Author Archives: Guest Post

Yammer Announces Message Translation to Ignite Multilingual Collaboration

Uses Microsoft Translator technology to support 39 languages.

SAN FRANCISCO — Feb. 28, 2013 — Yammer, Inc., a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network and part of the Microsoft Office Division, today announced plans to add message translation capabilities, which will allow users to instantly translate Yammer conversations into their native languages.

“Removing language as a barrier to cross-company collaboration can be a competitive game changer for multinational organizations. It opens a world of possibilities,” said Adam Pisoni, Yammer co-founder and general manager of Engineering, Microsoft Office Division. “This is another example of Yammer’s accelerated innovation following the Microsoft acquisition — we’re able to use Microsoft Translator to quickly deliver additional value to customers.” (more…)

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Chew on this

How a ‘motor mouth’ is changing dentistry

If you want your dental fillings, crowns, implants, and so on to last, you can thank ART.

Chewing involves some of the human body’s most complex motions, and ART, the artificial mouth at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry, can perform a year’s worth of chewing—300,000 cycles—in just a day or two. (more…)

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A Neural Basis for Benefits of Meditation

Mindfulness meditation training in awareness of present moment experience, such as body and breath sensations, prevents depression and reduces distress in chronic pain. In a new paper, Brown University scientists propose a neurophysiological framework to explain these clinical benefits. (more…)

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Buying ad time just got easier

Today’s consumers switch between media forms so often – from TV to laptops to smart phones – that capturing their attention with advertising has gone, as one CEO explained, from shooting fish in a barrel to shooting minnows. (more…)

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NASA’s NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin

PASADENA, Calif. — Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.

The supermassive black hole lies at the dust- and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is spinning almost as fast as Einstein’s theory of gravity will allow. The findings, which appear in a new study in the journal Nature, resolve a long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve. (more…)

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March of the Pathogens: Parasite Metabolism Can Foretell Disease Ranges under Climate Change

Knowing the temperatures that viruses, bacteria, worms and all other parasites need to grow and survive could help determine the future range of infectious diseases under climate change, according to new research.

Princeton University researchers developed a model that can identify the prospects for nearly any disease-causing parasite as the Earth grows warmer, even if little is known about the organism. Their method calculates how the projected temperature change for an area would alter the creature’s metabolism and life cycle, the researchers report in the journal Ecology Letters. (more…)

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IBM Big Data Technology Helps South Korea’s Meteorological Administration Increase Accuracy of Weather Forecasting

South Korea’s most powerful data storage system helps tackle weather’s data deluge

Seoul, SOUTH KOREA – 27 Feb 2013: South Korea’s Meteorological Administration (KMA) and IBM today announced a project to help KMA and its affiliate, the National Meteorological Satellite Center (NMSC), tackle Big Data for better, more accurate and predictive environmental forecasting.

As South Korea’s national meteorological organization, KMA’s mission is to protect citizens’ lives and property from natural disasters and support economic activities sensitive to environmental conditions. (more…)

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A Dual Look at Photosystem II Using the World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser

Berkeley Lab and SLAC Researchers Demonstrate Room Temperature Simultaneous Diffraction/Spectroscopy of Metalloenzymes

From providing living cells with energy, to nitrogen fixation, to the splitting of water molecules, the catalytic activities of metalloenzymes – proteins that contain a metal ion – are vital to life on Earth. A better understanding of the chemistry behind these catalytic activities could pave the way for exciting new technologies, most prominently artificial photosynthesis systems that would provide  clean, green and renewable energy. Now, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken a major step towards achieving this goal.

Using ultrafast, intensely bright pulses of X-rays from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, the researchers were able to simultaneously image at room temperature the atomic and electronic structures of photosystem II, a metalloenzyme critical to photosynthesis. (more…)

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