Quick Hit: Scientists Grow Brains In Petri Dish

By: Syeed 

Yup you read it right. Brains in a petri dish, pretty crazy ish right? Not only are the brain cells working, they’re capable of storing memories for a short time as well.

The study, carried out at the University of Pittsburg involved taking brains cells from a hippo and a rat and fusing them together with proteins. After being fused the team shut down any inhibitor cells and ran an electrical current through the network of brain cells and successfully replicate some normal brain functions that are akin to memory, albeit to a much lesser extent.

The team, headed up by Henry Zeringue, who is a bioengineering professor at the University’s Swanson School of Engineering, was able to sustain the bust of neural-network activity on the cells for 12 seconds. That’s a pretty long time considering that the natural duration of .25 seconds. Sustaining that activity for such a long time allows researchers to make more extensive observations of how the transmitted neurons held their electrical charge.

Somehow this makes me much less worried about the impeding zombie apocalypse.

Source:

Quick Hit: Unknown HTC Windows Phone With 12 MP Camera Support

By: Kareem Ali

So it would seem the rumors of an HTC-WP7 12 MP camera were true. A phone reviewer by the name of Eldar Murtazi posted some tweets and pictures of the phone showing off it’s 12 MP capabilities check em out:

The pictures also show that the phone will be capable of capturing images in RAW format which is a first I think for phones.

Murtazi said this via his twitter account "I like 12 megapixel camera on WP7 - support RAW, some additional settings. Quality is not bad at all. Will compare with N8 tomorrow"

There is no other real information on the phone other than it will be running Mango (as Murtazi shows in the video below). There’s no release date or even and official  name for this device yet, but a lot of people seem to be pretty excited about it.

Here’s the vid (in Russian):

Related Stuffs:

• Source: GSM Arena
• Engadget: Mystery HTC Windows Phone sports 12 megapixel goodness, RAW support

Quick Hit: Endeavour Crew Ready To Head Back Home

 

By: Syeed

After a successful 10 day mission the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour crew said their goodbyes and are ready to head back home.

During their 10 day’s docked to the ISS (10 days 23 hours and 45 minutes to be exact) Endeavour’s crew made four spacewalks to install new components on the space station as well as perform some maintenance.  Including a Boom Assembly that marked the completion of the U.S Orbital Segment of the station.

One of the more interesting things the crew installed is the $2 Billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 , an experiment module designed to measure cosmic rays and help particle physicists search for all types of weird matter they can’t see with current instrumentation. Scientist are hoping the AMS-02 will shed some light on dark-matter and anti-matter as well as help with understanding the formation of the universe.

So that’s that, the 134th and final mission of the Space Shuttle Endeavour is almost over, the crew will be landing this Wednesday June 1st at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ISS Commander Andrei Boriseinko wished the crew a soft landing in his goodbye, and I wish them the same.

Here’s an interview with the crew from PBS:

Related Stuffs:

• Source: The Telegraph
• NASA: Endeavour Page

Quick Hit: Samsung’s New WQXGA Debuting This Week

Samsung is planning to unveil it’s new display technology which will offer tablets in the 10.1 screen size range to compete with the quality of smaller cell phone displays.

The new screen will feature a 2560 x 1600 resolution at 300 dpi which is only 27 dpi short of Apples patented retina display. Besides the super high-quality of the new screens, Samsung boasts that they will consume 40% less power than the tablet displays on the market today.

Samsung is expecting to make the displays available to manufactures later this year and there’s no doubt that the first device to offer it will probably be their own Galaxy tablet. Some people are speculating that this new display tech might make it onto the iPad 3, but relationships are pretty strained between Apple and Samsung so that’s kind of a long shot in my opinion. Plus there’s no reason not to think that Apple is working on their own super high-def display for that device. There have also been some complaints about PenTile displays, (which use a pixel layout like to 5 on a 5 sided die) making pixels a little fuzzy, so it could be a step back from the retina display I’m sure Apple is hoping to get onto the iPad 3.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see once this hit’s devices if those complaints are valid in this case or if Samsung found a workaround for that particular problem.

You can read more about the details at the link below.

Related Stuffs:

Source: Tech News World

Quick Hit: Lenovo Releasing Game Console In China

Lenovo, the company know for laptops, announced yesterday that they will be releasing a game console in China that will be heavy on the motion control.

The console will be called the iSec which stands for ‘Sports Entertainment Center” (I’m guessing the I stands for internet) and will be controlled solely by motion control.

