science

iPhone 5 coming in September

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OK, this item is here simply because I’m keen to get my hands on the next iPhone … the news is …

(Reuters) – Apple’s next-generation iPhone will have a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, three people with direct knowledge of the company’s supply chain said.

The production of the new iPhone will start in July/August and the smartphone will look largely similar to the iPhone 4, one of the people said on Wednesday.

The iPhone — introduced in 2007 with the touchscreen, on-demand application template now adopted by its rivals — remains the gold standard in the booming smartphone market.

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A galactic rose

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NASA Press release …

April 20, 2011: To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.

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Singularity 101

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The Singularity, also known as the nerd rapture, can be a bit of a mystery to some, well no longer because the Singularity Institure, has published a Singularity FAQ (think of it as Singularity 101).

Is there anything skeptical here? Well yes, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

First, some basics (from the FAQ of course) …

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Anti-vaccine kooks still at it

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All parents will strive to do what is best for their kids, so when faced with a photograph of a mother cradling her naked baby accompanied by the words: “Vaccines: Know the risks.” it gains some attention. The image is faded out, and then replaced by the Statue of Liberty and “Vaccination. Your Health. Your Family. Your Choice.”, how would any parent react?

The ad links to Mercola and NVIC  websites full of articles blaming common ingredients in vaccines for a number of health problems from breast cancer to infertility. The very seed of doubt is enough to cause any concerned parent to pause and opt not to vaccinate.

The only problem is that it is all an outright lie.

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The origin of Life

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Whenever engaged in a debate with believers a common question that often arises is, “How do you explain life, what started it all?”

OK then, lets step back see where we are today. To start off, here is an interesting article on the origin of life on The Daily Galaxy here …

It’s paradoxical that as our leading microbiologists look to create the building blocks of life in Earth-bound labs, our Universe is alive with the building blocks for DNA and RNA. The giant gas nebula in outer space are rife with sugars that form ribose –the backbone of RNA. There’s no rational reason why the system of DNA and RNA that shaped life on Earth should be limited to our remote biosphere.

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Yuri Gagarin

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The Google logo declares that today is the day.  Exactly 50 years ago on 12th April 1961 he became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth.

To help with a bit of an insight, his elder daughter Elena gave her first ever interview about her father to Andrea Rose of the British Council. This is the complete transcript. Here are a couple of surprising details …

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