Ah, Science

He entertains me with his mockery. Though he is foolhardy. We have observed the one in the box, therefore the experiment is null and void!

Mushy Meat

Test Tube Meat anyone?

Straight from Wired:

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?

Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005. The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale.

“All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro,” says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. “We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively.”

A single cell could theoretically produce enough meat to feed the world’s population for a year. But the challenge lies in figuring out how to grow it on a large scale. Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student and a director of New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds research on in vitro meat, believes the easiest way to create edible tissue is to grow “meat sheets,” which are layers of animal muscle and fat cells stretched out over large flat sheets made of either edible or removable material. The meat can then be ground up or stacked or rolled to get a thicker cut.

“You’d need a bunch of industrial-size bioreactors,” says Matheny. “One to produce the growth media, one to produce cells, and one that produces the meat sheets. The whole operation could be under one roof.”

The advantage, he says, is you avoid the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of conventional meat production. No more feed grain production and processing, breeders, hatcheries, grow-out, slaughter or processing facilities.

“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 (percent) to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” says Matheny. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”

The sheets would be less than 1 mm thick and take a few weeks to grow. But the real issue is the expense. If cultivated with nutrient solutions that are currently used for biomedical applications, the cost of producing one pound of in vitro meat runs anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.

Matheny believes in vitro meat can compete with conventional meat by using nutrients from plant or fungal sources, which could bring the cost down to about $1 per pound.

If successful, artificially grown meat could be tailored to be far healthier than any type of farm-grown meat. It’s possible to stuff if full of heart-friendly omega-3 fatty acids, adjust the protein or texture to suit individual taste preferences and screen it for food-borne diseases.

But will it really catch on? The Food and Drug Administration has already barred food products involving cloned animals from the market until their safety has been tested. There’s also the yuck factor.

“Cultured meat isn’t natural, but neither is yogurt,” says Matheny. “And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn’t natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?”

Taste is another unknown variable. Real meat is more than just cells; it has blood vessels, connective tissue, fat, etc. To get a similar arrangement of cells, lab-grown meat will have to be exercised and stretched the way a real live animal’s flesh would.

Kosnik is working on a way to create muscle grown without scaffolds by culturing the right combination of cells in a 3-D environment with mechanical anchors so that the cells develop into long fibers similar to real muscle.

The technology to grow a juicy steak, however, is still a decade or so away. No one has yet figured out how to grow blood vessels within tissue.”In the meantime, we can use existing technologies to satisfy the demand for ground meat, which is about half of the meat we eat (and a $127 billion global market),” says Matheny.

Sounds..nasty.

But hey, if you live in Nigeria I bet it sounds like not-starving.

so..woo…if the price ever comes down from about $5400 dollars a ton.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is 64-Bit, but only if you have Windows

Not a bad thing, for about 90% of us, though it doesn’t help us.

I hear that other 10% screaming in agony though.

I’ve read a lot about it online and honestly, I just want to sum it up easily.

Adobe used the old method of doing things, an API to OSX called Carbon.

Apple is not making Carbon a 64-Bit API.

So…Adobe has about a million lines of photoshop code if I had to guess that needs to be re-written if they want it to work on OSX in 64-Bit glory.

Ars Technica made a nice blame chart:

Blame Apple: If Apple had not discontinued the 64-bit port of Carbon, Adobe could have shipped Photoshop CS4 as a 64-bit Mac OS X application as planned. At WWDC 2006, there were many sessions about developing 64-bit Carbon applications. At WWDC 2007, 64-bit Carbon was canceled. Adobe found this out the same time everyone else did, at WWDC. By canceling 64-bit Carbon so suddenly, Apple screwed Adobe.

Blame Adobe: The death of Carbon was inevitable. Adobe should have seen it coming and planned accordingly. It’s been clear for years that Cocoa offers many advantages to Mac application developers. Adobe should have started its Cocoa port of Photoshop years ago. By willfully ignoring Cocoa for so long, Adobe screwed Apple.

Sources:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/1247246&from=rss
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/04/02/rhapsody-and-blues

The Most Advanced Piece of Technology You Will Ever Pee On

Anyone seen the new Clear Blue Easy Pregnancy test advertising?

It’s kind of … odd.

I can’t believe on TV they show a big stream of..you know hitting a stick. 0.o

I find this one to prove it wrong though. Pee on THAT!

Nyanroll

Nyanroll, it’s a thing.

Drupal 6.0 Released! Woo!

Drupal 6.0 is released, and man is it fancy looking. It’d got all the features of an iGoogle-esque web portal built into it if you ask me.

Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6’s major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project’s continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

That commitment is something you don’t see everywhere, and by people who do it in their spare time, and for the cause, makes me proud. =)

One of the coolest features is OpenID support. That means anyone with an OpenID can come to your site, not have to register, and have a user account at whatever permission level you assign them. It helps grow a user base without the hassle of maintaing the records of one. It’s a neat project, though personally I still use my own, it can be helpful in a lot of applications.

Oh and sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend, it was V-Day!

Achewood Writes Women So Well?

Oh man, I nearly spit out my morning coffee on this one guys, it’s golden.

More Rants Added. Also, wasn’t Futurama Great?

Added more rants to the misc. rants section. Some are kind of funny.

Ah, I miss Futurama, these new movies need to release faster and with more quantity.

I only know about the first floor so far myself, not sure if more are on the way or not?

Bender’s Big Score

The Beast with a Billion Backs

Bender’s Game

Into the Wild Green Yonder

Shuffle : Kaede Background Profile

A little background on one of our star characters. =)

Eight years prior to the time Shuffle! takes place, both of Rin’s parents and Kaede’s mother are killed in a car accident. Kaede became traumatized from the incident, losing her will to live. Rin overheard the doctor saying that she needed a reason - any reason - to live. Rin then went to Kaede and told her that on the night of the accident, he was lonely and phoned his parents, asking them to come back. Since his parents and Kaede’s mother rode in the same car, he essentially told Kaede that it was his fault that her mother died. This caused Kaede to harbor a deep hatred for Rin. Upon emerging from her stupor, she began to choke him.

Since Kaede’s father decided to take Rin into their home, Rin constantly had to endure Kaede’s deep hatred of him. While putting on a front of being friends to her father, Kaede performed vengeful acts such as destroying Rin’s room and attempting to hurt him.

Later, some time during their junior high years, Kaede found a postcard while rummaging through Rin’s possessions after destroying Rin’s model ship— one of his most prized possessions. The postcard sparked her memory of the night of the accident, and she remembered that the reason her mother (and Rin’s parents) came back was because she had a fever, and she had asked her father to call her mother home. This meant that her mother’s death was to be blamed on Kaede herself, rather than Rin. Rin rushed in just as she finished reading the postcard, but he was too late to prevent Kaede from remembering everything and feeling deep guilt for her actions.

In order to atone for her actions in the past, Kaede decided to make herself Rin’s personal servant by cooking his meals and doing all the work around the house. Rin does not want this, but he is afraid of causing Kaede a relapse by not allowing her to punish herself in this way.

Shuffle!

Shuffle! it’s a big thing.

It’s a game.

 Shuffle! consists of a typical harem romance set-up, where the main character is liked by a number of attractive girls, and he must choose which girl he wishes to be with. The game is fully voiced (except for the main character) and offers approximately six hours worth of gameplay for each path.

It’s a…less perverted game.

The Playstation 2 version greatly varies from the PC version by having all of the H scenes removed. To make up for these deleted scenes, the storylines of the five original characters have been expanded. Additionally, the player may follow Kareha’s or Mayumi Thyme’s paths, two characters whose coupled ending routes were unavailable in the PC version of the game. Tsubomi, Kareha’s younger sister, also has her first appearance in the On the Stage version during Kareha’s path. Tsubomi also appears on occasions in the anime.

It’s a Manga

There have been two official series of Shuffle! manga which originally appeared in Comptiq magazine. The first, titled Shuffle! Days in the Bloom, is illustrated by Shiroi Kusaka, has six tankōbon, and retails for, eh, about 5 bucks (USD of course! =p). Days in the Bloom began running in Comptiq on December 2003, a month before the Shuffle! visual novel was released, to build publicity for the game.

It’s an Anime

Funimation is releasing the Anime in 2008 over here in the U.S. of A. It adds “Idol Clubs” (like worship centers of the main character girls) and removes the H-Scenes as well..heh. It’s pretty darn cute! I love the animation style, and it’s a bit Love Hina-ish looking, but definitely going to be more fun.

It’s an.. Audio .. Drama ?

 Shuffle! also has seven audio drama CD adaptations, which each one focusing on one of the main girls (including Kareha and Mayumi from On the Stage) and a radio drama series that translates as Shuffle! Charadio: Verbena Academy Broadcasting Department. I’d kill to hear these but alas, I only speak English.

Anyhow, lots of fun there, and just wanted to lay the basics. It’s a wonderful success story! One company can make a game and turn it into a franchise without losing the integrity during their move to mass market appeal, I’m envious. =)