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YouTube announced today that it has implemented the ability to jump straight to any point in a video by simply adding a few extra characters at the end of the video’s URL. The YouTube Team explainson the official blog:

To create a deep link, append the following to the end of a YouTube video URL: #t=1m15s. This says to link to the time 1:15 - you can replace the numbers before the ‘m’ and the ’s’ with anything you like.

As an additional bonus, if you mention a specific time in a video comment, e.g. “haha 1:14 is funny”, this will become a hyperlink. Viewers can simply click on the time and the video will automatically jump to the point you are referencing. Pretty cool huh? 

NOW WE CAN WRITE THE FOLLOWING CODE TO ACCESS THAT PART AND USE THAT PART ONLY 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2c2_inNre4#t=0m28s

Rather than the regular link of :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2c2_inNre4

This feature should be mostly useful to those who wish to show certain parts of videos to others, particularly if they want them to see what was intended rather than risk the receiving party losing interest before they get to the good part (nothing against Joe’s theatrics or this video. It’s just an example). This should prove to be a very efficient way to link to videos when trying to make a point.

What behaviour do website visitors exhibit? Do they buy a specific product mainly on Mondays? Do they always return at a certain time of day? Being able to recognise and make use of such patterns is lucrative business for companies. Edgar de Graaf discovered that interesting patterns often contain a time aspect. Jeroen De Knijf developed methods to detect relevant patterns quicker.

In subject jargon it is called data mining: looking for interesting relationships within large quantities of data. Many data-mining programs produce a flood of potentially interesting patterns: as a user, how can you then find what you are looking for? Furthermore, the files are not always set up for such search actions, as is the case on the Internet or for instance in bioinformatics. It usually concerns semi-structured files: they often contain, for example, hyperlinks to other files, and contain (partial) information in a range of formats, such as text, images and sound.

MISTA project

Edgar de Graaf and Jeroen De Knijf both worked within the NWO-funded MISTA project (Mining in Semi-Structured Data) on methods to find patterns more quickly and effectively within large quantities of semi-structured data. De Graaf discovered that some patterns are interesting because they occur in quick succession. Other patterns are striking because, for example, they occur weekly. According to De Graaf, this time aspect merits further investigation.

The patterns can best be presented visually so that the user can find the information sought at a single glance. To realise this De Graaf described various ways of presenting different types of information.

Wikipedia compressed

De Knijf demonstrated that the number of patterns can be drastically reduced by allowing the user to indicate in advance the minimum requirements that a pattern must satisfy. This allows the data-mining program to find the interesting patterns much faster.

A second method De Knijf devised to reduce the number of results is the compression of the entire collection of documents (for example, Wikipedia pages) into a single document. By building accurate models that only make use of the compressed document, De Knijf was able to demonstrate that this summary does indeed contain the essential information from the entire collection.

source: eurekalert.org

The thickness of sea ice in large parts of the Arctic declined by as much as 19% last winter compared to the previous five winters, according to data from ESA’s Envisat satellite.

Using Envisat radar altimeter data, scientists from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL) measured sea ice thickness over the Arctic from 2002 to 2008 and found that it had been fairly constant until the record loss of ice in the summer of 2007. Unusually warm weather conditions were present over the Arctic in 2007, which some scientists have said explain that summer ice loss. However, this summer reached the second-lowest extent ever recorded with cooler weather conditions present.

Dr Katharine Giles of UCL, who led the study, said: “This summer’s low ice extent doesn’t seem to have been driven by warm weather, so the question is, was last winter’s thinning behind it?”

The research, reported in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that last winter the average thickness of sea ice over the whole Arctic fell by 26 cm (10%) compared with the average thickness of the previous five winters, but sea ice in the western Arctic lost around 49 cm of thickness.

Giles said the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is down to a number of factors, including warm temperatures, currents and wind, making it important to know how ice thickness is changing as well as the extent of the ice.

“As the Arctic ice pack is constantly moving, conventional methods can only provide sparse and intermittent measurements of ice thickness from which it is difficult to tell whether the changes are local or across the whole Arctic,” Giles said.

“Satellites provide the only means to determine trends and a consistent and wide area basis. Envisat altimeter data have provided the critical third dimension to the satellite images which have already revealed a dramatic decrease in the area of ice covered in the Arctic.”

The team, including Dr Seymour Laxon and Andy Ridout, was the first to measure ice thickness throughout the Arctic winter, from October to March, over more than half of the Arctic.

“We will continue to use Envisat to monitor the evolution of ice thickness through this winter to see whether this downward trend will continue,” Laxon said. “Next year we will have an even better tool to measure ice thickness in the shape of ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission which will provide higher resolution data and with almost complete coverage to the pole.”

Source : Eurekalert !

Dark chocolate, apples and coffee are among 20 foods essential for living as long and healthy a life as possible, according to a leading nutritional scientist.

