HartleySpurlock.com

Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom.  This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head.  Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won't be the last.  The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna.  This can't be a good design decision, can it?  How can we be stuck with this conundrum?  It's the FCC's fault.

You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone.  But, the hand is not!!  And the FCC's tests are not the only tests that must be passed by a candidate product.  AT&T has their own requirements for devices put on their network, and antenna efficiency is one of them.  I know because I have designed quad-band GSM antennas for the AT&T network.  The AT&T test similarly does not require the hand to be on the phone.

Fallout MMO Now Accepting Beta Sign-Ups

After a long gestation period - and its fair share of legal woes - the Fallout massively multiplayer online game is now accepting sign-ups for beta testers. You want in?

Then head to the site below, where you'll be treated to a suitably-themed introduction sequence showing a few of the game's locations and characters/enemies.

I can't imagine post-apocalyptic wastelands are the most enjoyable places the hang out in your spare time and socialise with people. Then again, Fallout is about as fun and cheery as a nuclear wasteland gets this side of Full Throttle.

[Fallout Online]

"One of the first things that came to my mind was, 'Good thing we brought a second javelin,'" Coach Richard Vance, said Monday.

Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.

Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.

The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.

The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.

According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.

Senior White House officials said today they believe last week's Times Square car bomb was the work of a Pakistani Taliban group, rather than a "lone wolf" attacker, after finding evidence of a broader plot behind the botched attack.