The Windows browser world has a new compatibility king

An Acid3 score of 100 percent on Windows was long thought to be a mythical creature like a unicorn or dwarf, but Opera proved otherwise.
Opera Becomes First Windows Browser To Pass Acid3
The Windows browser world has a new compatibility king

It looks like Safari's sole reign at the top of the Acid3 standings was rather short lived. The new co-victor is Opera, maker of the Nintendo Wii and DS browsers, which has been hard at work preparing to release its PC 9.5 version of its browser, codenamed "Kestrel". It released an alpha build in September and a beta build in October. It plans on a final release of "Kestrel" this summer, squaring it up to take on Firefox 3.

Now "Kestrel" has some new bragging rights in its competition against Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple's browsers. The scrappy little company has become the first to produce a Windows browser capable of passing the Acid3 test. On Opera's Desktop Team blog a team poster shared news from Lars Erik Bolstad, the Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, who states, "I have a quick update on where we are with Acid3. Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly."

Last month the best result had been set on a Mac computer using the Safari browser, which scored 90 percent. The same day that Opera scored a passing result, Safari's nightly webkit build for Apple also achieved a 100 percent score, according to an online leaderboard with many statistics. However, this passing result was for Mac only. According to the list the previous leaders for Windows for in-development browsers were Firefox 3.0b4 at 68 percent, and for released browsers Safari 3.1 (525.13) at 75 percent.

The new results for Opera place it as the clear leader in compatibility among the Windows browsers. While it has to share the overall crown with Safari, Safari is only fully compatible on Macs, lowering its userbase that get to enjoy Acid3 perfection. For those who want to grab the record setting Opera browser, you'll have to wait about a week, while the Opera team fixes a few final bugs for the final preview version.

In his message Bolstad states, "We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera's platform independent Core."

Opera use peaked in February 2004. With the release of more stable/functional Internet Explorer versions and Firefox its support waned to its current marketshare of between 0.5-0.8 percent, according to current estimates. However, with its new status as compatibility king of windows browsers some may care to take a second look at this alternative browser.

more...

Just a few months after the announcement that Internet Explorer 8 successfully passed the Acid2 standards compliance test, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced last Monday that it unleashed Acid2’s successor, Acid3.

Created to identify flaws in the way a browser renders its web pages, WaSP’s Acid tests throw down the gauntlet with difficult-to-display graphics written to accentuate browsers’ quirks. When the original Acid test was released in 1998, it helped reign in browser inconsistencies and insured that Internet Explorer, Netscape, and others handled HTML code according to specification – making web designers’ lives easier and ensuring the web rendered consistently in the future.

Acid2, with its focus on Cascading Style Sheets, seems quaint in comparison to Acid3’s objectives, which target major web standards expected to see use today and in the future. Tests are derived from many of the last few years’ development in the web’s control languages, including rendering graphics embedded in HTML code, CSS3 compliance, DOM compliance, CSS2 downloadable fonts, as well as handling new graphics formats and Unicode support.

Currently, no known browser is able to correctly render the Acid3 test, which displays an animated, incrementing score counter and a series of colored boxes with some description text. Bloggers have already assembled galleries of browsers’ failing test results, with most of today’s browsers scoring between 40 and 60 on the test’s 100-point scale. The results shouldn’t be too alarming as the Acid tests have always been forward-looking in nature, and are designed to measure standards to aspire to, as opposed to what’s current. Also note that more than six months lapsed between Acid2’s release and Safari 2.02’s announcement that it was the first to pass Acid2.

Anecdotal reports around the web seem to indicate that nightly builds of the next versions of Firefox and Safari are reportedly achieving Acid3 scores in the 80-90 range.

Given the state of the web today – where web designers will often write two versions of a web site: one for Internet Explorer and one for everyone else – Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer 8 passed Acid2 is all the more important. Currently, each new version of Internet Explorer keeps older versions’ flaws for compatibility, resulting in a confusing state of affairs for web developers.

