Build A Mars Base with A Box of Engineered Bugs

Travel to Alien Planet – Bug Boxes – Engineered Microbes

The next time humans intend to set foot on an alien planet, they may not have to travel alone but travel along with small lightweight `bug boxes’ that could be full of engineered microbes that would make life on these planets much more liveable.

The pioneering settlers would be needing food, fuel as well as shelter in order to survive on a distant world and tugging along bulky supplies from the Earth could be costly. Another option has been offered by Synthetic biology.

It is said that microbes weigh less and the space taken is next to nothing on a spacecraft though once the mission lands on Mars it is said that they could multiply by feeding on the materials that may be available there. The outcome of their labour could provide the essentials for human settlement.

A research has begun by NASA to realise this vision, according to Lynn Rothschild at the Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. Rothschild who is the leader of NASA’s new Synthetic Biology Initiative, aims to build designer microbes for future crewed space missions and shared her vision at the BioDesign Forum, last week in Cambridge, UK.

Synthetic Biology – At Crossroads of Biology/Engineering 

Synthetics biology lying at the crossroads of biology and engineering has its practitioners building a biological toolkit comprising of chunks of genes, known as biobricks, each performing a certain function of making a bacterium generate natural antifreeze molecule, for instance: Biobricks could be inserted into other microbes to provide that function.

With this approach, a microbe having the capabilities of surviving on an alien planet could become one that can endure human life there. With regards to energy, several earthly microbes would have died in extra-terrestrial environment that are rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen, the two main elements of Martian air. Anabaena, an ancient cyanobacterium tends to thrive in these conditions though metabolising both gases in order to make sugar.

Rothschild states that `as long as it has warmth and some shielding from ultraviolet light radiation, it could do well on gases in the mars atmosphere’. Anabaena utilises most of the energy produced, from carbon dioxide and nitrogen but synthetic biologist could encourage the cyanobacteria to share its supplies.

Waste – Feed the Microbes

At a synthetic biology competition last year – International Genetically Engineered Machines – iGEM, a team from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Stanford University in California portrayed how inserting genetic machinery from E.coli made Anabaena excrete more of its energy as sugar.

 Moreover they also showed that they tend to support colonies of other bacteria as well on sugar. Such microbial colonies, in theory tend to make oil, plastic or fuel for the astronauts. The team which was led by Andre Burnier, a recent Brown graduate who had been advised by Rothschild had also come with options of supplying human settlers on Mars with mortar and bricks and had started with a bacterium known as Sporosarcina pasteurii that unusually tends to break down urea which is the main waste product in urine, excreting ammonium, making the local atmosphere alkaline enough for calcium carbonate cement to form. The waste created by the astronauts could feed the microbes and they in turn could help strengthen fine rocky material on the planet’s surface to create bricks.

Logitech Bluetooth Adapter : Gadget Review

Logitech Bluetooth Adapter Offers Simplicity Backed By Performance

In the world of gadgets Smartphones are the most talked and bought gadgets which are ruling the world right now. Still there are companies which are making huge sum by providing such gadgets which are necessary yet a buyer doesn’t know it. Logitech, JBL and other have invested a lot in creating high end Bluetooth speakers which offers impressive sound.

Usually the better sounding Bluetooth speakers are expensive and find very few takers. Most of the people are still using the 2.1 or 5.1 channel speaker system which offers perfect sound. Logitech is all set to bridge this gap of reliance of the old technology with its Bluetooth adapter which can easily turn any speaker system into a wireless system.

Logitech Brings Elegant and Compact Design

For a Bluetooth adapter it is size which matters and Logitech has craftily designed an ultra compact and handy adapter. Logitech Bluetooth Adapter measures just 50x50x23mm which can easily fit within the palm and it can easily kept hidden away from the view.

Tough plastic has been used to make it highly durable. This Bluetooth adapter supports Bluetooth v3.0 which a range of 15m and make sure that the connected devices are within the line of sight. A single button for Bluetooth had been placed at the top for pairing with other devices. The rear side of the adapter has 3.5mm and RCA outputs and a power socket. Furthermore a relatively small blue LED light is on the bottom side which blinks at the moment of pairing and remains constant once paired.

