linkstream2 microblog

There is an interesting discussion about synthesized voices and how the technology is changing as well as some of the legal implications of this. Does a person own their voice after it has been moved into a synthesizer? For instance one can easily take the addresses from George Bush and Barak Obama and create synthesized voices from them that sound fairly realistic, which in turn can be used to say virtually anything.

Do you own your own voice? It’s now possible to synthesize realistic #voices from snippets such as an Obama address
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v499/n7457/nature-2013-07-11.html

Iron production electrified. New tech for extraction of Fe directly from its oxide w/o C via high-T #electrolysis.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7449/full/nature12102.html

This piece contains an interesting discussion of new blast furnace technology, which enables one to extract the oxygen directly from iron oxide without the need for carbon or the creation of carbon dioxide as it uses electrolysis. The key idea is being able to do this at very high temperatures.

QT:”
Kerri Smith: Extracting iron from its naturally found form, iron oxide is a hot and heavy business. You throw your iron oxide and some carbon into a blastfurnace and then heat it to 1600 degrees Celsius, out comes iron, worldwide about a billion tons of it a year, but also outcomes carbon dioxide- bad news for the environment. Scientists would like to use other friendlier methods to make iron. This week a team from MIT reports a way to convert iron oxide to iron using electricity. It’s not a new idea. It’s basically a form of
electrolysis which extracts the oxygen leaving pure iron behind. But they’ve gotten over the biggest problem, finding material that can withstand the temperatures of molten metal oxides. Metallurgist Derek Fray at the University of Cambridge in the UK has written a News and Views article about the research. He started by telling me how much CO2, iron production is responsible for. Nature (2013); Nature(2013) ”

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7449/full/nature12102.html

Great link on True Cost of Science #Publishing: $5K/article with #openaccess giving clearer view on costs
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 MT @Richvn

Interesting discussion on the cost of scientific publishing. It appears that the open access model, in addition to having free access to the content, is also giving people a much more open view of the cost. This is because most of the costs are upfront and clear to see author paid charges as opposed to being hidden in secret contracts to libraries. A number of the journals have a cost of
~$5000/article going down to as low as ~$1300 for PLoS ONE.
It is claimed that some of the marquee subscription
publishers such as Nature have costs of >$30,000/article
and it is interesting thinking about how to meld these
together.

QT:”
We estimate that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000–10,000 years.
”

6,515 #exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants: ~75% #SNVs arose in last ~7.5K yrs
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7431/full/nature11690.html

The bread #wheat genome using… shotgun sequencing: ~5X human, from 3 diff. component genomes, many #pseudogenes
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7426/full/nature11650.html