf, you know about it."

"If a product is about to expire, you know to move it to the front -- or to the bargain bin."

But researchers have analysed the web and discovered that the practice is alive and well today.

"This grammar has continued with 'Mr and Mrs', 'his and hers' and the names of romantic couples like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."

"While the original sexist ideas behind this grammar are no longer accepted, we wanted to investigate whether the sexist habit of male names coming before female names still holds true and the psychological reasons why this might be."

Using 10 popular British male and female names and another 10 popular American boys and girls names, the team searched the web using each of the possible male-female name pairs as search terms.

For British name pairs, the male-first name pairings accounted for 79 per cent of the mentions -- male-first mentions were 70 per cent for the Americans.

"These results were found to be statistically significant, and support the idea that gender stereotypes still affect the written language," Dr Hegarty said.

"It has been argued that the male-first effect isn't down to sexism but that it is due to phonological attributes of male names, or because male names come more readily to mind as they are popular and familiar."

"We therefore carried out further studies to investigate whether the male-first finding was a gender stereotyping effect."

A sample group of 121 people were asked to imagine a heterosexual couple who were either 'quite traditional and who conform strictly to gender scripts about how the two genders should behave' or 'non-traditional who deviate radically'.

They were then asked to write down five possible name-combinations for this hypothetical couple.

Participants named the imagined 'traditional couples' men-first more often -- but this effect was not seen in the naming of 'non-traditional' couples.

In a third study, 86 people were asked to write down names of an imagined lesbian or gay couple.

They were then asked to assign attributes such as annual earnings, interest in fashion, interest in sport and physical attributes to each individual.

Participants assigned significantly more of the masculine attributes and fewer of the feminine attributes to the person they named first.

"The results of our studies suggest that people tend to put men, or male qualities, before women," said Dr Hegarty.

"As this is a remnant of the sexist grammar of the 16th century, it would seem that psychologically, we are still sexist in writing."

But Dr Hegarty cautions that the effect does not always apply when dealing with couples that we know well:

"When people address greeting cards to couples, for example, they often put the person that they know best first, whether female or male."

While the wine is usually of high quality, a new study shows that slapping an eco-label on the bottle turns off consumers and drives down prices.

"Well, this is the American version."

"You'd expect anything with an eco-label to command a higher price, but that's just not the case with California wine."

While the general public miss out on good quality wine, savvy oenophiles have an opportunity to save money.

"Wine made with organic grapes -- especially if it has an eco-label -- is a really good deal," said study co-author Laura E. Grant, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental science and management at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

"For the price of conventional wine, you get a significantly better quality wine."

"Wine made with organically grown grapes is higher quality," Professor Delmas added.

"Growers have to devote more time and attention and take better care of organically certified vines than conventional vines, and our results show that these efforts are apparent in the product."

The study found that the 'made from organically grown grapes' label not only negated the price premium for using certified grapes but actually drove prices 7 per cent below those for conventionally produced wines.

Only one-third of vintners using organically certified grapes actually advertised the fact on wine labels.

"Producers of two-thirds of these wines must suspect that consumers, for whatever reason, wouldn't appreciate the use of organically grown grapes," said Professor Delmas.

"Otherwise, why would they refrain from drawing attention to this benefit on their labels?"

One theory is that consumers believe that wines made with organic grapes lack preservatives -- a result of confusion with 'organic wines' that do not contain sulphites.

But certified wines made with organic grapes are allowed to use sulphites as a preservative.

"Organic wine earned its bad reputation in the '70s and '80s," Grant said.

"Considered 'hippie wine,' it tended to turn to vinegar more quickly than non-organic wine. This negative association still lingers."

Today's organic wines are still susceptible to taint as a result of the lack of added preservatives.

"Without added sulphites, the wine turns into vinegar after a while, and you're likely to lose out on the opportunity for your wine to mature into something considerably richer than when purchased, which is the promise of fine wine," Professor Delmas said.

"So while no-sulphites-added is fine for white wines such as Chardonnay that you usually drink 'young,' it is not good for a red wine like a Cabernet Sauvignon that you want to keep to drink in a year or two."

Surprisingly, green consumers are more likely to be motivated by personal benefit than a desire to protect the environment.

"Consumers buy organically grown food because they think it is going to improve their health," said Professor Delmas.

"That motivation doesn't go a long way with wine."

"If consumers want to drink something healthy, they'll reach for wheat grass, not an alcoholic beverage."

Professor Delmas hopes that consumers start to get the message that wine produced with organic grapes tastes better.

