Australia’s laws on Internet censorship are, theoretically, amongst the most restrictive in the Western world. However, the restrictive nature of the laws has been combined with almost complete lack of interest in enforcement from the agencies responsible.
Each of us has at least 100 new mutations in our DNA, according to research published in the journal Current Biology.
Scientists have been trying to get an accurate estimate of the mutation rate for over 70 years.
However, only now has it been possible to get a reliable estimate, thanks to "next generation" technology for genetic sequencing.
The findings may lead to new treatments and insights into our evolution.
In 1935, one of the founders of modern genetics, JBS Haldane, studied a group of men with the blood disease haemophilia. He speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each of us.
Others have since looked at DNA in chimpanzees to try to produce general estimates for humans.
However, next generation sequencing technology has enabled the scientists to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate.
They looked at thousands of genes in the Y chromosomes of two Chinese men. They knew the men were distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805.
By looking at the number of differences between the two men, and the size of the human genome, they were able to come up with an estimate of between 100 and 200 new mutations per person.
Impressively, it seems that Haldane was right all along.
Unimaginable
One of the scientists, Dr Yali Xue from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, said: "The amount of data we generated would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
"And finding this tiny number of mutations was more difficult than finding an ant's egg in an emperor's rice store."
New mutations can occasionally lead to severe diseases like cancer. It is hoped that the findings may lead to new ways to reduce mutations and provide insights into human evolution.
Joseph Nadeau, from the Case Western Reserve University in the US, who was not involved in this study said: "New mutations are the source of inherited variation, some of which can lead to disease and dysfunction, and some of which determine the nature and pace of evolutionary change.
"These are exciting times," he added.
"We are finally obtaining good reliable estimates of genetic features that are urgently needed to understand who we are genetically."
The architectural firm, Emergent Architecture, has designed a bioreactor system that is being envisioned to be installed in Perth. The Perth PhotoBioReactor will use colonies of red and green algae to generate biofuel.
The outer shells of the Photobioreactors are fiber-composite monocoque construction, pleated for stiffness. The Photobioreactors contain colonies of algae that require CO2 and light at the front end and generate hydrogen or biofuel at the other end.
The system is based on the technology developed by OriginOil which that allows for continued operation in shade and also in complete darkness through the use of a helix of lights inside each algae coil.
The electricity needed for the system to run is generated by thin-film solar transistors that are embedded in the transparent polycarbonate apertures. The system can be placed in different locations as a piece of art, and can help generate fuel for the masses as well.
.. from greentechaustralia.blogspot.com
.. Now with even more fresh zeroes and ones!
Since moving back to Australia and buying a tv, we have been using an old desktop computer of mine as our poor man's 'home theatre PC'.
While it has been functional, it's also really been a bit of a piece of crap, the fan is really noisy for at least the first 15 minutes of turning it on, if you reboot rather than shutting it down it can't find the harddrive, that sort of stuff.
We actually have been using it quite a lot, the standard nightly mealtime conversation usually incorporating a 'what to watch' component, along with the more standard 'what to eat'.
After the recent untimely death of my laptop and nicer than usual tax return, I decided to give my wife a new computer (she's been using my old gateway 9300 which is a p3 600 with 256mb ram), and hating it... and fix our media centre situation at the same time.
On the recommendation of a friend from work I went down to Bestone computers on Victoria Rd one afternoon and got us some new toys. It's pretty amazing what $550 gets you nowadays. I know I'm going to look back on this and laugh, but Core2 duo 2.6, 2gb ram, 160gb hdd, certainly enough juice for the job.
For Peilin's pc I added a Acer 23 inch LCD which looks awesome, and for the htpc (home theatre pc - that's the lingo), I added a HDMI video card, figuring the tv supports it, so may as well.
From a software point of view I put Ubuntu 9.04 on Peilin's machine (we ended up with too many toolbars of unknown origin when we had xp), and initially mythbuntu on the htpc.
I ended up ditching Mythbuntu and using a standard Ubuntu 9.04 install with X-box media centre (xmbc) for linux on top, simply because we don't really need anything other than a tool to allow us to watch downloaded shows on the tv, no recording, no remote servers etc.
Also we were familiar with the xbmc interface as we used the windows version on the old noisy xp box.
Besides a crystal clear display and a 45 second boot time, another advantage is that our generic htpc remote ($14.95 from Ebay, delivered) works almost entirely out of the box.
I'll look at doing a little tweaking as things like the shutdown button on the remote no longer actually shuts down, but I've found some info on editing the control info here.
Isn't it great when things just work?
Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence that life could exist beyond Earth, with research published showing that comet dust contained traces of a compound vital to human existence.
Researchers probing dust and gas collected from the Wild 2 comet by NASA's Stardust spacecraft in 2004 found traces of the amino acid glycine, lending credence to idea that there is life elsewhere in the universe.
"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said Carl Pilcher, one of the space agency's top astrobiologists.
Jamie Elsila, lead author of the report, which was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, said the findings also support the idea that the material elements of human life may have come from space.
"Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts," she said.
The group's final findings confirm suspicions that the amino acid -- which creates the proteins that form the building blocks of life -- were not simply earth-sourced contamination.
"We discovered that the Stardust-returned glycine has an extraterrestrial carbon isotope signature, indicating that it originated on the comet," said Elsila.
Twenty different amino acids are arranged to build the millions of different proteins that make up everything from hair to enzymes, NASA said.
