Made up of three parts that clip apart for easy cleaning, the Noodle Dispenser holds your noodles in an airtight tube for storage, then provides means for perfect portions. One hole big enough for a child-sized portion, one hole big enough for an adult-sized portion, and a circular finger space for turning to the correct hole.

Designer: WANKO studio

Alzheimer's is characterized by two kinds of proteins -- amyloid and tau -- that aggregate in the brain. Stultz and co-author Austin Huang, an HST graduate student, have focused on determining the structure of tau.

But there's a problem. "Tau is 'natively unfolded,' or floppy, so in solution it moves around a lot and can adopt many different structures," Stultz said [Collin M. Stultz, the leader of the work and the W.M. Keck Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science], much like the individual strands in a bowl of cooked spaghetti. Contrast that to the vast majority of other proteins, whose individual strands have similar structures, like the individual strands of uncooked spaghetti.

"With a 'normal' protein," Stultz said, "you can measure the lengths of individual molecules and the average will be a pretty good description of any one." Tau molecules, however, "are all over the place -- they're so diverse that it's difficult to get one measurement that describes all of the possible structures."

That complicates the hunt for specific tau structures associated with Alzheimer's (not all tau is bad).

Stultz and Huang approached the problem as engineers, breaking it down into steps. Using a method they developed called Energy-minima Mapping and Weighting (EMW), they asked a computer to come up with all possible structures of tau that are consistent with an average set of experimental data.

"We generated lots and lots of structures for both normal tau and a mutant form" associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer's, Stultz said. By comparing the two sets, the researchers found one structure that was more common in the mutant form -- and therefore likely to "play a role in the pathologic process." That structure, in turn, could then become the target for a new drug.

Press release: MIT zeroes in on Alzheimer's structures...

To learn more about EMW method and author's research, head on to the article in PLoS Computational Biology: The Effect of a ΔK280 Mutation on the Unfolded State of a Microtubule-Binding Repeat in Tau

Images: Up: Outline of EMW method, as described in the study. Side: Confocal image of an Alzheimer's brain showing a region of amyloid plaque. Wellcome Images.

Not only does packing your own lunch save money (can you believe how much it costs to get a sandwich or salad these days, and Heaven help you if you want both), it also saves the time and effort it takes to battle the lunch crowd.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that it’s SO much healthier to take your own lunch - especially if you’re smart about it and prepare a lunch that’s as healthy and filling as it is delicious.

The picture, here, and the recipe below are from a feature on Southern Living.com.  This Sweet Chili-Lime Noodles with Vegetables recipe is part of a feature called Power Up Your Lunch.  There are several recipes, but this one just begged to be the one I focused on.  It’s a lime thing.

I’m actually re-structuring the recipe, size wise, and making it for lunch this afternoon.  I’m feeling kind of kicky, so I think I’ll throw in some firm tofu seasoned with lime and pepper.  Check out the other recipes by clicking the link above.

Sweet Chili-Lime Noodles with Vegetables
1 cup cooked whole grain spaghetti (2 oz. uncooked)
2 cups shredded bok choy (or shredded cabbage)
1/4 cup grated carrot
1/4 cup fresh snow peas
Sweet Chili-Lime Sauce (recipe below)
1/4 cup shredded cooked chicken (optional)

1. Place pasta, next 4 ingredients, and, if desired, chicken in a medium-size microwave-safe plastic container. Cover with lid, and shake to combine.
2. Lift 1 corner of lid to allow steam to escape. Microwave at HIGH 2 minutes or until vegetables are tender.

Sweet Chili-Lime Sauce
2 tablespoons bottled sweet chili sauce
2 teaspoons lime juice
1/2 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic

Mix all ingredients until combined.
 

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This Do it Yourself Project is designed by Brady Clark and Hykle Hansen. The vest is powered by an Arduino computer, an open-source embedded platform that is powered by an Amtel microcontroller.

As for the display itself, it uses electro luminescent wire that glows brightly with just a small amount of high voltage. One AA battery can power the Speed Vest for up to six hours, while a 9 volt can power the Amtel microcontroller for the same amount of time.

So, you can ride with this jacket for a little while without having to worry about power. I don’t know if the inventors of this device plan on mass marketing this, but you would think they would use the same method of numbering that is used on LCD alarms and calculators. Otherwise, there is a lot of glowing spaghetti mixed up in the back of that jacket.

Even if this does get mass marketed, I don’t know why you would want this particular device. I mean, if it was made a requirement for all bikers to wear so cops could check their speeding, then these numbers could be faked.

Source
[ Speed Vest has got your back copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Courtesy of Waxy's illustrious Andy Baio, a wonderfully written history of the halcyon years of GIF News, a distributed online newsletter distributed via BBSes (the Internet's underground, trilobitic evolutionary precursor) dating back to 1988. Luridly pixelated Flickr gallery and all!

