View PDF in Gmail
Now it is very easy to view any attached pdf file in Gmail. If anybody send you a pdf file then usually you download it in harddisk and view this file in any pdf viewer. But now you don't need any third party software to view any attached PDF file. Gmail has the unique ability to view the pdf file directly from inbox.
Picture and news source: Official Gmail Blog
Google Search Wiki
On 20 November 2008 GoogleBlog said that:
Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.
The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link.
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
From Gmailblog:-
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.
We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.
Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.
Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.
Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses) - the Microsoft years - 01
by Engadget staff, posted Jun 27th 2008 at 3:33PM
Damn, Bill, you have come a LONG way. Look at you there back in '82, you handsome devil. As part of our tribute, let's take a quick look back at the top ten greatest (and not so great) products created on Bill-time, shall we? Don't worry, it'll only sting a little.
Internet Explorer (IE)
Introduced 1995
It's really easy to simply remember "Internet Exploder" as the standards-breaking, web-forking, buggy, monopoly-causing app that helped shape Bill's old image as the evilest baron of all technology companies. But it's also the app that led to the creation Ajax-based web apps through the XMLHttpRequest spec, and the kludgey early popularization of CSS. Love it or hate it, IE's gotten more people on the web over the years than any browser, and that's definitely got to count for something.
Media Center
Introduced 2002
Despite TiVo's DVR dominance and competitors that came and went over the years, Media Center has always been an underrated standout product. Even Bill admits that the company's long struggled with usability, but Media Center is a beacon of hope not only for 10-foot UIs everywhere, but also for the company's ability to create powerful, advanced, user-friendy products. Between its online integration, extensible plugin architecture, ability to stream shows to nodes around the house, and now CableCARD support, the only real downside to Media Center is the fact that you still need a full-blown PC to run it.
MS-DOS
Introduced 1981, discontinued 2000
It was arcane and nigh-unusable to mere mortals -- but the early cash-cow was one of Bill's most strategic moves, and helped Microsoft define the concept of software licensing. It also helped launched Mossberg's career as crusader of user-friendly technology. But most importantly, MS-DOS was still the OS an entire generation grew up learning, so del crticsm.* for a second because our autoexec.bat and config.sys were so very well crafted, and extensively tweaking Memmaker for a few extra KB of usable RAM definitely ranks amongst our top most formative geek moments.
Speaking Without Sound
ScienceNOW Daily News
Children learn to talk by listening to others speak, but what happens when that line of communication is severed? Surprisingly, people who go deaf as adults can chat intelligibly for years afterward. Now, thanks to a robot that tweaks jaw movements, scientists may have figured out why.
Neuroscientists David Ostry and Sazzad Nasir of McGill University in Montréal, Canada, suspected that in addition to listening, people pay attention to muscles in their own faces, tongues, and vocal tracts to judge whether they are saying words correctly. To test the theory, the two recruited 11 adult volunteers, some with normal hearing and some who had gone deaf within the past 20 years but who wore cochlear implants.
The crux of the experiment was distorting the muscular sensations of speaking. The researchers connected the subjects to a robotic device that tugged their lower jaw outward a tiny amount. The two groups were then asked to say words like "sass" and "saw"--words that start with the same mouth position and use vowels that open the mouth wide--as the robot pulled their jaw outward by a few millimeters. The tiny shifts in mouth position didn't change the way words sounded, Ostry says. But what if the participants could not rely on any sound cues to adjust their speech?
The team had the deaf subjects turn their implants off during the experiment. After repeating hundreds of words, all five of the deaf participants began to pull their jaws in slightly to partially correct for the manipulation, the researchers report online this week in Nature Neuroscience. "These are such small changes, but the nervous system cares when you get the movements wrong by tiny amounts," Ostry says. The results indicate that sensations from the jaw and vocal tract alone can be used for speech learning.
"It's beautiful work," says James Lackner, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The findings may one day inspire speech therapy approaches that teach people to notice changes in mouth position rather than listening for changes in sounds, says Shari Baum, a neurolinguist at McGill University who was not involved in the research. But it's important not to forget the significance of hearing, especially for children learning to speak, she says.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/915/2?etoc
'Big Bang' experiment starts well
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years
Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.
They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash particles together with cataclysmic force.
Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.
The first beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. The second successfully circled the ring after 1400 BST.
Cern has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions, but these are expected to happen before the machine shuts down for winter.
"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. There were cheers in the control room when engineers heard of the successful test.
He added later: "We had a very good start-up."
The LHC is arguably the most complicated and ambitious experiment ever built; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late.
The collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern.
The vast circular tunnel - the "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.
The magnets are there to steer the beam - made up of particles called protons - around this 27km-long ring.
Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.
At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.
Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.
Major effort
"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool.
"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."
The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?
"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.
The currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.
The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe.
The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".
But Professor Virdee told BBC News: "Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us."
Full beam ahead
Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring.
Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems.
Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, said: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets."
If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.
Superconducting magnets are cooled down using liquid heliumMr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.
The culprits - who were drinking a particular brand that advertising once claimed would "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach" - were never found.
After the beams make one turn, engineers attempt to "close the orbit", allowing the beams to circulate continuously around the LHC.
Engineers then try to "capture" them. The beams which circle the LHC is not continuous; they are composed of several packets - each about a metre long - containing billions of protons.
The protons would disperse if left to their own devices, so engineers use electrical forces to "grab" them, keeping the particles tightly huddled in packets.
Once the beams are captured, the same system of electrical forces is used to give the particles an energetic kick, accelerating them to greater and greater speeds.
