On The Path to Universal Blood

It used to be the case that in the event of needing a blood transfusion you could only get specific types of blood. For certain people that could be a worse thing than others, but it could all be a thing of the past thanks to scientists at the University of Copenhagen led by Henrik Clausen. The Danish team have developed a way to scrub the antigens (sugars that give blood its “type”) from blood cells, effectively transforming it into the universally-accepted type “O”. The process uses two enzymes, one of which is found in the human gut and the other commonly causes opportunistic infection.

??The A and B antigens, which give blood groups their name, are sugars carried on the surface of red blood cells. Human red blood cells can carry one of these antigens, both, or neither; giving four blood groups: A, B, AB and O, respectively.??
For more about this amazing discovery, read this “article”:http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11508&feedId=online-news_rss20 in the “New Scientist”:http://www.newscientist.com/ . Credit goes to the “American Red Cross”:http://www.givebloodredcross.org for the blood-type chart used above.

French Shatter High-Speed Record for Trains w/ Wheels


A modified TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse / Train of Great Speed) with two engines called the V150 attained a record speed of 581 km/hr (361 mph) on the run between Paris and Strasbourg. The record for all trains belongs to the mag-lev trains of Japan. Of course, none of this helps me get to Spain any faster as there are no direct connections between the countries owing to a difference in rail gauges.
A “BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6521295.stm with the same AFP photo.

Killer Apps for Mac – Sidenote

I started using Sidenote almost a week ago and it’s already become an integral part of my OS X life. I use it to store absolutely all of my working notes from job hunting to ideas for blog articles. Anytime I want to use it I just press _Cmd-^-[_ (my choice) and it slides out, I make my notes, and with the same key stroke it dissapears, automatically saving what I wrote.
From the “Mac Downloads page:”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/sidenote.html :
_”[Sidenote] Tries to catch the “Stickies” spirit but in the form of a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right). You can use it to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font.
Sidenote will automatically expand so that you will be able to drag into it any picture, text clipping or pdf file from the finder or your favorite application. With notes auto-saving, you’ll never have to save your notes. Sidenote will handle that for you. You can also print notes or export them to rtf.”_
Here’s a screenshot of Sidenote at work.
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Go South Young Man

Global warming isn’t happening quite fast enough for sun-seeking Americans who have been moving to sunny Southern California and Florida at such rates that the property prices haven’t had time to catch up. “Business Week”:http://businessweek.com recently put out a special report about the 274 most appreciative zip codes in America. Quite why they’re appreciative is unclear, and there’s certainly no real understanding as to why they chose 274, but in an equally random number choice, here are the top 11 and here is a “link to the report.”:http://www.businessweek.com/investing/special_reports/20070302luxuryreal.htm
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The Art of Wii – Creativity Meets Technology

Nintendo of Canada is hosting a “unique sweepstakes”:http://theartofwii.nintendo.com/ in which contestants can win one of six beautifully crafted, artistically brilliant, hand-painted Wiis. These systems are gorgeous.
“http://theartofwii.nintendo.com/ Each was crafted by a renowned Canadian artist, and each provides a unique interpretation of Nintendo's vision for the Wii: one features a friendly bunny waving hello to a friend, while another (pictured below) features a slick character exploding out of the Wii canvas in a fury of 1-Ups and treasure chests (brandishing a Wiimote and Nunchuk, no less). This entry was posted in Original Duenos and tagged , on by .

And The April Fools' Day Winner Is . . .

“Overclocked Remix”:http://www.ocremix.org, a site specializing in arrangements and remixes of video game music, absolutely blew away the rest of this years’ “April Fools’ Day joke field”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2007.
The site today released a “soundtrack featuring 18 remixes”:http://icecap.ocremix.org/ –mixes of perhaps the single most clichéd song in the vgremix world: Ice Cap Zone from Sonic 3.
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR00691/ of djpretzel's (subtly enough, entitled "Love Hurts") with Ice Cap awkwardly overlaid on it. Another "gem":pixietricks features a ridiculous a capella rendition of the artist singing her name and the song's name repeatedly--to the tune of Ice Cap. The rest of the humor stems from the hundreds of site members who have "not yet realized this is a joke":http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8732, including remixers who have "threatened to quit":http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8734&page=4 the site over the poor quality of the collection. Clearly, they did not hear the toilet-flushing (literally) beats in "this song":toilet. Is it a bad thing that I really like "some of them":beats? [beats]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_03_Icecap_Zone_2007_(Green_Hill_Mix)_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [toilet]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_17_The_Music_of_My_Icecap_Zone_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [icecaphurts]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_01_Ice_Cap_Hurts_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3 [pixietricks]http://rama.herograw.org/icecap/ReCapitated_13_Pixietricks_Ice_Capella_(Ice_Cap_Zone_Act_1).mp3

Oh April Fools, You Bring Me Joy

Every year April Fools’ Day delivers wacky internet hijinx, and it seems like each year sites try to outdo themselves and each other. Some of my favorites from today thus far include “Facebook’s”:http://www.facebook.com LivePoke system (which I absolutely wish were real) and “Google’s free in-home, toilet-based broadband”:http://www.google.com/tisp/. More awesomeness to be updated throughout the day!
More April Fools’ jokes:
“Gmail’s Google Paper”:http://www.gmail.com
“NASA’s first game of Space Quidditch”:http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070401.html
“woot!’s million dollar bag-o-crap”:http://www.woot.com
“Blizzard’s ‘new’ Warcraft game”:http://www.blizzard.com/whoa/
The “complete list”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2007 at Wikipedia

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Lend Money Online To Third World Entrepreneurs

“Nicholas Kristof”:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html, the talented New York Times opinion writer, continues to impress me with his ingenuity, resourcefulness, and compassion. Last week he wrote about “a new way to help combat third world poverty”:http://www.kiva.org/content/about/images/YouTooCanBeaBankertothePoor_NewYorkTimes.pdf: online lending to recipients in third world nations looking to start or grow their businesses.
“http://www.kiva.org "Kiva.org":http://www.kiva.org provides pictures and detailed information about the lender and his/her business so that you can ultimately make the decision of who and what you want to support. Truly, this is an amazing and innovative service, and it appears to be actively fostering growth in needy areas.

Time Out Film Guide

Time Out magazine started in 1968 as a simple fold out poster for all the entertainment listings in London. Now they publish three weekly periodicals (London, Chicago, and New York) dozens of city guides, and an annual compendium of every single film review ever written by Time Out reviewers. That’s over 17,000 films reviewed. Starting this year, that entire database of film reviews is available online for free at “timeout.com/film.”:http://www.timeout.com/film/ Reviews from Time Out tend to be witty, shrewd and very sarcastic. In a word, British.
Style aside, the online film guide acts much the same as “IMDB”:http://imdb.com/ (allowing cross searching actors, directors, genres) but all with a sleek, professional sheen to it. Also if you like the review, you can buy or rent the DVDs right on the screen.
http://elliott-herder.com/plugins/ you can just go to the search engine selector in the top-right, go to the bottom and select "add Time Out Film." Happy searching.