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Welp, our new lil girl is with us now — we picked her up this weekend :
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Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web. Like desktop applications, these applications work offline, offer more privacy than pure websites, run quickly, and integrate with your computer and its devices. But like Web applications, they are also more creative, visually alluring, accessible from anywhere and potentially accessible by anyone. In short, Parakey apps are designed to be both useful and social, a combination that is too rare today.
Parakey is building not just the platform but also its first set of applications. The folks behind it enjoy programming, but ultimately started this company to make computers better for average people who turn to technology for convenience, not…adventure. When people need to call their “computer friend” in 2007 to install a program, scan a document, burn a CD or show a picture to a friend, there is a problem. Fixing it will take time and the patience to sit down with users and understand them.
Enter Parakey…
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In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.
Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.
Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather’s spacesuit–think more Spiderman, less John Glenn.
Traditional bulky spacesuits “do not afford the mobility and locomotion capability that astronauts need for partial gravity exploration missions. We really must design for greater mobility and enhanced human and robotic capability,” Newman says.
Newman, her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a local design firm, Trotti and Associates, have been working on the project for about seven years. Their prototypes are not yet ready for space travel, but demonstrate what they’re trying to achieve : a lightweight, skintight suit that will allow astronauts to become truly mobile lunar and Mars explorers.
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Scientists at Seoul National University Korea are seeking to commercially clone dogs this year, which would be the world’s first attempt to create canine clones for money. Senior researcher Kim Min-kyu at the Seoul-based University is spearheading the efforts based on his team’s expertise in cloning dogs. As per Mr. Kim early last month, they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korea Customs Service to clone its drug-sniffing dogs. They have already obtained somatic cells of the expensive dogs and will attempt to clone them in July or August to get puppies late this year at the earliest.
Demand for drug and explosive sniffing dogs has outstripped supply after the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks in 2001, as countries focus on beefing up security, according to Kim. But he refused to elaborate the terms of the MOU. Kim played a pivotal role in creating the world’s first cloned dog, a male named Snuppy, in 2005 as well as three other female clones last year. Still, no other scientists on the planet have succeeded in cloning a dog except Kim’s team.
here we go, folks…
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