China currently has some pretty hardcore PC gamers but the county’s government has banned all the major consoles due to fears of how the content might affect it’s people. Sony and Microsoft are both currently in talks with the country to try and get their consoles sold there, while Nintendo released a fairly unpopular China-only console a little while back.

The iSec will release later this year and Lenovo is hoping that the console can make up for the lack of PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 in China. Which would give a much needed boost to the basically non-existent console game market.

I’ll have the specs, vids, pictures and all that soon so stay posted!

Source: Toms Guide

Quick Hit: N.Y. Attorney General Wants To Know Why PSN Went Down

 

By: Syeed@techsual.com

Just this Tuesday Eric Schneiderman, N.Y attorney general subpoenaed Sony. Apparently they have some questions as to how and why the breach happened.

Sony is claiming that the attack was well organized and planned and that it had to be carried out by experts who had been researching the companies security. They’ve gotten the FBI involved in their personal investigation and it looks like they may be getting a little more help in hunting down the person or persons who caused all this havoc.

Sony is claiming that the perpetrators of the crime had only the intent of stealing credit card information in order to use it for ‘illegal purposes’. Even though there hasn’t been any evidence of the cards being used, and beside I thought Sony said the card numbers were encrypted and safe.

We can expect Sony to divulge all the details in court, until then we just have to guess at who might’ve done this and more importantly why. Was it just to prove a point? Or did they have some sort of malicious intent?

Related Stuffs:

• Source: Cnet
• Article: Sony Blaming Anonymous For Attacks
• Article: Update(2) PSN Still Down Might Be Up Soon

Quick Hit: Apple Updates iOS, Fixes Tracking ‘Bug’

Apple rolled out an update today to iOS that addresses some of the current outrage people have been feeling about the fact that their phones and tablets trace their location, despite this being pretty well known long long before iOS or Android even existed.

So the patch released today will cut the iPhone and iPad’s tracking database to the last 7 days, rather than the years worth of data it was holding before. In case your wondering why it’s still holding any information, it’s because it needs it so applications can have quicker access to your location for certain features, also to help prevent dropped calls and other failing signal issues.

The patch calms some nerves I’m sure but nonetheless people either have to start reading about these things and why they’re done, accept it an move on with their lives or just ignore it altogether because once again, your phone’s been tracking you since before the days of iPhone and will continue to, mostly because it has to, that’s just the way mobile technology works my friend.

Related Stuffs:

• Source: Mercury News
• Article: Apple Denies It's Tracking Data
• Article: Stop Being So Paranoid About Your Phone Collecting Data

Quick Hit: Apple, Google And Other Big Tech Companies Being Sued For Not Paying Up

By: Kareem@techsual.com

 

A press release was umm released yesterday by the law firm LIef, Cabrasser, Heimann & Bernstein (there’s always got to be a Bernstein eh?), that basically says Apple, Google, Lucasfilm and a bunch more big tech companies weren’t paying their employees properly and worked together to keep employee wages low across all the suspected companies.

The whole shebang was file by Siddarth Hariharan, a former software engineer for Lucasfilm. He says; 

"My colleagues at Lucasfilm and I applied our skills, knowledge, and creativity to make the company an industry leader. It's disappointing that, while we were working hard to make terrific products that resulted in enormous profits for Lucasfilm, senior executives of the company cut deals with other premiere high tech companies to eliminate competition and cap pay for skilled employees."

So apparently the companies had a ‘gentlemen's agreement’ that they would not ‘poach’ each others employees, they did however say employees were free to apply at any company they wanted. What this effectively did was make sure that if a high value employee who was working ant say, Pixar, wanted to go and work at Lucasfilm the heads of Lucasfilm would deny his application because it could be seen as ‘poaching’ or they might give him the interview to save face, but he would have no chance at getting the job.

There’s tons more to the case, and it will probably be a long long drawn out battle.

Related stuffs:

 

 

 

Quick Hit: Evo 3D Pre-Orders Started, You Just Have To Ask

Androidcommunity.com has gotten their hands on an apparent text message sent out to Best Buy employees about customers asking for the HTC Evo 3D, which hasn’t has any official release date or price announcements yet.

According to the text message they will be allowed to take pre-orders starting today (May 2nd 2011), they’re just not allowed to let customers know they can yet. However if you ask, they are allowed to tell you what they can and take your pre-order request

Source: Android Community