Dino-Might? The T. rex question

Computer science professor Pavel Pevzer has been one of the voices in an ongoing scientific debate over T. rex fossils and whether soft issue is really from T. rex.

Last October, Scott LaFee covered the (then) latest dinoMight details for the San Diego Union Tribune. I never did link to that story, so here it is...

Update May 5:
National Geographic quoted Pavel Pevzner in a related story that ran on May 1, 2009.

MapLink - The UC San Diego Google Map Service....Finally

Campus recently launched MapLink 1.0, a modern interactive campus map based on the Google maps technology.

http://www-act.ucsd.edu/maps

>>I just clicked around a bit, and the satellite view is far better than the map view. Also, some of the road names around the engineering buildings don't seem right...but I'll to do a little more checking.

>>According to the email announcement of MapLink:

"MapLink is a web-based tool that allows you to find not only campus buildings but also relevant services like parking, restaurants, and shuttle stops, for both campus and the Hillcrest Medical Center.

Initially released in beta form in 2007, MapLink 1.0 now includes new features such as driving directions and better search capabilities, plus enhancements to make it more versatile, easier to maintain, and more responsive to users' feedback and questions. Another new feature allows users to link to specific map pages within MapLink, a refinement requested by many users."

Sleep Talking Saves Energy

Skyping while your computer sleeps.

IM'ing while your laptop snoozes.

Remote access to a sleeping desktop.

A new energy saving gadget will let you do all of this. The common thread? Your computer is "sleep talking." Really. It's asleep...but it appears awake to the network. And if you suddenly need all your computer's computational strength, the prototype, called Somniloquy (which means "talking in your sleep"), will wake up your computer via the USB bus.

Read the full press release here on sleep talking to save energy.

Or jump to the paper, presented on April 23 at USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2009) by UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal.

Yuvraj Agarwal worked on this project when he was an intern at Microsoft Research, Cambridge in the summer of 2007, and continued afterwards at UC San Diego. Steve Hodges, Ranveer Chandra, James Scott, and Victor Bahl from Microsoft Research are Somniloquy co-inventors and authors on the NSDI 2009 paper. Agarwal’s Ph.D. advisor and paper-coauthor is computer science professor Rajesh Gupta from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Sleep Talking around the web

Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz

Tech Radar UK
EcoGeek picked up the story via TreeHugger via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego via me.
Engadget picked up the story on April 25.
Gizmodo too...via Engadget via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego

A nice story on WindowsForDevices.com
Slashdot picked up the WindowsForDevices.com story
UPI ran the sleep talking story
the LA Times technology blog linked to the story on the UC San Diego news site

Swine Flu Blog from Science Magazine

The journalists in the news department of Science Magazine, published by AAAS, are covering the science behind the swine flu story...as well as the breaking news from the story itself.

Check it out here.

How Cells Change Gears

It's Friday night and do you know what your transcription network is doing?

I didn't think so. Neither do I. But there are bioengineers here at UC San Diego who know how to figure out what a network of transcription factors is doing at any given time point. They published this work in Nature Genetics.

This is great, because it means you can track the activity of transcription factors and see what parts of the network are active when...and then use that information to try to figure out the role that networks of transcription factors play in important cellular tasks like "changing gears"...switching from proliferation mode to specialization/maturation mode. Figure this out, and you might get your head around a lot of interesting questions...including how some cancers arise, and how tissues and organs form.

My colleague Andrea Siedsma wrote a release this week about a different group of bioengineers who recently published in Nature Biotechnology. Read on: "New Method Developed by UC San Diego Bioengineers Gives Regenerative Medicine a Boost".

DECaF gets Caffeinated UK Style

Katherine Lee, the bioengineering undergrad who served as one of the key organizers of DECaF 2009, the crazy-successful student-run job fair at the Jacobs School of Engineering, is quoted at the very beginning of a news story in the Financial Times (FT) today. The story "Students put more work into getting a job," is by Emma Jacobs.

Remember Katherine? She is one of the narrators of the DECaF 2009 video, which you can watch below:

Music Search Engine in Voice of San Diego

Science and technology journalist David Washburn recently wrote a story about the music search engine invented here at the Jacobs School of Engineering. See the blog post below this one for more info.

The photo (above) of Luke Barrington, Gert Lanckriet, and Damien O'Malley (l to r) that accompanies the Voice of San Diego story is super cool because it makes them look like they are in a band...and in fact, Luke is a musician. If you take the tutorial for their new music discovery Facebook game, the song that you hear is from his band, Audition Laboratory. Photo credit: Sam Hodgson (Voice of San Diego)

The same story was also featured by Channel 6 News.