Life can be stressful, whether you’re an individual watching the stock market crash or a commuter stuck in traffic. A new study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, examines how stress affects decision-making and finds that older adults alter their behavior more than young adults when under stress — particularly in situations involving risk.

“People haven’t looked at how stress affects decision making, even though so many of our decisions are made under stress,” explained Mara Mather of USC Davis School of Gerontology, lead author of the study. “There’s very little information about this whole topic, and, when you get to age differences, there’s even less.”

Mather and her colleagues Marissa Gorlick, of the USC Emotion and Cognition Lab, and Nichole Kryla-Lighthall, a USC doctoral student, exposed young adults (18 to 33) and older adults (65 to 89) to a stressful event, in this case, holding a hand in ice-cold water for three minutes.

Participants were then asked to play a driving game correlating to a real-life situation in which taking a small amount of risk is common: whether to go for it on a yellow light. Participants started at a green light, and points were awarded for every second spent driving during a yellow, but lost if the light turned red while driving. The length of time for the yellow lights was determined randomly.

In other words, Mather explained, participants had to decide to take some risk — driving during a yellow light — to score any points at all.

“This is the way life is, quite often. To make more money in your investments, you have to take risk. To end up dating someone, you have to take the risk of going up and saying hello,” Mather said. “When there’s a potential payoff, most of the time you have to take some risk.”

In the control group, which was not exposed to ice-cold water, older adults were actually better drivers than younger adults, the researchers found, scoring higher on the game.

However, in the stressed group, older adults were not only more cautious but were also jerkier drivers, braking and restarting almost three times as much as their calmer peers.

The differences in the effects of stress were consistent even when the researchers accounted for gender, level of education, mood and health self-ratings.

“The everyday commute can be stressful: someone cuts you off, you’re late already. Are you more likely to try and take a risk than if you weren’t stressed out?” Mather asks. “Our results indicate that stress changes older adults’ strategies.”

The exposure to ice-cold water caused a rise in levels of the hormone cortisol, measured in saliva. Cortisol levels increased significantly (and about the amount) among stressed younger and older adults, but did not change significantly from pre-test levels for the control group, which was not exposed to ice-cold water.

As Mather explained: “The brain regions that are involved in and activated by stress overlap quite a lot with the brain regions that are involved in decision making and, in particular, in decisions about risk.”

source:Eurekalert !

COLUMBIA, Mo. – From Barack Obama’s controversial pastor to Sarah Palin’s “secret religion”, religious values have continued to play a dominant role in the presidential election since John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic elected to president in 1960. Hoping to answer the question of which political party has a monopoly on the “best” values and how religion affects these values, Kennon Sheldon, a University of Missouri professor, compared the “extrinsic” values (financial success, status, appearance) with “intrinsic” values (growth, intimacy, helping) of self-declared Democrats and Republicans in four different samples. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger Y. Tsien, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Martin Chalfie of Columbia University. The three were honored for “the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.”

According to the Royal Swedish Academy, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments that have led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience. By using DNA technology, researchers can now connect GFP to other interesting, but otherwise invisible, proteins. This glowing marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of the tagged proteins. Read the rest of this entry »

To protect against nuclease digestion, or single-strand binding protein interactions, oligonucleotides for targeted delivery into intracellular systems must be stable. To accomplish this, we have developed single-walled carbon nanotubes as a carrier for single-stranded DNA probe delivery. This has resulted in superior biostability for intracellular application and, hence, has achieved the desired protective attributes, which are particularly important when DNA probes are used for intracellular measurements. Specifically, when bound to single-walled carbon nanotubes, DNA probes are protected from enzymatic cleavage and interference from nucleic acid binding proteins. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008 ozone hole – a thinning in the ozone layer over Antarctica – is larger both in size and ozone loss than 2007 but is not as large as 2006.

Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found in about 25 kilometres altitude that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, which can increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life. This year the area of the thinned ozone layer over the South Pole reached about 27 million square kilometres, compared to 25 million square kilometres in 2007 and a record ozone hole extension of 29 million square kilometres in 2006, which is about the size of the North American continent. Read the rest of this entry »

COLUMBIA, Mo. –According to the American Heart Association, three-fourths of people with diabetes die of some form of heart or blood-vessel disease. Previous studies have shown that cardiac function is compromised and cardiovascular diseases are increased in people with type 2 diabetes. Before vascular diseases develop in diabetics, blood-vessel cell dysfunction occurs. Using precise microscopes, University of Missouri researchers are dissecting coronary microvessels and testing which proteins are responsible for inflammation that causes blood-vessel dysfunction. By identifying the proteins that play important roles in blood-vessel dysfunction, they hope to develop new treatments for blood-vessel dysfunction in people with type 2 diabetes. Read the rest of this entry »