"Vintners and regulators really need to communicate better what wine with organically grown grapes means and the potential impact on quality," she said.

"I don't think they've done that, and I think it's too bad."

"It's a real missed opportunity."

An onboard detector called the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) captured light from the immense cloud of dust and gas to determine the chemical makeup of the molecules within.

Among the molecules identified were those of water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulphur oxide, sulphur dioxide and their isotope analogues.

Researchers anticipate that new organic molecules will also be identified in the future.

"This HIFI spectrum, and the many more to come, will provide a virtual treasure trove of information regarding the overall chemical inventory and on how organics form in a region of active star formation," said Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan and principal investigator of the HEXOS Key Programme on Herschel.

"It harbours the promise of a deep understanding of the chemistry of space once we have the full spectral surveys available."

HIFI was conceived to open new wavelength ranges for high resolution mapping -- especially when inaccessible to ground-based telescopes.

"It is astonishing to see how well HIFI works," said Frank Helmich, HIFI principal investigator at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

"We obtained this spectrum in a few hours and it already beats any other spectrum, at any other wavelength, ever taken of Orion."

"Organics are everywhere in this spectrum, even at the lowest levels, which hints at the fidelity of HIFI."

"The development of HIFI took eight years but it was really worth waiting for."

Identification of the many features visible in the Orion spectrum was dependent on tools like the Cologne Database of Molecular Spectroscopy -- a collection of spectroscopic data covering several hundred molecular species.

“The high spectral resolution of HIFI shows the breath-taking richness of molecular species, which are present, despite of the hostile environment, in the stellar nurseries and sites for planet formation”, said Jürgen Stutzki, HIFI-co-principal investigator at the University of Cologne.

Researcher have also concluded that there may be as many as six dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered within the Milky Way -- rather than the two currently confirmed.

"These ‘alien’ star clusters have made their way into our galaxy over the last few billion years."

Astronomers previously suspected that some star clusters -- which contain from 100,000 to a million stars each -- were foreign to our galaxy.

But identifying those star clusters with origins in other galaxies was a difficult task.

Dr Bridges collaborated with Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia on solving this problem.

They examined old star clusters within the Milky Way galaxy using data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

This yielded the largest ever high-quality database to record the age and chemical properties of each of these clusters.

"We looked at all the data we could find," Dr Bridges said.

"The best data are from the Hubble Telescope because it has the best imaging."

"We looked at the ages and the amounts of heavy elements in these clusters, which can be measured from their stars."

One of the key findings of the study is that the Milky Way may have swallowed-up more dwarf galaxies than was previously thought.

These ‘mini’ galaxies of up to 100 million stars sit within our larger Milky Way.

The study suggests that many 'invading' star clusters came from dwarf galaxies -- which would mean that that the Milky Way may have far more dwarf galaxies than previously suspected.

But a new study shows that while me may be good at assessing internalised traits such as anxiety, other people may be better at judging manifest behaviours like extroversion.

"Personality is not who you think you are, it's who you are."

"Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story -- it's the reality."

"So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what?"

"Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe."

Evidence of personality traits are obvious in the choices we make -- the clothes we choose to wear, how we decorate a bedroom, the content posted on a social networking site, and so on.

"Everything you touch you leave a mark of your personality," Professor Vazire said.

"You leave traces unintentionally."

"You give off hints of your personality that you don't even see yourself."

She used a battery of tests on 165 volunteers and discovered that while people were good at assessing their own internal traits such as anxiety, other people were better at observing external traits such as extroversion.

“You probably know pretty well your anxiety level, whereas others might not be in the position to judge that because, after all, you can mask your inner feelings,” said Professor Vazire.

“Others, though, are often better than the self in things that deal with overt behaviour.”

Professor Vazire believes that desirable traits such as intelligence, attractiveness, and creativity are hard for the self to judge objectively.

"There is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not," she said.

"Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we’re not going to judge accurately in ourselves."

We are better at judging friends’ intelligence than our own 'because it’s not that threatening to us to admit that our friends aren’t brilliant, but it’s more threatening to admit to ourselves that we’re not brilliant.'

A classic example of this is how we perceive ourselves in the mirror.

"We look in the mirror all the time, yet that's not the same as looking at a photo of someone else," Professor Vazire said.

"If we spent as much time looking at photos of others as we do ourselves, we'd form a much more confident and clear impression of the other's attractiveness than we would have of our own."

"Yet after looking in the mirror for five minutes we're still left wondering, 'Am I attractive or not?'"

