Marriage-Hunting Bra

Nothing says “marriage or bust” quite like the Marriage-Hunting Bra (Konkatsu Bra), a new concept lingerie by Triumph International designed to help the marriage-minded woman find a husband by displaying how much time remains until she hopes to tie the knot.

In addition to the easy-to-read LED display that shows the number of days until the wearer’s ideal wedding date, the white lace bra — which has the look and feel of a wedding dress — features a ring holder and convenient pockets for a pen and official stamp seal, which will be needed when filling out the marriage license application.

Triumph, which unveils a new concept bra every six months, hopes the Marriage-Hunting Bra will encourage more people to get hitched, even though it is not for sale. The creators were inspired by Konkatsu-Jidai (”The Times of Marriage-Hunting”), a recent best-seller by Toko Shirakawa that looks at Japan’s declining marriage rate and the growing difficulty that people in their 30s and 40s face when seeking marriage partners.

Recent statistics indicate that 47 percent of men and 32 percent of women in their early 30s are unmarried. These figures appear to be on the rise as people focus more on career than on family, and as people increasingly view marriage as a personal preference, not an essential part of life.

Robot scientist makes discoveries with no human help

A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.

Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast.

Ross King, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, said that Adam's results were modest, but real. "It's certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable," he says.

Adam, which actually consists of a small roomful of lab equipment, has four personal computers that act as a brain, and possesses robot arms, cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and other equipment. The team gave the robot a freezer containing a library of thousands of mutant strains of yeast with individual genes deleted. It was also equipped with a database containing information about yeast genes, enzymes, and metabolism, and a supply of hundreds of metabolites.

To discover which genes coded for which enzymes, Adam cultured a mutant yeast with a certain gene knocked out, and monitored how well the mutant grew without a particular metabolite. If the strain grew poorly without the metabolite, Adam learned something about the function of the knocked out gene. The robot could carry out more than 1000 of these experiments a day.

In all, Adam formulated and tested 20 hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam's work with their own experiments.

The team is now working on a new robot, called Eve, which will search for new drugs.

Adam, Eve and their ilk could soon automate routine and time-consuming scientific chores, leaving human scientists free to make higher level, creative leaps, says King. But ultimately the robots may even be capable of conducting truly independent research, he says.

Will Bridewell, an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, says Adam is operating only at the level of a graduate student. Still, the robot is moving closer to the goal of an artificially intelligent machine that can cooperate with other scientists and write up their results in natural language, he says. "That's probably far off, but it seems likely that we will get there. This is yet another step on the way."

In a further step in this direction, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have developed software that can observe physical systems and independently identify the laws that underlay them.

The software, which was not pre-programmed with any basic rules of physics or geometry, was shown images of moving systems such as a double pendulum. It then used an evolutionary algorithm to generate mathematical equations, and tested them to see if they accurately described the system it had observed. For instance, the computer produced an equation that described conservation of angular momentum.

AMD, Nvidia Release 'Most Powerful' Graphics

On Thursday, both AMD and Nvidia released updates to their graphics cards, with AMD claiming to have the most powerful graphics chip in the world. According to testing from ExtremeTech, however, Nvidia's card is faster.

AMD released the Radeon HD 4890 reference card, which the company says will be priced at $249 by its fourteen or so partners, or $229 after a rebate. Nvidia countered with the GeForce GTX 275, which will be sold at about the same $250 street price.

Technically, both cards are extensions of existing architectures, although ATI is using a different ASIC for the 4890, simply rearranging the components to allow the chips to reach higher clock speeds.

Although both cards are powerhouses in and of themselves, the $250 price point is becoming more significant in a world where a new graphics card costs as much as a dedicated game console, PC gaming's chief competition. Both AMD and Nvidia have shifted away from monolithic graphics monstrosities into a business model that attempts to facilitate older integrated graphics to work together with a newer graphics card, and push PC gamers into buying one graphics card now, buying another later, and pairing them together to gain more performance.

"The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card represents the AMD sweet spot strategy reloaded," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD, in a statement. "With last year's launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 products, we gave gamers great performance and an incredible value proposition. Today, we're doing it again. ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards are incredible performers, priced to sell in all major markets worldwide."

Although AMD has publicly boasted of its transition to 40-nm process technologies and aggressively using new memory technologies, at Nvidia "we want to focus on things, more about what does the end user consumer care about?" said Ujesh Desai, the general manager of the GeForce product group at Nvidia, in a small press conference last week. The company will shift to the more aggressive technologies "when it makes sense," he said.

So who won the graphics shootout? According to an ExtremeTech review of the AMD Radeon HD 4890 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 275, most likely Nvidia, by a nose. But the review also did not take into account what AMD claims is an extensive overclocking threshold, which OEMs and enthusiasts will take advantage of.

Below, ExtremeTech summarizes the new architectures:

	GeForce GTX 260 c216	GeForce GTX 275	Radeon HD 4870	Radeon HD 4890
Price	~$200	~$250	~$250	~$250
GPU	GT 200b	GT 200b	RV770	RV790
Manufacturing Process	65/55nm	55nm	55nm	55nm
Transistor Count	1.4 B	1.4 B	956 M	959 M
Core Clock	576 MHz	633 MHz	750 MHz	850 MHz
Stream Processor Clock	1.24 GHz	1.404 GHz	750 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock	2.0 GHz DDR	2.26 GHz DDR	1.8 GHz DDR	1.9 GHz DDR
Stream Processors	216	240	800	800
Texture Units	72	80	40	40
Render back end (ROPs)	28	28	16	16
Frame Buffer	896 MB	896 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Interface	448 bits	448 bits	256 bits	256 bits
Memory Bandwidth	111.9 GB/sec	127 GB/sec	115.2 GB/sec	124.8 GB/sec