The release of IE7 complicated matters further, as it shipped with both an IE6-compatibility mode and a somewhat-standards-compliant IE7 rendering mode, with an easily overlooked method for switching between the two. As a result, Internet Explorer earned a nasty reputation among web design circles, with developers writing safe, proven websites that worked universally instead of rich websites that exercised their languages’ full features.

Scientists from Japan believe the origami airplanes could make it back to Earth without catching fire

Origami Shuttle in wind Tunnel Tests
The biggest thing that most associate with the re-entry of a spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere is heat and friction. To that end, one of the biggest concerns for the space shuttle fleet is the integrity of the heat shield to allow re-entry without catastrophic failure such as the Columbia suffered.

Japanese scientists have a wild idea that involves the ancient art of paper folding known as origami. A prototype shuttle built from folded paper that was made from sugar cane fibers and sprayed with a special coating has been able to withstand durability tests in a wind tunnel at the Tokyo University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Ultimately, the researchers want to launch the plane from space and see if it can withstand re-entry.

Project leader Shinji Suzuki is quoted by Boston.com as saying, “It sounded like a simply impossible, crazy idea [origami planes surviving reentry]. I gave it some more thought, and came to think it may not be ridiculous after all, and could very well survive if it comes down extremely slowly."

The researchers believe that if the origami planes enter the earth’s atmosphere at slow enough speed that they would be subject to much less friction and heat than a full-size space craft like the space shuttle. Large spacecraft enter the Earth’s atmosphere at tremendous rates of speed leading to copious amounts of heat generated from friction.

The small origami paper shuttles measure about 2.8-inches long and 2-inches wide. In wind tunnel testing the origami shuttles survived wind speeds of up to Mach 7 and temperatures up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit. These conditions are said to approximate reentry into Earth’s atmosphere from orbit.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has agreed to fund the project for three years with a grant of $300,000 per year. The program is getting stiff opposition from those who don't understand why money would be wasted on such a proposal.

Opponents ask what’s the point of the study if the planes can’t be tracked to determine if they survived reentry. The origami panes would be launched by astronaut Koichi Wakata by throwing them into the wake of the ISS as it hurtles through its 250 mile high orbit at Mach 20.

Suzuki and fellow researchers plan to write messages of peace on the origami shuttles, the exact number of which would be launched is not yet determined. Messages on the origami shuttles will also request that anyone finding the planes notify the researchers.

The launch of origami planes from the ISS would be a perfect use for the Japanese Kibo lab's open section scheduled to be delivered to the ISS next year. The first section of the Kibo lab was delivered by the space shuttle Endeavor in March 2008.






The biggest thing that most associate with the re-entry of a spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere is heat and friction. To that end, one of the biggest concerns for the space shuttle fleet is the integrity of the heat shield to allow re-entry without catastrophic failure such as the Columbia suffered.

Japanese scientists have a wild idea that involves the ancient art of paper folding known as origami. A prototype shuttle built from folded paper that was made from sugar cane fibers and sprayed with a special coating has been able to withstand durability tests in a wind tunnel at the Tokyo University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Ultimately, the researchers want to launch the plane from space and see if it can withstand re-entry.

Project leader Shinji Suzuki is quoted by Boston.com as saying, “It sounded like a simply impossible, crazy idea [origami planes surviving reentry]. I gave it some more thought, and came to think it may not be ridiculous after all, and could very well survive if it comes down extremely slowly."

The researchers believe that if the origami planes enter the earth’s atmosphere at slow enough speed that they would be subject to much less friction and heat than a full-size space craft like the space shuttle. Large spacecraft enter the Earth’s atmosphere at tremendous rates of speed leading to copious amounts of heat generated from friction.

The small origami paper shuttles measure about 2.8-inches long and 2-inches wide. In wind tunnel testing the origami shuttles survived wind speeds of up to Mach 7 and temperatures up to 446 degrees Fahrenheit. These conditions are said to approximate reentry into Earth’s atmosphere from orbit.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has agreed to fund the project for three years with a grant of $300,000 per year. The program is getting stiff opposition from those who don't understand why money would be wasted on such a proposal.

