To com­mem­o­rate the 200^th anniver­sary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 Feb­ru­ary 1809 and the 150^th anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of Darwin’s ‘On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ural Selec­tion‘, the British Royal Mint has struck a series of lim­ited edi­tion proof and uncir­cu­lated col­lec­tor £2 coins.

“My imme­di­ate idea was to depict Dar­win look­ing back into the past so the start­ing point was to have him in full or 3/4 pro­file on one side and there were a vari­ety of options for the other,” Zamit explained on the Mint’s site. “I decided hav­ing Dar­win and an ape was the sim­plest and most rec­og­niz­able way of say­ing evo­lu­tion.“

The obverse or heads side of each legal ten­der coin fea­tures the cur­rent por­trait of Her Majesty The Queen by Ian Rank-Broadley FRBS. The coin edge includes the inscrip­tion “ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 1859.”

13th February, 2009 Comments Off

Today is the 200^th anniver­sary of the birth of Charles Dar­win, one of science’s most revered fig­ures. Spe­cial events mark­ing the occa­sion are planned through­out the world espe­cially in Eng­land where he was born on this date (Feb­ru­ary 12^th) in 1809. This year’s also the 150^th anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of the famed naturalist’s most impor­tant work, On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ural Selec­tion, a book that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the sci­ence of biol­ogy, and despite enor­mous amounts of evi­dence in its favor remains con­tro­ver­sial to this day.

Darwin’s works have played a key role in advanc­ing sci­en­tific thought in such fields as biol­ogy, genet­ics, bio­chem­istry, and pale­on­tol­ogy (just to name a few!). The life and works of Dar­win have been deemed so impor­tant by sci­en­tists from around the world that hun­dreds of muse­ums, orga­ni­za­tions, and sci­en­tific soci­eties have decided to cel­e­brate his birth­day and his research. Here are some of the notable events planned in cel­e­bra­tion of Dar­win, his life, and his con­tri­bu­tions to the field of sci­ence.
Con­tinue reading →

12th February, 2009 Comments Off

Today we are prouly open web site for newly estab­lished Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Nan­otox­i­c­ity Cen­ter (ICN). I was responible for design and deploy­ment of the project. Cen­ter is located at Jack­son State Uni­ver­sity cam­pus. The ICN is funded under NSF CREST pro­gram. It con­sists of an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary group of researchers from Chem­istry, Physics, Biol­ogy and Engi­neer­ing per­forms com­pre­hen­sive inves­ti­ga­tions of nano­ma­te­ri­als that will strengthen the research infra­struc­ture of Jack­son State Uni­ver­sity. The research projects include dif­fer­ent aspects of the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of nano­ma­te­ri­als and inves­ti­ga­tions of their prop­erty and bio­log­i­cal activity.

On the cen­ter pre­sen­ta­tion I deliv­ered a short talk on impact of web tech­nol­o­gis on sci­ence and so called “sci­ence 2.0″.

UPD[19:25]: Thanks, Dmytro for blog­ging on me! Go word­press, its so much nicer:)

6th February, 2009 Comments Off

The U.S. gov­ern­ment has com­mis­sioned IBM to build a mas­sive super­com­puter that will have 1.6 mil­lion proces­sor cores and be 15 times faster than today’s most pow­er­ful machine, IBM announced Tuesday.

The “Sequoia” super­com­puter is sched­uled for oper­a­tion in 2012 and will be able to per­form at 20 petaflops, IBM said. The fastest super­com­puter today, IBM’s Road­run­ner at the Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­tory, can man­age 1.1 petaflops.

Sequoia will be based on IBM’s Blue Gene/Q archi­tec­ture, which is still under devel­op­ment. Ordered by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy, it will be located at the Lawrence Liv­er­more National Lab­o­ra­tory in California.

Sequoia will occupy 96 server racks over an area a bit larger than a ten­nis court. IBM won’t dis­cuss the machine in detail because it is still being devel­oped, but Dave Turek, vice pres­i­dent of IBM’s Deep Com­put­ing ini­tia­tive, said it will be sim­i­lar in design to its pre­de­ces­sor, Blue Gene/P, but on a much larger scale. The sys­tem will run a ver­sion of the Linux OS, use IBM’s embed­ded Power proces­sors and have 1.6 petabytes of main memory.

Because a com­puter this size has never been built, scal­ing the proces­sor count, mem­ory DIMMs and man­age­ment sub­sys­tems comes with a level of uncer­tainty, Turek acknowl­eged. “This is not an exer­cise for the faint of heart,” he said “When you push the lim­its of scal­a­bil­ity you start to observe prob­lems that were sim­ply unanticipated.”

[via PC world and Reuters]

3rd February, 2009 Comments Off