"And still have no clue.'

"And it's not the case that we all assume that we're beautiful, right?"

For some personality traits, she says we miss the point if we look at thoughts and feelings and ignore the behaviour.

Bullies, for example, have thoughts and feelings that tell them they’re insecure and want to be liked and admired, which is not a horrible, nasty notion.

But they cannot see their behaviour as nasty and horrible, though, because their thoughts obscure their actions.

Similarly, if you think that you are warm and friendly, but friends and family say that you don't come across that way in reality, you might pay more attention to your behaviours.

"I believe I've presented evidence that should make people think twice," said Professor Vazire.

"On average, the people who know you best know you as well as you know yourself, no better, no worse than you."

'More importantly, there are things that both you know that they don't know, and things that they know that you don't know, and those lead to very interesting experiences and disagreements."

Unlike viruses, rootkits attack the heart of a computer’s software -- its operating system.

They can only be detected from outside a compromised operating system with a specialised tool known as a virtual machine monitor, which can examine every system operation and data structure.

“Smart phones are essentially becoming regular computers,” said Professor Vinod Ganapathy of Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences.

“They run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or ‘malware.’”

The researchers deliberately infected smartphones with rootkits to demonstrate how an attack on a smartphone could be used to eavesdrop on a user, track the movements of the owner via GPS, or rapidly drain the smartphone's battery to render it useless.

These actions could happen without the owner being aware of what happened or what caused them.

But the researchers point out that they have not employed vulnerabilities in current smartphones -- they deliberately infected the devices in order to assess the potential threat.

“What we’re doing today is raising a warning flag,” study co-author Professor Liviu Iftode said.

“We’re showing that people with general computer proficiency can create rootkit malware for smart phones."

"The next step is to work on defences.”

These simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.

"We just provide them with the building blocks."

Professor Joyce worked with PhD student Tracey Lincoln on taking naturally occuring RNA enzymes known as ribozymes and placing them in a growth medium.

They were heated and allowed to replicate until they had exhausted their fuel -- a random subset was extracted and put them in a new medium.

The ribozymes then competed with each other to consume as much of the medium as possible.

The more successful ribozymes came to dominate the culture and grew in complexity -- blindly finding solutions that made them more successful.

"They’re just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate," said Joyce.

"And this will go for ever -- it’s an immortal molecule, if you like."

"The key thing is it replicates itself, and passes information from parent to progeny down the line."

"There’s roughly 30 bits of information passed."

"Some functions are more fit than others, and those that are more fit ‘breed’ more, and are perpetuated more efficiently, and so it goes Darwinian."

Although the ribozymes have some characteristics of life, they still do not constitute a truly living system.

The challenge for researchers now is to create genetic systems that have all the qualities of life -- but without use of existing biological components.

"The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment."

"What we do have is a self-sustained chemical system that undergoes Darwinian evolution."

"They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving."

"But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent a whole cloth of functions."

"The idea is to given them enough information wherewithal so they can start inventing their own solutions rather than just optimising existing solutions."

"And because the nanofibres are so small, we could weave them right into clothes with no perceptible change in comfort for the user."

The flexible nanofibres are made from organic polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF, making them relatively easy and cheap to manufacture.

Previous efforts have focused on nanogenerators out of inorganic semiconducting materials, such as zinc oxide or barium titanate.

"Inorganic nanogenerators -- in contrast to the organic nanogenerators we created -- are more brittle and harder to grow in significant quantities," Professor Lin said.

Although the exact ratio of movement to power has yet to be determined, it appears that more vigourous movements result in more electricity generated.

"Surprisingly, the energy efficiency ratings of the nanofibres are much greater than the 0.5 to 4 per cent achieved in typical power generators made from experimental piezoelectric PVDF thin films, and the 6.8 per cent in nanogenerators made from zinc oxide fine wires," said the study's lead author, Chieh Chang.

"We think the efficiency likely could be raised further," said Professor Lin.

"For our preliminary results, we see a trend that the smaller the fibre we have, the better the energy efficiency."

"We don't know what the limit is."

Researchers have now proved the advantage -- compared with heel-first walking, it takes 53 per cent more energy to walk on the balls of your feet, and 83 per cent more energy to walk on your toes.

"In most mammals, the heel remains elevated during walking and running."

"Most mammals -- dogs, cats, raccoons -- walk and run around on the balls of their feet."

'Ungulates like horses and deer run and walk on their tiptoes." he adds.