Logitech Bluetooth Adapter Brings Splendid Performance

In order to staring pairing process long pressing on Bluetooth button is required. Adapter requires to get paired for the first time only after which it connects automatically. It works splendidly across a wide range of devices like the home theatre system; Bluetooth enabled music players, Apple products like Macbook Air, iPhone and other smartphones.

Furthermore this adapter also gives the freedom of pairing with two different devices at the same time as audio source and users can actively switch between them. Once the connection is established the adapter simply converts the Bluetooth wireless data into analog signals which are transmitted to the connected speakers.

Whether you play music in the device or through speakers connected by the adapter the quality is almost same except for little which can only be picked when listened very closely. The Bluetooth connection remains firm when the connected device is placed in the clear line of sight while being away certain anomalies appear. Hence it will be wise to keep the devices in sight in order to enjoy music.

Give A New Life To Old Speakers With Bluetooth Adapter

The Logitech Bluetooth adapter was initially launched at the price of Rs. 1,999 but in the online sphere it can be easily bought at just Rs. 1,200. Now price shouldn’t be a concern for the enthusiastic individual who is looking for an alternative to enhance the capability of their age-old music systems.

Leaked Details, If True, Point To Potent AMD Zen CPU

It has been more than a year that the potential new about the next-generation CPU architecture from AMD, and it has been code named which known as Zen however it is running in the fantasy of the fans of the company as well as among the people who are looking for more efficient competitor when compared to Intel. The technical configuration can differ, but all geeks should be ready to see the next generation chip full of wallop. The leaked slide is only a part of the highest-end part.

Even though the slide has manage to capture more than required focus, details of the chip might have drastic changes in terms of what it appears now and how it will be at the time of the launch. For instance, the leaked slide itself might not be accurate.

Reports from Fudzilla indicates that this new CPU will be able to offer nearly 16 Zen cores, in which each of the core will be further supporting 2 threads out of the total 32 threads. Rumors also suggest that this new core will be using Simultaneous Multithreading, which is completely opposite to the Clustered Multi-Threading on which the AMD has debuted as part of the Bulldozer family and has been in use for the past 4 years.

Every core has been backed up by 512K of L2 cache and with 32MB of L3 cache will be seen throughout the entire core. This clearly depicts that the L3 structure has been inspired from the Bulldozer. If AMD will be come over from the cache there might be a improvement in the performance. The new integrated GPU will also be offering double-precision floating point at every 1/2 single-precision speed.

Is it too good to be believed? 

The CPU layout shown in the leaked slide makes a lot of sense to everyone. People can clearly see at the modular part and AMD part wherein the Zen module consists 8 threads and 2MB of L2, some unbelievable L3 cache as well as of 4 CPU cores,. Nevertheless, what has been able to raise eyebrows among all the fans includes 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0, HBM interface, and quad-channel DDR4.

The reason being, the highest end servers from Intel pack comes with 32 PCI-Express lanes and even though the Quad-channel DDR4 is available, Intel can only support 4x DDR4-2133. You have to believe that HBM has arrived and the day is not far when it will integrate with servers and desktops since 16GB of HBM memory makes a whole lot of difference. However the Zen’s 512GBs memory interface is one of the most important achievements. This CPU is expected to be unveiled in another 12 to 18 months in the world of server.

AMD will be able to create history if they are able to meet the power consumption and IPC targets. Still the details have not yet been confirmed. It is expected that in coming days it will be big if company will be able to launch the device with 64 lanes of PCI-Express, a totally revamped CPU, integrated graphics processor and 16GB of HBM memory.

Why is My Website Loading Slowly

As a website owner, you likely already know the importance of ensuring your site loads quickly. You know that even mere seconds can make all the difference between your visitors sticking around and going elsewhere to your competitors. You also know that if they do jump to a different site, there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll never return to yours.

Yet if you’re reading this article, what you probably don’t know is what’s currently slowing down your site and driving them away in the first place.

Indeed, it’s all well and good knowing that your website is currently performing slower than it should, but let’s be honest, it’s nigh on impossible to do anything about it until you’ve discovered where the issue lies.

To help you get to the bottom of your site speed issues, here’s a look at some of the more common reasons why your website could be loading slowly.

It could just be your connection 

We don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but it’s often the most obvious issues that we tend to overlook. Before we go any further, it’s worth double checking that it’s not your own internet connection that’s causing the problem.