Long haul
The idea of the Large Hadron Collider emerged in the early 1980s. The project was eventually approved in 1996 at a cost of 2.6bn Swiss Francs, which amounts to about £1.3bn at present exchange rates.
However, Cern underestimated equipment and engineering costs when it set out its original budget, plunging the lab into a cash crisis.
Cern had to borrow hundreds of millions of euros in bank loans to get the LHC completed. The current price is nearly four times that originally envisaged.
During winter, the LHC will be shut down, allowing equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy.
"What's so exciting is that we haven't had a large new facility starting up for years," explained Dr Shears.
"Our experiments are so huge, so complex and so expensive that they don't come along very often. When they do, we get all the physics out of them that we can."
Engineers celebrated the success with champagne, but a certain brand of beer was not on the menu.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Courtesy: BBC News
Google Chrome is coming tomorrow
A new web browser is going to rock the cyber world tomorrow. It's Google's Chrome. Official Google blog said:
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.
On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.
This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.
Details information is available Here. Check it now.
How Sound Can Move Light
Ventriloquism In Motion: How Sound Can Move Light
The study, conducted in conjunction with Prof. Jon Driver at University College London, revealed that the perceived direction of motion from a given visual object (in this case, red bars across a screen), depends on minute variations in the timing of an accompanying sound (a sequence of beeps, for example). This provides evidence that the brain’s integration of these visual and audio cues occurs at a very early stage of processing.
Every day examples of audio-visual integration include our ability to identify who is saying what in a noisy crowd and the illusion that sound comes directly from the an actor’s lips seen on a television, rather than from the loudspeakers; the latter is the well-known ‘Ventriloquist Effect’, where seeing influences the location of sounds.
The audiovisual illusion revealed by this new research could be dubbed ‘reverse ventriloquism in motion’, as it shows that sound affects what we see. This might explain why if we watch dancing without sound, the dancers appear to have no rhythm; and why the sound of a ball hitting a racket can help us to determine the direction of the ball in a game of tennis even though the ball moves faster that the camera or eye can track.
Dr. Freeman believes that his research could have profound implications for the understanding of the neural processes that underlie multisensory perception. This knowledge could be applied in a number of industries: “The illusion could be applied to novel displays that change their appearance depending on sound, which may be of use in advertising or providing an eye-catching multisensory warning or alert in safety-critical applications. It may also eventually be useful in detecting and diagnosing subtle perceptual differences thought to be characteristic of certain clinical conditions such as dyslexia and autistic spectrum.”
Source: ScienceDaily
Spiraling Nanotrees Offer New Twist On Growth Of Nanowires
But when University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Song Jin and graduate student Matthew Bierman accidentally made some pine tree shapes one day -- complete with tall trunks and branches that tapered in length as they spiraled upward -- they knew they'd stumbled upon something peculiar.
"At the beginning we saw just a couple of trees, and we said, 'What the heck is going on here?'" recalls Jin. "They were so curious."
Writing in the May 1 edition of Science Express, Jin and his team reveal just how curious the nanotrees truly are. In fact, they're evidence of an entirely different way of growing nanowires, one that promises to give scientists a powerful means to create new and better nanomaterials for all sorts of applications, including high-performance integrated circuits, biosensors, solar cells, LEDs and lasers.
Until now, most nanowires have been made with metal catalysts, which promote the growth of nanomaterials along one dimension to form long rods. While the branches on Jin's trees also elongate in this way, growth of the trunks is driven by a "screw" dislocation, or defect, in their crystal structure. At the top of the trunk, the defect provides a spiral step for atoms to settle on an otherwise perfect crystal face, causing them stack together in a spiral parking ramp-type structure that quickly lengthens the tip.
Dislocations are fundamental to the growth and characteristics of all crystalline materials, but this is the first time they've been shown to aid the growth of one-dimensional nanostructures. Engineering these defects, says Jin, may not only allow scientists to create more elaborate nanostructures, but also to investigate the fundamental mechanical, thermal and electronic properties of dislocations in materials.
His team created its nanotrees specifically by applying a slight variation of a synthesis technique called chemical vapor deposition to the material lead sulfide. But the chemists believe the new mechanism will be applicable to many other materials, as well.
"We think these findings will motivate a lot of people to do this purposefully, to design dislocation and try to grow nanowires around it," Jin says. "Or perhaps people who have grown a structure and were puzzled by it will read our paper and say, 'Hey, we see something similar in our system, so maybe now we have the solution.'"
What initially puzzled Jin and his students about their pine tree structures was the long length of the trunks compared with the branches, a difference that indicated the trunks were growing much faster. The result was surprising because when complex, branching nanostructures are grown with metal catalysts, the branches are usually all of similar length because of similar growth rates, leading to boxy shapes rather than the cone-shapes of the trees.
Another oddity was the twist to the trunks, which sent the branches spiraling.
"The long and twisting trunks were telling us we had a new growth mode," says Jin. Suspecting dislocation, the team set about refining their technique for growing the pine trees -- they soon learned to produce entire forests with ease -- and then confirmed the presence of dislocations with a special type of transmission electron microscopy.
Upon closer examination, the twisting trunks and spiraling branches also turned out to embody a well-known general theory about the mechanical deformation of crystalline materials caused by screw dislocations. Although this so-called "Eshelby twist" was first calculated back in 1953 and is discussed in many textbooks, Jin's experimental results likely offer the best support yet for the theory.
"These are beautiful, truly intriguing structures, but behind them is also a really beautiful, interesting science," says Jin. "Once you understand it, you just feel so...satisfied."
The paper's other authors are Y.K. Albert Lau, Alexander Kvit and Andrew Schmitt. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