"Few species land on their heel -- bears and humans and other great apes [such as] chimps, gorillas, orang-utans."

"Our study shows that the heel-down posture increases the economy of walking but not the economy of running."

The major findings of the study include:

• "The activity of the major muscles of the ankle, knee, hip and back all increase if you walk on the balls of your feet or your toes as opposed to landing on your heels," said Professor Carrier. "That tells us the muscles increase the amount of work they are producing if you walk on the balls of your feet."
• "When we walk on the balls of our feet, we take shorter, more frequent strides," said Professor Carrier. "But this did not make walking less economical." Putting the heel down first and pivoting onto the ball of the foot makes the stride longer because the full length of the foot is added to the length of the step. But that has no effect on energy use.
• The researchers wondered if stepping first on the balls of the feet took more energy than walking heel-first because people are less stable on their toes or balls of the feet. But increased stability did not explain why heel-first walking uses less energy.
• Stepping heel-first reduced the up-and-down motion of the body's center of mass during walking and required less work by the hips, knees and ankles. Stepping first onto the balls of the feet slows the body more and requires more re-acceleration.
• Heels-first steps also made walking more economical by increasing the transfer of movement or "kinetic" energy to stored or "potential" energy and back again. As a person starts to step forward and downward, stored energy is changed to motion or kinetic energy. Then, as weight shifts onto the foot and the person moved forward and upward, their speed slows down, so the kinetic energy of motion is converted back into stored or potential energy. The study found that stepping first onto the balls of the feet made this energy exchange less efficient that walking heels-first.
• Heel-first walking also reduced the "ground reaction force moment" at the ankle. That means stepping first onto the ball of the foot "decreases the leverage, decreases the mechanical advantage" compared with walking heel-first, Professor Carrier said.

But if heel-first walking is so economical, why do so many animals walk other ways?

"They are adapted for running," said Professor Carrier.

"They've compromised their economy of walking for the economy of running."

"We are not efficient runners."

"In fact, we consume more energy to run than the typical mammal our size."

"But we are exceptionally economical walkers."

"This study suggests that one of the things that may explain such economy is the unusual structure of our foot."

"The whole foot contacts the ground when we walk."

"We have a big heel."

"Our big toe is as long as our other toes and is much more robust."

"Our big toe also is parallel to and right next to the second toe."

"These features are distinct among apes, and provide the mechanical basis for economical walking."

"No other primate or mammal could fit into human shoes."

]]> tag:www.bubblejam.net,2010:/brain//14.9581 2010-02-07T08:28:07Z 2010-02-07T08:50:07Z
The first comprehensive study of UK pet ownership in 20 years has yielded a number of unexpected results. As well a showing a huge leap in the numbers of cats and dogs, the study shows that cat owners are more...
bubblejam http://www.bubblejam.net The first comprehensive study of UK pet ownership in 20 years has yielded a number of unexpected results.

As well a showing a huge leap in the numbers of cats and dogs, the study shows that cat owners are more likely to be degree educated than their canine counterparts.

]]> 47.2 per cent of households with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, while the figure was 38.4 per cent for households with dogs.

"We don't know why there is this discrepancy," said Dr Jane Murray, a lecturer in feline epidemiology at Bristol University.

The study, published in the Veterinary Record by Dr Murray and her colleagues, aimed to estimate the total number of UK domestic cats and dogs -- as well as identifying the characteristics of their owners.

A telephone survey of households in 2007 randomly selected from the electoral roll revealed that cats and dogs were owned by 26 per cent and 31 per cent of households respectively.

This data was then applied to data from the 2001 UK census -- yielding an estimate of 10.3 million cats and 10.5 million dogs living domestically.

The last peer-reviewed study, dating back to 1989, suggested there were 6.2 millon cats and 6.4 million dogs.

But it is the anomalous difference in degree education between cat and dog owners that has researchers puzzled.

"We did look at average household income but that wasn't significant," Dr Murray said.

"Our best guess is that it's to do with working hours and perhaps commuting to work, meaning people have a less suitable lifestyle for a dog."

"It's really just a hunch though."

]]> tag:www.bubblejam.net,2010:/brain//14.9563 2010-01-30T12:25:15Z 2010-01-30T21:51:59Z
The launch of Apple's iPad tablet computer has drawn widespread criticism from all and sundry. But the employees of the company have seen worse reactions to previous launches -- those products went on to make billions of dollars in profit....
bubblejam http://www.bubblejam.net The launch of Apple's iPad tablet computer has drawn widespread criticism from all and sundry.

