With the release of firmware 1.6 for the PlayStation 3, along with it comes the Folding@Home software which many members of the gaming community have been waiting for. And yes, among those who have been looking forward to this potentially life-saving project is the QJ Team.

For those who are yet unfamiliar with the term, Folding@Home is a project which was started by researchers from Stanford University. The project involves the study of protein folding which has been thought to be the root of diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington's Disease, cystic fibrosis, and some types of cancer. The aim of the project is to help the researchers to build models and simulations of these proteins by lending them some CPU power and a bit of bandwidth.

Now that Sony has fully pitched in on this effort and is putting the power of the Cell processor to good use, gamers can now do their part by simply installing the Folding@Home software on their PS3s and letting the program run while the console is idle.

Well, we here at QJ are doing just that, but we would of course love some company from our readers. So, in order to turn this into a full community effort, we would like to invite all of our readers (or even if you're just passing by our site for the first time) to join the QJ.Net Folding@Home team.

It's fairly simple. Once you've launched the Folding@Home program, just press the triangle button to bring up the Options panel, select "Identity", and then select "Join an existing team". After that, just enter QJ.Net's team number and, voila! You're now a part of QJ.Net's Folding@Home team. Here's QJ's team number:

52781

There's nothing to lose while we have everything to gain as we help in the scientific effort to cure some of the diseases which many members of society have been or are currently suffering from. So, power up that PS3, download and install the software, join our team, then go make yourself a sandwich and proceed to feel good about yourself. Or you can just simply continue to sit in your living room, let the program run and watch that really nifty 3D background which shows the Earth in all its sparkly glory, AND feel good about yourself.

Visit: QJ.Net Folding@Home
Visit: QJ's PS3 General Discussion Forum

We all know that a bowl of hot chicken soup has always been one of the best remedies for a variety of household ailments. However, thanks to scientific research, eggs from genetically-modified chickens can now contain pharmaceutical proteins, which in turn, can be harvested and turned into virus-fighting drugs.

British scientists Dr. Helen M. Sang and her team, all from the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, UK, began their experiments by creating new genetic material which was a combination of a hen's genes which regulate the egg white production, and a gene which makes human antibodies that target malignant melanoma. This new gene was then injected into the embryo of a fertilized and newly-laid egg, which was then cared for until it hatched.

The resulting chick then grew and was bred, and then its own batch of fertilized eggs were examined to see if any of it were transgenic. These transgenic eggs were again cared for until they hatched. It was then this third generation of chickens that laid the eggs containing the melanoma-fighting pharmaceutical proteins, which were first introduced at the beginning of the experiment.

To prove that the proteins were still usable and effective, they harvested the antibodies from the egg white and used it on a test virus. The antibodies were then proven to be active.

Dr. Sang has noted that they are hoping to produce various other protein drugs via this method. According to her, she is hoping that using transgenic chickens as an alternative production platform would "bring down the costs of drugs that currently are prohibitively expensive".

The mystery of the ball lightning has been solved by a team of Brazilian scientists who were able to create lightning balls. The scientists even got the mysterious ball to bounce around for several seconds in a lab. The team who was able to finally recreate this mysterious natural phenomenon is the one led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco.

It has always been thought that lightning balls were either a "highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields" or "a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface" - with the latter supposedly the result of lightning striking soil and turning the silicon in the soil into silicon vapor. This latter theory attributed the heat of lightning balls to the heat of the silicon recombining with the oxygen in the atmosphere.

Using these theories as a basis for their experiments, the Brazilians took a silicon wafer which is 350 micrometres thick, sandwiched it between two electrodes and then zapped them with currents which go up to 140 amps. They then moved the electrodes slightly apart, and an electrical arc was formed which in turn vaporized the silicon and created ping-pong sized lightning balls which lasted up to eight seconds.

Even though we're not yet sure about the practical use of this experiment (except maybe to dispel the fears of people that the floating orbs they see during thunderstorms may be their great-great-great-aunt), Pavao, Paiva, and their team are now continuing their experiments using various other materials, minerals and alloys, to see if the same effect can be reproduced using those variations. Whether an iPod was one of the things they plan to zap next is unknown.

Yep, the U.S. Army is now taking their trainings seriously, and first and foremost among the things that they'll be spending more time on would be... well, playing video games. These aren't just plain, old games though, as they will be using computer simulators which have been tailor-made for the purpose. In fact, these simulators are now being used in places like Fort Carson in Colorado, where recruits are now learning the basics of M-1 tanks and M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

These things don't go cheap, either, as the government is shelling out US$ 50 million for the project. Officials find that this is still the more efficient alternative as it saves on fuel and prevents real-life accidents from occurring.

