Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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iBGstar first approved blood glucose mobile device
There are many potential cell phone based applications but the firsn to get approved for Diabetes is iBGstar from Sanofi Aventis. This is a good compromise is using the dipstick based technology and then combining it with iPhone to read out the results. All this ends up replacing is the little electronic device that used…
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NIH thousand genome project
How do you access 200 Terabytes of data? NIH is collecting data of many genomes that are being stored as computer code. These are then stored for researchers to access for their purpose. Being NIH, these large data sets are available for free. But, how do you process this amount of data. About the only…
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Big Data – mouse brain images
Big data exists in different forms. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has worked to digitize the entire mouse brain. Each of the different regions of the brain can be seen and visualized. The data is estimated to be about 500 Terabytes but the fantastic thing is that it is available for anyone to see and download.…
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Simulating the whole brain one cell at a time.
Dr Dharmendra Modha’s group at IBM has been simulating the whole brain one cell at a time. They started with cat brain simulation and have almost reached the whole brain simulation except it runs about 1542 times slower. This is a simulation of nearly 1.6 billion virtual neurons and 9 trillion synapses. The power consumption…
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Hacking medicine and Amazon Kindle
The current period has been called the information age, where information is the most important element of society. Interestingly, with so much data being collected, the next age is the data analysis age wherein the analysis of data is important. An interesting thing about research in medicine is that it has been oriented towards clinical…
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Five ways a company could patent DNA sequence despite Supreme Court decision
Supreme Court made a ruling on June 13, 2012 that DNA sequences found in nature is not patentable. This seems obvious since this is the product of nature and so a company or a person cannot patent a fish or a frog as it occurs in nature. The ruling can be found in this PDF…
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Artificial photosynthesis lab.
It is amazing that plants photosynthetic machinery is the only one that keeps the earth and human beings alive by fixing the carbon dioxide and generating the oxygen that is required for all the human activities. It is also surprising that the reaction that just uses sunglight, water and carbon-dioxide could be the most important…
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Sensors on the cheap
There are many sensors that go into devices, such as temperature sensors, pressure sensors or even hemoglobin oxygenation sensors. Many of the sensors are made by engineers to be very precise and also very linear in their response. However, they are expensive and most hobbyist look for alternatives to the sensors. Sometimes, it is possible…
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Zoho CRM has Card scanner
Business cards are used all the time for people to exchange contact information. The technology for exchanging cards using standardized pieces of paper has not changed for many years. The basic idea has remained the same, take the paper and put it in your files. Several companies have developed things that would enable easy exchange…
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Sensors for the environment including air quality sensor
Another series of sensors, this time for monitoring quality of local weather. There are many weather solutions out there but neatatmo intends to monitor the local (backyard) weather accurately and make specific graphs and reports about the hyper-local weather rather than rely on weather channels that supply the general weather. The instruments and the sensors…
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