But the employees of the company have seen worse reactions to previous launches -- those products went on to make billions of dollars in profit.

]]> A Brief History of Apple

Some historical context would be useful before we plunge into the various product launches of Christmas Past.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in the late 1970's from an infamous garage in California.

Jobs' mercurial personality drove the company to revolutionise the computer industry with products such as the Apple II and Macintosh.

But by the late-1980's, Jobs had been ousted by the very man that he himself had brought in to drive the company further -- John Sculley, formerly an executive for PepsiCo.

During his wilderness years, Jobs occupied himself with the NeXT computer -- essentially a more powerful version of the Macintosh in all but name.

NeXT ultimately failed as a hardware company but did have some success with their software -- WebObjects was one of the earliest e-commerce offerings taken up by large corporations.

The NeXT computer also has a place in history as the machine used by Tim Bermers-Lee to create WorldWideWeb -- the world's first web browser.

But NeXT may have failed to thrive because Jobs was more focused with his other company -- a computer animation studio bought from George Lucas called Pixar.

With the roaring success of movies such as Toy Story, it seemed as if Jobs was destined never to return to the scene of his first glory.

But as Jobs' studio was picking up Oscars, Apple was in serious danger of going out of business.

Sculley may have ousted Jobs but he and his successors ultimately failed to drive the company forward.

By the mid-1990s, the Mac OS was looking long in the tooth and frustrating users with frequent crashes.

The product line had stagnated with a confusing range of models that had bizarre features such as built-in TV tuners.

Apple's board took the bold decision to shore up the flagging morale of the company by purchasing NeXT and re-appointing Jobs as CEO.

Although it was initially an interim appointment -- Jobs joked that he was the iCEO -- his old management style kicked back in.

He was soon cutting a swathe through the decaying company by abandoning the Newton handheld and rationalising the confused range of desktops and laptops.

The ageing Mac OS was dropped in favour of the NeXT OS which was given a shiny new look to make it more Mac-like.

Jobs signalled a new era with the launch of the iMac -- the iBook, iPod, iPhone, and a host of other devices followed that assured the future of a company that once faced oblivion.

The point of all this historical meandering is to demonstrate two points.

Firstly, that Jobs rescued the company from itself and all his decisions are driven by the knowledge that Apple has to prosper at all costs.

Secondly, Jobs is not afraid of iconoclasm -- such as the first iMac having no floppy drive or launching a mobile phone without a keypad.

Past launches have inspired violent reactions but Apple has usually been vindicated -- most of the time.

Let's take a look back at past product launches to see what the reaction was -- and how they actually fared in the market.

1998: iMac

The iMac was the breakthrough product that revived Apple -- but it faced criticisms for lacking a floppy drive.

It also used USB ports -- a departure from the ADB and SCSI ports used previously -- drawing complaints from users that their old peripherals would be obsolete.

But the iMac went on to become the top-selling computer in its first year on sale.

800,000 iMacs were sold in that year -- with Apple's total retail sales jumping 176%.

After several revisions, the iMac is still a key part of the Apple product range.

2000: Power Mac G4 Cube

A rare failure for the company, the Cube was praised for its good looks but failed to make enough profits.

It was essentially the guts of a laptop in an transparent plastic cube measuring 8" x 8' x 8"-- reminiscent of the legendary cuboid computers made by NeXT.

But there was little love for the silent beauty and the device was put 'on ice' in 2001.

However, the Cube lives on in some shape or form as the Mac Mini launched in 2005 -- the dimintive Mini is the same basic idea in a smaller housing.

As the cheapest Mac in the range, the Mini has proved to be a strong seller for first-time buyers looking to switch from PCs as well as those looking for a 'media centre' they can hook up to a TV.

At the time of writing, Mac Mini models hold the number 2 and 3 spots in Amazon's list of top-selling desktops.

2001: iPod

Although MP3 players were nothing new, Apple entered the market with an innovative interface and a hard drive that allowed for far greater capacity.

But sceptics heaped criticism on the fact that it was expensive and only featured a FireWire connector -- ubiquitous on Macs but rarely found on PCs.

Consumers felt differently and snapped up the iPod as it succeeded where others had failed by integrating closely with the iTunes client software.

Within three years, Apple had taken 70% of the market share for MP3 players.

The iTunes Store then went on to popularise paid music downloads and Apple is now the largest distributor of digital music in the world.

2007: iPhone

The iPhone was the clearest demonstration of Jobs' iconoclasm -- a touchscreen phone with no keypad.