So what else does this new way of training soldiers need? The soldiers say that sadly, "computers can't replicate is the smell of being inside of a tank".

Smell-o-vision, anyone?

If you ever auditioned for anything and you were rejected because you "lacked the star quality/x-factor" to make it into showbiz, then it may actually mean that you just simply have to be more vain.

Recently, Los Angeles psychologists Mark Young and Drew Pinsky have compiled proof that, yes, celebrities do think that they're better than the rest of us, and that it may just be that which has propelled them into stardom in the first place.

After having conducted a survey among 200 celebrities via Pinsky's radio show, they've come up with the results showing that what makes celebs different would be "their extreme levels of self love and their compulsive need for public attention".

According to the survey, dubbed as "Narcissism Personality Inventory", celebrity women tend to be "far more narcissistic than men and up to a third are more manipulative and vain about their appearance than the typical woman in the street", that they do believe that they deserve the compliments that they get, and that they do insist on being respected at all times.

However, he does point out that several of Hollywood's "fast set" such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears may be digging themselves into trouble. To quote:

They are going further and further. One of these Hollywood party girls is going to be dead in five years' time.

We are seeing a new type of celebrity who is famous just for being famous, without a foundation of skills, and this puts the pressure on them to perform ever more outrageously to feed their need for attention.

On the other hand, they have also pointed out that there is also a marked difference between various types of celebrities, since "the more real-life skills they have, such as musicians, the less narcissistic they are".

So. How about those guitar lessons?

In a recent official press release, NASA has announced that they will be offering their assistance to Santa Claus as he makes his annual global delivery today. In the announcement, they have noted that some of NASA's resources such as the Debris Imaging Radar System will be... ah, heck.

Here's the full announcement. It's best when you get to read the whole thing for yourself, and if you don't believe us, then feel free to NASA's official site.

RELEASE: 74-06

NASA's KSC Providing Assistance to Santa on Christmas Eve

The Debris Imaging Radar System, used during the night launch of NASA's space shuttle mission STS-116, is a new system at Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will now be made available to Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

Based on its success in identifying even the smallest amount of debris coming off the orbiter or the external tank, NASA has strong confidence the system will provide assistance in observing Santa's sleigh. Since the elves have the packages piled high, NASA can determine with great accuracy if any gifts planned for delivery fall off the sleigh. The radar system is capable of high-definition radar imagery, so the approximate shape, size and weight of the packages can be determined.

This could greatly help Santa recover the packages so that no child is disappointed by not receiving the presents the jolly fellow promised while he made the rounds in shopping malls before Christmas. The radar has an auto-track mode so that it can be left unattended on Christmas Eve and still perform its intended function. The system will be automatically activated once NASA's air traffic control radar located on north KSC has made radar contact with Santa's sleigh.

Also of assistance to Santa this year is the new Differential Global Positioning Satellite System ground station at the Shuttle Landing Facility. These new GPS antennas located near the control tower can help if there is an emergency. Since the sleigh is now GPS equipped, it can guide Santa to a landing within 10 feet of the runway's centerline, regardless of which end of the runway he needs to use.

Though Shuttle Landing Facility personnel will be on holiday leave, officials at the NASA Tower have agreed to provide the customary support by turning the landing lights on before they depart for Christmas, as well as turning on the TACAN radio homing beacon and the visual alternating green and white lighted rotating beacon.

NASA will use the orbiter Discovery to mimic Santa's sleigh during the STS-116 landing currently planned for Friday, in order to test the ability to operate these two new systems in auto-track mode. If the orbiter is waved off to land on the West Coast, the Shuttle Training Aircraft will be used to simulate Santa's sleigh.

If Santa needs help, one of the primary radio frequencies normally used for communication in restricted airspace will still be monitored by the Air Force Eastern Range and also NASA security.

For more information about KSC's assistance to Santa, contact the KSC News Center at 321-867-2468.

In the meantime, you can track Santa's progress right here.

It's the stuff that science fiction is made of, one of the most ambitious science projects of all time, and is possibly also the most expensive. However, with this experiment, scientists may just finally achieve the Holy Grail of physics: The God particle.

At the Cern particle physics lab in Switzerland, more than 600 physicists are working on the Large Hadron Collider, a machine that they hope will finally reveal details on how the universe began. The Collider will be large enough to house the nave of Westminster Abbey and will be monitored by computers that were built to easily handle information and data that is the equivalent of 150 times of what's on the internet each year.