Opponents ask what’s the point of the study if the planes can’t be tracked to determine if they survived reentry. The origami panes would be launched by astronaut Koichi Wakata by throwing them into the wake of the ISS as it hurtles through its 250 mile high orbit at Mach 20.

Suzuki and fellow researchers plan to write messages of peace on the origami shuttles, the exact number of which would be launched is not yet determined. Messages on the origami shuttles will also request that anyone finding the planes notify the researchers.

The launch of origami planes from the ISS would be a perfect use for the Japanese Kibo lab's open section scheduled to be delivered to the ISS next year. The first section of the Kibo lab was delivered by the space shuttle Endeavor in March 2008.

Researchers Show Bomb Defusing Robot Controlled

A Soldier and his Packbot
Xbox 360 style controls not intuitive enough say researchers.
If you want to make a complex piece of machinery easy to control by a multitude of different people from different walks of life you have to use something that’s common to many different groups. The U.S. military has found this common thread for several of its military robots: console gamepads.

Some of the U.S. military’s robots are controlled by a gamepad that is very similar to the controller of an Xbox 360. As one of the most popular game consoles around, the Xbox controller is very familiar and easy to operate for a variety of users.

Researchers David Bruemmer and Douglas Few at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Lab have found a way to control robots that they feel is even more intuitive than the Xbox 360 style controller. The researchers took a Packbot made by iRobot that is used by the military to search out mines and diffuse bombs and modified it for a new control method.

The researchers say that the problem with using the gamepad is that it requires so much of a soldier’s attention to operate the robot that they can miss information sent from the robots sensors. To remedy this problem, Bruemmer and Few believe a more intuitive control method is needed to free up the solider to pay more attention to the sensor data.

The more intuitive control method the pair of researchers chose is the Nintendo Wiimote. The Wiimote from a typical Nintendo Wii game console was modified to control a Packbot. The researchers say that the motion sensitive Wiimote allows for far more intuitive control of the robot by directly translating hand movements into movements of the robot.

Few told New Scientists, “It’s Awesome [controlling the robot with the Wiimote].” Few also says that the control system could be modified to activate the Wiimote vibration feedback when the robot detects something.

The pair also plan to modify an iPhone to receive video streams directly from the robot's cameras eliminating the need for soldiers to carry a laptop. There is no word on if the researchers will modify the machine gun wielding variety of the Packbot for use with the Wiimote.

more,....
Packbot, made by iRobot in Burlington, Massachusetts, disposes of bombs, sniffs out explosives and checks for landmines for US soldiers. It is 70 centimetres long, and moves on wheels or tracks. Some even have machine guns attached, although these are yet to be used in battle (see "Make robots, not war").
Packbot is capable of some autonomous tasks, but is usually remote-controlled by a "joypad" similar to the controller used with most video games consoles, or a traditional joystick. The joypad consists of two groups of thumb-activated buttons, one for steering and the other for speed control. The problem with the joypad is that it takes a lot of concentration and can monopolise the attention of the soldier using it. Any information the robot gathers is beamed back and presented on a laptop display, but the soldier can be so occupied with the robot's controls that they can easily miss this, says Bruemmer. "Our tests show 90 per cent of the operator's workload goes into driving the robot rather than keeping an eye on the sensor data."
The Wiimote is far more intuitive because movements of the hand directly translate into movements of the robot. Bruemmer says it should allow soldiers to control the robots more instinctively, freeing them up to pay closer attention to the incoming sensor data. "It's awesome," Few says, although they have yet to ask the soldiers themselves what they think. Bruemmer and Few have also written software that sends a signal to the Wiimote when the robot has detected something of special interest - somebody trapped in a building, say - activating the Wiimote's built-in vibration feedback.
"Using the Wiimote to control various aspects of the robot makes a lot of sense," says Colin Angle of iRobot.
The pair also plan to harness the iPhone for military use. As an alternative to lugging a laptop around, Few and Bruemmer plan to modify the Packbot to transmit footage compatible with the palm-sized iPhone. Its touch screen should also allow soldiers to manipulate the video captured by the robot more intuitively.
The team will also be adding Wiimote control to the military Talon robots, made by Foster-Miller of Waltham, Massachusetts, but it could be applied to other types. "When trying to envision controlling a future domestic robot, I don't picture sitting down to my PC to instruct it to fetch me something," says Bruemmer.

