Neutrino Masses Confirmed March 31, 2006
Posted by Dmitri in Physics.add a comment
MINOS experiment confirmed that neutrinos have mass. The BBC News story does a good job explaining why masses of particles, that are almost impossible to observe, matter so much. “Light shed on mysterious particle” title though seems like a bad pun, since neutrinos do not have much to do with light. If anything, on those rare occasions when they interact with matter, light is emitted, not absorbed. The Register article about vanishing neutrinos is titled more appropriately, but is actually less informative. And just to round up today’s high-energy physics and cosmology reading list – the Why Files summary of the Big Bang mysteries offers a few insightful soundbites on the current theories about the past and the future of the Universe.
April 1 Update. OMG!!! Story accepted on Slashdot!!!
PINK PONIES day rules!!!
Google Deletes Own Blog March 31, 2006
Posted by Dmitri in Google, Websites.1 comment so far
A comment to the official Google Blog is back post claims that the same exploit can be used to take over blogger sites. An approximate translation of the claim (original is in Russian) is that it is possible to not only recover splogs previously deleted by blogger admins, but to also take over ownership of existing blogs. Of course, this could be just a publicity stunt, as the claim is made on a blog titled “Splog”, but at least so far it does not look like one.
The Cost of DNA Origami March 20, 2006
Posted by Dmitri in Biotechnology, DNA, Slashdot, nanobiotechnology, oligonucleotides.add a comment
Another post curtesy of a Slashdot discussion, this time of DNA Origami. In response to one of the questions, I ventured a guesstimate on the cost of DNA for that project.
The cost of (buying) DNA varies dramatically depending on the length and the purity of a sample, largely because DNA samples of different length are produced by different methods. The cost purification can also add up to more than that of the production. The Nature article specifically mentions common assumptions about the requirements for DNA components that can be used in programmed DNA self-assembly – essentially they have demonstrated that this can be done a lot cheaper than people have assumed.