You could use a tool like Speedtest to check if your connection is performing as it should. Alternatively, for a more practical solution, check out a few different sites and see if they’re loading as quick as you’d expect. If you can, try loading your site using a different internet connection.

If it’s still slow, and if those other sites load much faster than yours, it’s time to explore other possibilities.

Problems with your hosting 

These days, most web hosting or website builders promise unlimited bandwidth for your site, but it’s worth pointing out that unlimited in this case usually comes with a fair use policy. If you’re regularly exceeding your bandwidth, that could be causing the problem, in which case it might be time to upgrade

That said, it could be another issue entirely with your hosting account. It’s certainly helpful to check your hosting company’s status updates to see if they’re aware of any short term problems.

If not, you may be left with two options. First, contact your hosting provider to see if they can identify what’s causing the issue and if there’s anything they can do to help. Alternatively, you might be left with the last resort option of packing up your site and moving to a better host with a reputation for faster loading speeds.

Large image sizes 

Those huge images you uploaded to your site may look awesome, but if they haven’t been properly optimized for the web first, they can have a big detrimental impact on your loading times as the larger the image file size, the longer it takes to load those images. If you’re using Wordpress or another Content Management System, there’s a range of plugins out there that can help you to optimize your images for faster loading speeds.

If that still doesn’t solve the problem, you might want to explore replacing those images with other, smaller ones to see if that does the trick.

Your website code 

As a browser gets to work on loading your site, it needs to trawl through all that complicated back-end code to present your site the way it was intended. As you can imagine, that takes time, and again, the longer it takes, the slower your load speed.

For CMS users, this is where caching plugins come in real handy. Install one on your site, and they’ll get to work on creating static html pages that serve up your pages much quicker.

Who Makes The Most Reliable Hard Disk Drives?

The most daunting question for any PC maker and owners is as to who is best hard drives maker? This story is being constantly followed by the unlimited online backup company called as the Backblaze. The company has released some new data for year 2015 and it has been able to shed some incredible light of these manufacturers.

From the perspective of Backblaze, they are looking into these information as even they want to ensure that they buying the best hard drives available in the market. The company at present has around 410002% of these drives. It is hard to imagine that every time a hard drive fails, it takes time and effort to pull another drive, insert in the slot, and rebuild the entire RAID.

So which hard drive manufacturer is the most trustable? 

The data released by Backblaze has divided into two parts; search can be made either by means of specific drive or by means of the name of the manufacturer. The reports suggest that the company that as of December 2014, the company had 22,902 drives of Hitachi, 47 drives of Toshiba, 1,174 drives of Western Digital and 15,528 drives of Seagate.

Although these drives have been bought by the company in different years, the company installed thousands of new 4TB and 6TB models in the last few years. Here if we notice the company considers reliability a second important factor and considers the drives efficiency as the main factor. They buy the most competitive drives, which offer dollar-per-gigabyte ratio.

According to the data, Hitachi seems to have the most reliable product in the market. Backblaze’s Hitachi drives have the failure rate of only. When we compare the HGST drives, the failure rates have been recorded at only 1.4%. After operating for three year the drives from Western Digital, might be impressive as nearly 92.4 per cent of their drives are still in operation and they are functioning well.

In comparison to this, the 3TB drives from Seagate are disastrous, as their 40% drives have failed throughout 2014. Even though the company recorded the failure rate at 9.6%, their introduction of 4TB drives have increased their performance. These drives have failure rate of 2.6%, which is by far better than the 3TB drives.

Which is the best and worst single hard drive? 

4TB models will be the best in terms of reliability and value and these are being offered by Seagate and Hitachi. However, if you are looking for longevity, users will have a long list of options. The Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000 3TB, HGST will guarantee that you drive doesn’t die until 3 years. In terms of 4TB, Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 is one of the best options. People need to be aware of 3TB 7200.14 model from Seagate which has been rated very poor in this report.

Considering the fact that Backblaze does not many drives installed from Toshiba and Samsung, it is hard to derive meaningful numbers. While Toshiba and Fujitsu might be a reasonable choice, Seagate acquisition of the hard drive division of Samsung raises questions on the reliability. We might have to wait for another report on this in the future.