As for the content of this newsletter itself, it's important to note that the content was not about the GIF format itself (the Graphics Interchange Format is described in excruciating detail here), but simply used the GIF format to provide something that in 1988 was pretty unique for a person working out of upstate New York: a full-color, easily transmittable, completely static presentation of computer news. Because he had the 256 color palette to work from, Hsiao could intersperse color screen shots, artwork, and all range of unusual fonts. While not preceding the era of vector-based formats like Postscript, GIF News could produce a relatively low-size file (almost none exceed 100k in size) that could then be archived with other pages and transferred throughout the world...

Beyond the transport mechanism, of course, is the content being discussed. The GIF News would only arrive every 60 days or so, and each issue would be at most four pages/images, so the ability to devour the content in a world with RSS feeds and news shooting at us by the bucketful blows through a given posting in no time. It would be unfair, again, to sit here in 2008 and compare what tools rest in our hands for generating an image-and-text newsletter and berate or sneer at Eric's seemingly glacial release pace; every one of these pages could have been hours of painful adjustments and drawing, writing the articles and then carefully placing pixels or groupings around captured artwork.

My heart always suffers from a pang, a fond ache, when I read-up on the incredibly creative BBS scenes of the late 80s... a scene I largely missed in lieu of downloading shareware games from Software Creations and playing pornographic door games. There were these clusters of incredible creativity and ingenuity hidden inside a sprawlingly disjointed, 1200 baud spaghetti structure of isolated communities tied together (at best) by the tin-can transmission system of FidoNet. I was never a part of these, but these secret conclaves of phreakers, programmers, artists and writers were the first cowboys of cyberspace. I wish I'd spent my youth getting to know them.

History of GIF News [Textfiles via Waxy]

GIF News Gallery [Flickr]

Short story shorter: It's about four inches long and as thin as spaghetti.

Here's Scott Norris's August 3, 2008 National Geographic News story with the details.

World's Smallest Snake Discovered, Study Says

The world's smallest snake — and perhaps the smallest possible snake — has been discovered on the Caribbean island of Barbados, a new study says.

At about ten centimeters long (less than four inches), the diminutive reptile might easily be mistaken for an earthworm, and could comfortably curl up on a U.S. quarter [top], researchers say.

A second new species, only slightly larger, was found on the neighboring island of St. Lucia.

Genetic tests and studies of the snakes' physical features identified the animals as new species, said biologist Blair Hedges of Penn State university, who led the study team.

Both new species belong to a little-known group of known as thread snakes — also called worm snakes and slender blind snakes. Short and slender, thread snakes burrow in the soil and live on a diet of insect larvae.

Finding the smallest snake completes an odd trifecta for Hedges, who also led the teams that discovered the world's smallest lizard and smallest frog.

"The frog and lizard are also found on Caribbean islands," he said. "But [my] describing all three [for science] is somewhat of a coincidence."

Unfortunately the smallest snake — which Hedges calls Leptotyphlops carlae — may be on the verge of extinction. It appears to be live on only a few square kilometers of forest on Barbados, where almost all the original forests have been cleared.

"I think it should be considered critically endangered because of its limited habitat, apparent rarity, and ongoing threats," said Hedges, whose study will be published tomorrow in the journal Zootaxa.

The world's roughly 3,100 known snake species show an enormous range in body size, from the Caribbean thread snakes to the roughly 30-foot long (10-meter-long) reticulated python.

Many of the smallest snake species are found on oceanic islands — a pattern that holds true for other animals too.

"A number of island species have evolved extremes in size, small and large, apparently because they have come to occupy vacant niches that are normally filled [by other species] on the continents," Hedges explained.

"For example, if centipedes are missing from an island, a snake species can evolve to a smaller size and eat the food normally consumed by the centipede."

But there are limits.

Hedges believes the Barbados thread snake may be at or near the smallest size possible for snakes, due to an evolutionary trade-off between size and reproductive strategy.

Any further miniaturization, he said, would prevent the snakes from producing offspring large enough to forage independently and consume insect prey.

Among the five L. carlae individuals Hedges examined was a pregnant female bearing a single, elongated egg — a rarity among snakes, which tend to produce more offspring in a brood.

But multiple eggs mean smaller eggs, and Hedges speculated that if the Barbados thread snake's eggs were any smaller, they would result in offspring too small too survive.

Nathan Kley, a biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said it may be too soon to declare the Barbados thread snake the world's smallest.

Several closely related species are only fractions of an inch longer, and those species are known from only a few observations or museum specimens.

"The true natural size ranges for all of these species remains extremely poorly documented," Kley said.

"Most [thread snakes] are extraordinarily small, and most exhibit secretive, burrowing lifestyles, so they often escape detection."

Even if the new species is the shortest, Kley noted, others are even thinner, resulting in a smaller body volume.

"For my money, it's these extremely slender taxa that are more highly miniaturized," he said.