researchers and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has uncovered genetic errors that may shed light on the causes of schizophrenia

In a major step toward solving the puzzle of schizophrenia, researchers have found that deletions and duplications of DNA are more common in people with the mental disorder, and that many of those errors occur in genes related to brain development and neurological function.

Rates Of Rare Mutations Soar Three To Four Times Higher In Schizophrenia
A team of researchers at the University of Washington and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories has uncovered genetic errors that may shed light on the causes of schizophrenia. The scientists found that deletions and duplications of DNA are more common in people with the mental disorder, and that many of those errors occur in genes related to brain development and neurological function.

Schizophrenia, a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affects approximately 1 percent of the population. People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking, and are at risk for unusual or bizarre behaviors. The illness greatly impacts social and occupational functioning and has enormous public health costs.

The team of investigators, led by Tom Walsh, Jon McClellan, and Mary-Claire King at the UW, and Shane McCarthy and Jonathan Sebat at Cold Spring Harbor, examined whether the genetic errors, which are individually rare DNA deletions and duplications, contribute to the development of schizophrenia. The findings, which were replicated by a team at the National Institute of Mental Health, appear in the March 27 online edition of the journal Science.

Some deletions and duplications are common and found in all humans. The researchers studied such mutations that were found only in individuals with the illness, and compared them to mutations found only in healthy persons. They theorized that rare mutations found only in schizophrenic patients would be more likely to disrupt genes related to brain functioning and thus may cause schizophrenia.

The study was conducted using DNA from 150 people with schizophrenia and 268 healthy individuals. The investigators found rare deletions and duplications of genes present in 15 percent of those with schizophrenia, versus only 5 percent in the healthy controls. The rate was even higher in patients whose schizophrenia first presented at a younger age, with 20 percent of those patients having a rare mutation.

The results were replicated by a second research team, led by Anjene Addington and Judith Rapoport at the National Institutes of Mental Health. They found a higher rate of rare duplications or deletions in patients whose schizophrenia began before age 12 years, a very rare and severe form of the disorder.

In individuals with schizophrenia, mutations were more likely to disrupt signaling genes that help organize brain development. Each mutation was different, and impacted different genes. However, several of the disrupted genes function in related neurobiological pathways.

The findings suggest that schizophrenia is caused by many different mutations in many different genes, with each mutation leading to a disruption in key pathways important to a developing brain. Once a disease-causing mutation is identified, other different disease-causing mutations may be found in the same gene in different people with the illness.

Thus, for most cases of schizophrenia, the genetic causes may be different. This observation has important implications for schizophrenia research. Currently, most genetic studies examine for mutations that are shared among different individuals with the illness. These approaches will not work if most patients have different mutations causing their condition.

Fortunately, there are now genomic technologies available that allow researchers to discover rare mutations within each individual with a disorder. As these technologies improve, it will be possible to detect other types of disease-causing mutations. Eventually, the identification of genes disrupted in individuals with schizophrenia will allow the development of new treatments more specifically targeted to disrupted pathways.

The research team included many other scientists at a variety of institutions, including Evan Eichler and his colleagues at the University of Washington, and investigators at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Case Medical Center in Cleveland, the University of North Carolina, the University of California Los Angeles, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute on Aging.

This work was supported by many different grants from several foundations and agencies, including the Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, NARSAD, the Simons Foundation, the Stanley Medical Research Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Mental Health Division of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

New Rocket Aims for Space Tourism Market

California-based Xcor has announced that they are joining the space tourism market. They have revealed new information about their Lynx rocket.