As side-effects of the machine, "dark energy" which is believed to drive the expansion of the universe, may be revealed. On top of this, as some scientists think that the universe is composed of various dimensions, the machine may momentarily create wedges to other dimensions from which enormous amounts of gravity can seep through. This influx of gravity may then result in the creation of baby black holes.

And all this just so they could hunt down the so-called God particle which is properly known as the Higgs boson particle, which is supposed to make other particles heavier by clinging to them, thus later on resulting into mass, and in turn answering the question of why objects have mass in the first place. "It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," says Cern's chief scientist, Jos Engelen.

After so many months looking for the missing Apollo 11 moon landing data tapes, the search has finally come to an end as the data has already been unearthed, quite literally, under the seats of the physics lecture hall of the Curtin University of Technology in Perth.

When the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon back in 1969, and right after the American astronauts addressed the citizens of Earth, they finally got to work and set up instruments on the surface of our closest neighbor.

The Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package (or EASEP) consisted of "several self-contained experiments including temperature and seismic activity gauges and a small dust detector..." This package was set up on the moon, then activated on August 4, 1969 when it started collecting data about the environmental changes and conditions which happened at the landing site. However, the experiment was stopped by August 27 when the EASEP stopped responding to signals from the ground stations in the U.S. and Australia.

While the EASEP was functioning, the data that it collected was recorded on magnetic tapes in the ground stations mentioned previously. The designer of the EASEP's dust detector, physicist and environmental consultant Brian O'Brien, then gave his tapes to colleague John de Laeter who would then keep the 28 centimetre-diameter tapes in perfect condition for the next 25 years. The tapes were originally housed in a small store room, but were then moved to the lecture hall where it stayed under physics students' seats for years.

One day, O'Brien decided to search for the missing NASA television tapes that scientists were looking for, and found the first box of old tapes. Then, just last week, de Laeter, O'Brien and the laboratory manager finally turned up the rest of the tapes (nearly 100 of them which were clearly marked "NASA Manned Space Center") and saved them from having been mistaken for trash and getting tossed into the dumpster.

One of the tapes have now been sent to NASA to see if any important data can still be retrieved.

To those familiar with Douglas Adams' novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (great book, go read it if you haven't already), one would recall that one of the main and most important things or creatures that the characters of the novel ever encountered was the Babel Fish. As explained by the author himself,

[This galactic species of fish] feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

Now, we're not about to start sticking fish in our ears, but American researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh may have something up their sleeves - something which Adams himself would be delighted to know. Instead of fish, they are attaching electrodes to the face and neck of a person. The electrodes can then detect the movements which occur when a person mouths a word in his own language, and the movements are then processed, associated with a word, then translated and spoken out in a different language by a synthesized voice. Cool, huh?

At the moment, the team has already developed two prototypes, one of which can translate Chinese into English, and another which can translate English to Spanish or German. The translator is working at 80% accuracy while using a vocabulary of about 100 to 200 words. It may not seem much, but if you're a tourist in a foreign country, 200 words can do wonders to make your life easier.

However, it has been noted that since the mouth movements will obviously not match the sound being made, the effect of this translator may come off as rather strange and may take some getting used to. That is, unless you're already used to watching dubbed Mexican soap operas.

And yet another citizen of the realm of science fiction attempts to make beam guns a reality with the Microwave-oven beam gun

As we all know, a microwave can burn through meat and skin (as proven by fresh chicken left in a microwave oven for too long); destroy electronics and induce high voltages in chips and wires; cause sparks on metallic objects; as well as induce detonation in improvised explosives by exciting unstable chemicals...all these simply by pointing a concentrated beam of microwaves.

It all sounds cool, that's true, but it also sounds complicated as magnetrons which can handle up to a megawatt is necessary for this idea to become feasible. However, this was all solved by a couple of inventors from New Mexico who came up with the idea to simply take the needed number of magnetrons from common, household microwave ovens, slap them together in the back of a mobile generator, and combine their output into one solid beam. How many microwave ovens do you need to hack in order to create your own mini Death Ray? About 300, apparently,  since each household magnetron takes on about one kilowatt.

This so-called microwave gun is a good idea, but many are questioning the US Patent Office's own idea of putting out a complete set of instructions on how to assemble this machine on the internet, for everybody to see, and we mean EVERYBODY, including dateless geeks, terrorists, and that girl you stood up on prom night.

So, if your new neighbor has a shipload of ovens delivered to his or her garage, or you hear news about a kitchen appliance delivery truck being hijacked, be wary and start reaching for that Cling Wrap.