New Florence. New Renaissance.

Your virtual double

Researchers have already developed models of many of the major organs (see diagram). Lars Küpfer at Bayer Technology Services, a pharmaceutical company in Leverkusen, Germany, and colleagues have created a virtual liver, for example, which they can use to investigate the toxicity of substances such as paracetamol. "The virtual human is the ultimate goal of computational biology," says Küpfer. "Current models, including the ones we are using, are important milestones along the way."

The ability to simulate biological functions is becoming important for developing more effective drugs. "Pharma companies are in trouble using their existing routes," says Coveney. Drugs often don't work for significant subsets of the population. "It's not one size fits all."

One of the goals of the Virtual Physiological Human project is for people to participate in their own medical care, simulating the outcomes of certain choices and even self-diagnosing. But with control comes responsibility. Will we listen to our simulated self?

New Scientist (sub required)

Click on image to enlarge

Watergate 40 years on

After 40 years, how advances in technology have allowed us to revisit Watergate:

“On November 19, 2009, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) of the documents was undertaken at the Library of Congress Preservation Research and Testing Division HSI Laboratory in Washington, DC. On December 11, 2009, and January 13, 2010, electrostatic detection analysis (ESDA) and video spectral comparison (VSC) examinations of the documents were undertaken at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Forensic Science Laboratory in Beltsville, MD. In support of these examinations, high resolution scans of the original documents and of the ESDA results were prepared at the NARA Special Media Preservation Reformatting Division Digital Imaging Laboratory in College Park, MD.

None of these efforts revealed or recovered additional content regarding H. R. Haldeman's 11:30 A.M. meeting with President Nixon in the Executive Office Building on June 20, 1972. “

Read more at US National Archives

Adobe + EchoSign = end of fax and Fedex and printer ink?

Are we truly nearing - finally - a paperless state?

From Adobe's announcement of EchoSign (the electronic signature company) acquisition

"EchoSign's solution, which currently supports more than three million users worldwide, will be offered as part of Adobe's online document exchange services platform. The EchoSign solution will be integrated with other Adobe(R) document services including SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation. By reducing the time and costs of having documents signed with traditional methods, such as fax and overnight envelopes, the EchoSign solution can enable customers to significantly accelerate sales cycles, improve tracking and centralize the management of signed agreements through a simple to use cloud service."

Photo Credit

Son-et-Lumiere goes 3D and comes to a place near you

If you have been to the Pyramids or the Taj you have probably seen the Son-et-Lumiere show at night. After 50+ years, the concept is a bit dated and you had to fly for hours to go see the show.

Well, a new form of show using buildings like in video below is coming near you. The Coolist site has several examples. It has the feel of the movie “Inception” being brought to life.

Artists such as NuFormer from the Netherlands and increasingly corporate benefactors like BMW and Samsung are bringing these customized 3D shows.  Some interesting factoids from NuFormer:

• When we line up several projectors we can actually project on a surface of 200 meters or more.
• A minimum distance of 35 to 40 meters is required between the building and the projector in order to get optimal results.
• Projection on modern glass buildings is not possible. The projection will actually ‘go through’ the glass.

Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags

“The tiny labels are just 3 millimeters across -- about the size of the @ symbol on a typical computer keyboard. Yet they can contain far more information than an ordinary barcode: thousands of bits. Currently they require a lens and a built-in LED light source, but future versions could be made reflective, similar to the holographic images now frequently found on credit cards, which would be much cheaper and more unobtrusive.”

Phsyorg

Photo credit MIT

A Picture Worth a Thousand Pictures

“This impressive panorama is actually a collection of 592 distinct photos, shot with a Canon Powershot with a 360mm zoom, and the help of a nifty gadget called the GigaPan Epic. Plop your camera into the device and it will automatically take between 20 and several hundred slightly overlapping pictures of a scene. The GigaPan software stitches them together for you into one massive, ultra-detailed, thousands-of-megapixels collage.

…Because the files are so large -- the photo above is 2,326 megapixels; a 2,000-shot image will weigh in around 6 gigapixels -- they're a pain to email, so upload them to gigapan.org to share with the world. GigaPan's viewer functions like Google Maps, sending only as much information as you need, and gathering more as you zoom in closer.”

Popular Science

Next-Gen 3D movies

"In the history of film, there have been two great revolutionary events -- the transition from silent movies to synchronised sound that happened in the early 1920s, and the arrival of colour in the 1930s," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, which created the "Shrek" series.

"Now more than seven decades later, the movie industry is entering the third period of revolutionary change with the arrival of 3D,"

PhysOrg

Photo of audience from a U2 3D movie

Yosemite Extreme Panaromic Imaging Project

Saw this courtesy of Robert Scoble

"The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project began in summer 2007 as a discussion between xRez Studio and Greg Stock, staff Geologist of Yosemite National Park, about constructing a comprehensive, large scale gigapixel image of the valley walls in high detail. The image would become a tool for Stock’s research of rockfall behavior in the park, an ongoing hazard with the large percentage of vertical faces present in the valley. By using gigapixel imagery as an aid in re-photography, the project hopes to create a extremely detailed snapshot in time of present-day geologic conditions, in order to assist future analysis of rockfall activity."

More at xRez Studio