The rocket is designed to seat one passenger and one pilot, and is set up similar to how a private plane is designed.

The Lynx will be able to run several times a day and reach altitudes of 37 miles above the Earth.

Xcor CEO Jeff Greason stated “Its liquid fuel engines will provide the enhanced safety, durability, reliability and maintainability that keeps operating costs low.”

Xcor stated they will have Lynx up and running by 2010.

They will be going head to head with Virgin’s Richard Branson

Another Firm Joins the Commercial Space Race

The race to become the first private company capable of launching paying customers into space got more crowded last week as a small but well-respected California firm announced plans to have a two-seat spacecraft ready within two years.

The mini-ship, built by Mojave-based Xcor Aerospace and designed to fly to the edge of space, is expected to be ready for test flights by 2010, around the time Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic hopes to send its much larger spaceship on its maiden voyage.

More than half a dozen other companies -- most, unlike Xcor, bankrolled by wealthy businessmen, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal -- are building rockets and spacecraft that they hope will capture the imagination of space travelers. Most plan to finish testing their rockets and rocket planes in the next few years, and the Federal Aviation Administration has estimated the market for space tourism to be more than $1 billion a year by 2021.

In announcing his company's plans, Xcor chief executive Jeff Greason revealed last week that his company's spaceship, called the Lynx, will have an unusual but understandably interested partner: the Air Force.

The Air Force recently announced that it awarded Xcor a small-business research contract -- usually between $700,000 and $900,000 -- to demonstrate the capabilities of the spacecraft. The U.S. fleet of space shuttles, which are fixed-wing spacecraft like the Lynx, is scheduled to be retired in 2010, but the Air Force has voiced interest in continuing that technology. The Lynx could help provide a model.

"As I understand their objective, they want to share in the lessons learned during our program," Greason said. "They want to learn about space vehicles that take less notice and less time to prepare for flight, and that's what we're trying to do."

Greason played down the government's financial role during a news conference but said that having the Air Force "show interest in our program is a very validating thing." The company also said that NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force have provided technical assistance.

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, who is sometimes critical of government efforts to mix commercial and military missions in space, said the Xcor cooperation appears to be useful. She said that the Air Force is eager to find ways to decrease the vulnerability of orbiting satellites and that technology from the Lynx could help with that, as well as reduce the cost of getting to space.

Roughly the size of a small private airplane, the initial Lynx is expected to fly about 38 miles high, and the follow-up version will go up to 63 miles, generally considered the beginning of space. Like most rocket companies aiming for the space tourism market, Xcor plans to create a ship that can enter orbit -- about 130 miles up -- Greason said.

"We decided to make it small because we could, and because there is a market for what it will provide -- a front-row seat into space," he said. "We fully expect to move into larger and more complex vehicles in the future, and to someday send spacecraft into orbit."

The company also plans to make the vehicle fully reusable, an aim of many commercial rocketmakers. It has been working for nine years on building reusable rockets and has flown two different rocket-powered vehicles.

Xcor hopes to make its spaceflights available for considerably less than those by Virgin Galactic, which has taken 85,000 reservations at $200,000 each. Greason said a central mission of his company is to bring down the cost of spaceflight "because affordable access to space for everyone means far more than breathtaking views and the freedom of weightlessness. It means unlocking the material and energy resources and economic opportunities of our solar system."

While the Xcor contract with the Air Force is unusual for a space-tourism rocket company, NASA has entered into substantial contracts with two private companies that are developing rockets and spacecraft that could ferry cargo and, someday, astronauts to and from the international space station.

Other companies working to be the first nongovernment carriers of space tourists include Blue Origin (created by Bezos), Bigelow Aerospace (founded by hotel magnate Robert Bigelow of Las Vegas) and SpaceX (started by Musk). Space Adventures, based in Tysons Corner, has already sent up five tourists in Russian Soyuz capsules.