Worst still, the first model was 2G only and featured a risible 2 megapixel camera without a flash.

But the real kicker was the eye-watering price -- as well as paying for the phone, users had to sign an 18-month contract with AT&T for mobile service.

Apple did listen to critics and quickly dropped the price -- the iPhone now retails for one-sixth of the price of the original 8GB iPhone.

By the end of 2009, 33.75 million iPhones had been sold.

They also repeated history by creating the App Store to sell software to users in the same way they had popularised music downloads.

The billionth application sold on the App store was downloaded on April 23rd 2009.

At the time of writing, that figure has jumped to three billion applications downloaded.

And the moral of the story is...

Futurology is perhaps a job best left to prophets and augurs.

The knee-jerk criticism of the iPad puts me in mind of Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People's Republic of China.

When asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution, he replied:

"It is too early to say."

]]> tag:www.bubblejam.net,2010:/brain//14.9554 2010-01-28T12:27:33Z 2010-01-28T14:00:30Z
Scientists investigating the rate of entropy in the universe have made a shocking discovery. The universe appears to be running down at a rate 30 times greater than previously suspected....
bubblejam http://www.bubblejam.net Scientists investigating the rate of entropy in the universe have made a shocking discovery.

The universe appears to be running down at a rate 30 times greater than previously suspected.

]]> The researchers used new data on black holes to calculate entropy -- the phenomenon where various types of energy are permanently converted to thermal energy.

The conclusion of entropy may be 'heat death' where all matter and energy in the universe eventually becomes thermal energy -- with no hope of reversing the process.

"We considered all contributions to the entropy of the observable universe -- stars, star light, the cosmic microwave background," said Chas Egan, a PhD student at the Australian National University's (ANU) Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"We even made an estimate of the entropy of dark matter."

"But it’s the entropy of super-massive black holes that dominates the entropy of the universe."

"When we used the new data on the number and size of super-massive black holes, we found that the entropy of the observable universe is about 30 times larger than previous calculations."

"Contrary to common opinion, the maintenance of all the complicated structures we see around us -- galaxies, stars, hurricanes and kangaroos -- have the net effect of increasing the disorder and entropy of the universe" said Dr Charley Lineweaver, co-ordinator of ANU’s Planetary Science Institute.

"But to be fair, their contributions are negligible compared to the entropy of super-massive black holes."

These findings have important implications for living systems on Earth and beyond.

"The universe started out in a low entropy state and, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy has been increasing ever since," Egan said.

"This is important because the amount of energy available to life in the universe, including terrestrial life, depends on the entropy of the universe."

"We’d like to know how much energy will be available to life forms anywhere in the universe, and where this energy is."

"The first step in this procedure is to determine the entropy of the universe."

"That is what we did."

The next phase of their research is to determine the point of maximum entropy to determine when we can expect heat death in the universe.

But there is one small reason to hope that the universe may not be ultimately doomed.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger of Schrödinger's Cat fame helped to pioneer the mathematical analysis of living systems in his seminal 1944 book 'What is Life?'.

He believed that life itself was 'negative entropy' and that this quality was observable in living organisms.

Perhaps somewhere out there, extraterrestrial scientists are even now developing strategies to prevent the end of the universe.

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A new study has found that 80% of men in Europe descend from the first farmers who migrated from the Near East around 10,000 years ago. Previous studies suggested a Paleolithic origin for Europeans -- but genetic analysis of male...
bubblejam http://www.bubblejam.net A new study has found that 80% of men in Europe descend from the first farmers who migrated from the Near East around 10,000 years ago.

Previous studies suggested a Paleolithic origin for Europeans -- but genetic analysis of male Y-chromosomes seems to indicate migration from a single source in the Near East via Anatolia during the Neolithic period.

]]> In Europe, farming spread from the Fertile Crescent -- the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and including the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

But was the westerly spread of agriculture from the Near East driven by actual migration or the transfer of new ideas to indigenous hunter-gatherers?

"We focused on the commonest Y-chromosome lineage in Europe, carried by about 110 million men –- it follows a gradient from south-east to north-west, reaching almost 100% frequency in Ireland," said study leader Professor Mark Jobling of Leicester University.

"We looked at how the lineage is distributed, how diverse it is in different parts of Europe, and how old it is."

"In total, this means that more than 80% of European Y-chromosomes descend from incoming farmers," said Dr Patricia Balaresque, lead author of the study at Leicester University.

"In contrast, most maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers."

"To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming -– maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer."

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