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A life-size chocolate model of Ferrari Formula 1 car

Despite the world tumbling from the otherwise economic hurdles, Italians are having their fun with chocolate as usual. A formula 1 car has been designed with chocolate, which will be smashed sometime later on, to eat ofcourse.

The price tag on it is £12,000. They started building it a year ago for fun, but then it turned into real size by enthusistics from the Club Pasticceri Italiani

“They started melting the chocolate in 2007, at first copying a small-scale model of the Ferrari F2008, then getting the full scale model done using chocolate imported especially from Belgium.” Well I hope this will generate some money for those who don’t have money to eat a small piece of chocolate. Thanks to Ananova for the sweet news.

Senecavirus is 10000 times better than the traditional chemotherapeutics

If you have not read or heard about this virus, you need to read this. An excerpt from scientific blogging.

The Senecavirus is a “new” virus, discovered several years ago by Neotropix Inc., a biotech company in Malvern, Pennsylvania. It was at first thought to be a laboratory contaminant, but researchers found it was a pathogen, now believed to originate from cows or pigs. Further investigation found that the virus was harmless to normal human cells, but could infect certain solid tumors, such as small cell lung cancer, the most common form of lung cancer.

Scientists at Neotrophix say that, in laboratory and animal studies, the virus demonstrates cancer-killing specificity that is 10,000 times higher than that seen in traditional chemotherapeutics, with no overt toxicity. The company has developed the “oncolytic” virus as an anti-cancer agent and is already conducting early phase clinical trials in patients with lung cancer.

The 3-D structure of the virus, officially known as Seneca Valley Virus-001, reveals that it is unlike any other known member of the Picornaviridae viral family, and confirms its recent designation as a separate genus, Senecavirus. A new study reveals that the virus’s outer protein shell looks like a craggy golf ball¬—one with uneven divets and raised spikes—and the RNA strand beneath it is arranged in a round mesh rather like a whiffleball.

Loneliest species of the world

This shows evidence that there are many lonely species out there on planet earth. According to Science magazine and Wired blog:

In the hot, dark water of a South African mine, scientists have found the world’s loneliest species.
Everywhere else biologists have studied life on our planet, they’ve found communities of life, but today, biologists announced they have discovered an ecosystem that contains just a single species of bacteria.

In all other known ecosystems, the key functions of life — harvesting energy and elements like carbon and nitrogen from the environment — have been shared among different species. But in the water of the Mponeng gold mine, two miles under the earth’s surface, Desulforudis audaxviator carries out all of those functions by itself. In short, it’s the tidiest package of life found yet. “It is possible to pack everything necessary for maintaining life into one genome,” said Dylan Chivian of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

All known life forms need carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and an energy source to live. Plants need nitrogen, but can’t just pull it from the atmosphere and start using it to make amino acids. Instead, they rely on archaea for that task. Interconnections like these form the basis of an ecosystem, often cheesily called the ‘web of life’.

What makes D. audaxviator so special is that its genome, cobbled together from bacterial and archaeal genes, can carry out all life’s functions by itself. That could make the bug a prime candidate for any attempt to see if Earth’s microbes could live in some other extreme environment within the solar system.

“Since it could live on its own on Earth, if it were given a matching habitat elsewhere, it could live,” said Chivian.

Why no one is talking about Blackberry storm

I saw the news and reviews, but no one seems to be excited and looks least bothered about the great storm. Its sleek design and amazing features are worth a talk. Here’s what Techcityinc has to say about it in case u missed it.

The latest handset from RIM has been officially announced. BlackBerry aims to take the world by storm. It’s a touch screen smartphone that will be made available via Verizon Wireless and Vodafone sometime this fall.

BlackBerry Storm Features include

* Touch Screen
* Multi-touch and gestures
* 480 x 360 resolution
* 3.2MP camera
* 1 GB of onboard memory storage
* Microsd card slot
* Media player
* 3.5mm headset jack
* Clickable screen
* Full HTML browser
* Rechargeable 1400 mAhr battery
* 6 hour talk time and 15 days of standby battery time.
* Weights 55g

It’s clickable screen will allow you to highlight and copy text. People have experienced great difficulties doing this on other touchscreen devices like iPhone.

Frank RoveKamp at Vodaphone said “With its unique clickable touchscreen, giving access to all the desirable multimedia features and services such as browsing, music and video, the BlackBerry Storm is being brought by Vodafone into the consumer world.”

Not just that it also has a accelerometer that will you displays the screen in portrait or landscape mode as appropriate. The BlackBerry Storm 9500 from Vodafone supports (2100Mhz) UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks. No word on pricing at this point but it’s expected soon.

Kutztown University in Pennsylvania?

Have you seen the first picture from Google’s satellite. Here is the one posted on Wired magazine.

Here is an excerpt from the post.

The bird’s-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week. The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters — close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye’s second major partner. “This is the opposite of a spy satellite,” Brender said in a phone interview. “Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.”

I was wondering why Google has opened its eyes on Kutztown University in Pennsylvania? Any thoughts?