From HHMI: Using muscle tissue from tarantulas, scientists have figured out the detailed structure and arrangement of the miniature molecular motors that control movement. A new technique called cryo-electron microscopy enabled them to answer questions about the thick filaments of myosin in muscle fibers, questions that could not be answered with existing electron microscopy techniques. The work provides insights into the molecular basis of muscle relaxation, and perhaps its activation too.

Research published in the August 24 issue of Nature.

For the full story, go to http://www.hhmi.org//news/padron.html.
6:51:03 PM    comment []  

In the scary dream that woke me last night at 1 a.m., enormous tigers ripped small animals to bits in the backyard. Between the slats of the window blinds I saw them snarling amid the carnage. But inside the house, and in front of the house, all was serene.

In the dream, on the news I heard an American politician insult an Asian country. The anchorman continued to other topics without hesitating. Behind the house, the tigers paced.

I heard a sound. I looked out the front window as the first planes came over. For a moment I thought of passenger pigeons, how they were said once to have been so numerous that flocks of them passing overhead darkened the sky. These were warplanes, however, and they flew in orderly rows, phalanxes of aircraft so dense and so neatly organized they appeared to be rows of Morse code--or, no, precisely like the tables of hexagrams that fold out on card stock at the back of the Bollingen I Ching. And before long the eastward-moving rows extended from horizon to horizon.

Soon soldiers on the ground were going from house to house taking prisoners, even killing those who resisted. In the dream I had a husband and a little girl, a sweet fragile child of 6 or 7. My husband in the dream was played by Mike Farrell (who played the bland, sweet-tempered B. J. Hunnicut in the M*A*S*H television series years ago). We prepared to flee but only my husband made it out. My daughter and I were trapped in the house, and soldiers approached from across the field. She and I went from room to room, hiding. In my heart I said sorrowful good-byes to our cats and dogs and llamas; I glanced over our packed-up precious possessions and family photos and released them.

We crept up one staircase after another, always moments ahead of the soldiers. I was afraid the child would make a sound, not understanding the peril, but she was so good and silent, even though she seemed unfrightened. Once or twice as we moved about she darted away to do something playful--to swing from a rafter, say--and when I asked her why she would answer, "I just wanted to see how that felt." Higher and higher we climbed, until in the highest attic room we found only a bed's boxsprings on the floor. I lifted it and we crept under, folding our bodies to fit between the wooden supports. Soldiers entered the room. We held our breaths. I expected them to fling over the springs with violence and expose us, but they did not.

They left. We had escaped them. We lived on quietly in the house, without leaving, for some months. I saw a report on TV about families of the killed and imprisoned. In the film my husband stood at the back of a group of mourners, looking anguished, certain we were dead.

A former neighbor who was now with an underground of escapees discovered us and promised to smuggle us to safety, to where my husband was waiting. But she took only the child. I was delayed, and then the soldiers found me. I lived for years then in a prison camp. The movie ended--the dream has become a movie I am watching with my son. It's a harrowing ending. He gets up to leave and I say, "Wait. Watch." And sure enough there is an epilog. We see the woman, emaciated, with shaven head, but all smiles, arrive before a building where her husband and child run out to greet her with embraces.
5:03:50 PM    comment []  

The Poynter Institute's Jonathan Dube reviews the "Today's Front Pages " feature of the Newseum ("The world's first interactive museum of news"):

Every day, the site publishes hundreds of newspaper front page images from dozens of countries around the world (the number of papers and countries varies). You can scan through thumbnails of all of the images either alphabetically or by region) . You can also find papers around the world via an interactive map. Once you find a front page that interests you, you can click on the thumbnail to get a fully readable PDF of it.

The site also keeps an archive of national and international front pages that chronicle events of historical significance, such as the Iraq war and the Red Sox winning the World Series. You can see those front pages here.

I've checked it out. Pretty cool. The diminutive thumbnails may appear irksomely unreadable, but move your mouse across the pages to display a readout of the names of the papers shown at the lower right of the screen; it helps.
1:31:08 PM    comment []  

A "radical experiment in data storage is underway" at InPhase Technologies in Longmont, Colorado:

...[T]his is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than three hours.

It's likely to be one of the first commercial systems to use "holographic storage," in which bits are encoded in a light-sensitive material as the three-dimensional interference pattern of lasers. Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store data bit by bit on their surfaces, holographic discs store data a page at a time in three dimensions, enabling huge leaps in capacity and access speed.

...

In holographic storage, a "data beam" holding information is crossed with a "reference beam" to produce an interference pattern that's recorded in a light-sensitive material. To retrieve data from a particular spot, a reference beam is shone onto it, and the combination of the reference beam and the patterned material reconstructs the original data beam, which is read by a digital-camera detector that translates the beam into a series of electrical signals. The recording material is typically either an inorganic crystal or a polymer. Polymers are more sensitive and require less powerful lasers, but they have their own flaws. For instance, when you hit a photosensitive polymer with a laser, it tends to deform, which messes up the data.

In 1994, a materials team at Bell Labs led by chemist Lisa Dhar worked with Wilson and Curtis to produce a "two-chemistry" photosensitive polymer. The researchers mixed one scaffoldlike polymer, which stayed rigid and preserved its structure, with another polymer that reacted to light and stored data. Decoupling the recording material's optical and structural properties let the researchers fine-tune each independently, arriving at a combination of sensitivity and stability that had eluded previous efforts.

...

Inside each breadbox-size drive is an elaborate system of mirrors, lenses, and liquid-crystal displays that manipulates the beam from a single laser. The disc, 130 millimeters in diameter and 3.5 millimeters thick (as compared to 120 millimeters and 1.5 millimeters, respectively, for a DVD), doesn't spin continuously like a DVD but is mounted on a stage that positions it so that the right portion is exposed to the laser beams at the right time. The laser and camera detector are fixed, but the mirrors and lenses move to produce different beam angles. And that's the real trick: unlike a CD or DVD, the disc can store hundreds of pages of data in a single, small area, each one inscribed by the reference beam at a slightly different angle.

Read the full story by Gregory T. Huang at http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/09/issue/feature_memory.0.asp
1:17:27 PM    comment []