The emerging private space-travel industry does not have an association -- the companies are very competitive and guard their technology and plans closely. But its progress is being tracked by space enthusiasts, including Kevin Kantola, whose Web site, http://www.space-tourism.ws, collects information about the companies and their spacecraft and launches.

Kantola said that while some companies will doubtless fail, some will succeed and turn space travel into "a great vacation or fancy cruise."

"Eventually," he said, "there will be lots of choices and different ways to have the adventure." He also said he expects prices to drop dramatically within a decade, at which point he hopes to take a ride himself.

more...

Lynx will make its first suborbital flight in 2010
The thought of traveling into space and experiencing weightlessness is enough to excite most space enthusiasts. However, the actual cost of taking a trip into space is more than most can afford.
A company from California called Xcor Aerospace intends to enter the space tourism market with a vessel called the Lynx. Lynx is the size of a small private aircraft and is expected to begin flights in 2010. According to Xcor the Lynx will take off from a normal runway like any other private aircraft.

After takeoff the two seat Lynx will reach a speed of Mach 2 and climb to an altitude of 200,000 feet. The Lynx would then return back to Earth in a slow gliding circle before touching down on a standard runway.

Xcor CEO Jeff Greason claims, “We have designed this vehicle to operate much like a commercial aircraft. The Lynx is powered by reusable liquid-fuel engines and is expected to be able to make several flights per day.

Boxing is possibly less dangerous for the brain

Boxing is possibly less dangerous for the brain than previously feared -- at least for amateurs.
How Dangerous Is Boxing For The Brain?
Boxing is possibly less dangerous for the brain than previously feared – at least for amateurs. However, conclusive statements on the level of danger are not yet possible. Whether professional boxers such as Muhammad Ali contracted their later brain conditions – in his case Parkinson’s disease at the age of 40 – from boxing, remains unclear. The all-clear cannot be given until more extensive studies of both amateur and professional boxers tell us more about the risks for the brain from boxing.
This was the conclusion reached in the “Heidelberg Boxing Study”, in which high-resolution MRI data were used to search for tiny changes in the brains of amateur boxers and a comparison group of non-boxers. These changes are most likely precursors for later severe brain damage such as Parkinson’s disease or dementia.

The study by the Department of Neurology, University of Heidelberg Medical Center has now been published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. In three of the 42 boxers, microhemorrhages were found, while in the comparison group of 37 non-boxers there were no such changes; however the difference was not statistically significant. The study was carried out jointly with National Training Center for Boxing in Heidelberg and the Department of Sport Medicine at the University of Heidelberg Medical Center (Medical Director: Professor Dr. Peter Bärtsch).

Microhemorrhages could be precursors to Parkinson’s disease and dementia

In boxing, the head is hit at a high speed and with great force. This can lead to shear movement between different brain tissues, resulting in microhemorrhages. “Injuries of this kind can be detected with the help of a modern MR imaging device with a field strength of 3 Tesla such as is available in Heidelberg,” explained Professor Dr. Stefan Hähnel, chief consultant at the Division of Neuroradiology, Department of Neurology, University of Heidelberg Medical Center, who conducted the study with Professor Dr. Uta Meyding-Lamadé, then chief consultant at the Department of Neurology, University of Heidelberg Medical Center, now Medical Director at Krankenhaus Nordwest in Frankfurt.

It is not known how often the microhemorrhages occur in boxers. They may eventually lead to the destruction of brain cells and deficits such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease. This hypothesis is shared by some working groups. The three boxers in whom changes were found typically had the changes in the frontal or temporal lobes, where the shear forces of blows are strongest.

A follow-up study will compare amateur boxers with professionals
One disadvantage of the “Heidelberg Boxing Study” was the great range in duration and intensity of amateur boxing. Duration ranged from one to 25 years and intensity from one to 375 bouts with 0 to 12 knockouts. A follow-up study is planned to include professional boxers, in order to assess intensive exposure to blows. The Heidelberg researchers are currently looking for funding for this study.