China Imitates YouTube In this photo taken on Monday, Jan. 25, 2010, workers clean and repair broken part of a marble tablet bearing Google’s logo in front of Google China’s headquarters building in Beijing. Google’s Android operating system should face no limits on its use by China’s phone companies so long as it complies with Chinese regulations, the government said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan) Imitation Web sites of both Google and YouTube have emerged in China as the country faces off against the real Google over its local operations. YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.The separate projects went up within a day of each other in mid-January, just after Google’s threat to leave. Microbes produce fuels directly from biomass Once E. coli have secreted oil, they sequester themselves from the droplets as shown by this optical image, thereby facilitating oil recovery. A collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids. Magnesium supplement helps boost brainpower Neuroscientists at MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing show that increasing brain magnesium with a new compound enhanced learning abilities, working memory, and short- and long-term memory in rats. The dietary supplement also boosted older rats’ ability to perform a variety of learning tests. Ten Things Missing From the iPad The iPad was supposed to change the face of computing, to be a completely new form of digital experience. But what Steve Jobs showed us yesterday was in fact little more than a giant iPhone. A giant iPhone that doesn’t even make calls. Many were expecting cameras, kickstands and some crazy new form of text input. The iPad, though, is better defined by what isn’t there, from Flash to GPS Bill Gates Funds Climate Hacking Research Bill Gates has sunk at least $4.5 million of his personal wealth into geoengineering research.While it’s a small chunk of Gates’ vast personal fortune, it’s a sign that the founder of Microsoft thinks we should at least be looking into the controversial practice of intentionally altering the Earth’s climate on a global scale.“ He views geoengineering as a way to buy time, but it’s not a solution to the problem” of climate change, Gates’ spokesperson John Pinette told Science Insider. “Bill views this as an important avenue for research—among many others, including new forms of clean energy.”. Floppy Disk Paintings Redefine Renaissance Art British artist Nick Gentry’s paintings give long-forgotten floppy disks a new lease on life. They’re still storage media, just in a much more literal sense. At some point recently, you’ve probably uncovered an old box of videos, cassettes, and floppies in the basement and thought to yourself, “what am I supposed to do with these?” It turns out you just weren’t thinking hard enough. Painting on canvases comprised of 3.5″ floppy disks and VHS tapes, Nick Gentry puts these bygone forms of storage to use in his art.

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