The VALENTINA BROSTEAN Portfolio

http://www.behance.net/valentinabrostean

650 Million Years In 1:20 min - Watch more Funny Videos

Solar system
Moon
Collisions
Atmosphere
Continental shifts
Volcanoes
Organic beings
.....
...
..
.
.
The temperature record!



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age 

Fibers cradle a planet-like ball in an award-winning image meant to convey that Earth's future is in our collective hands.

Harvard University's Sung Hoon Kang submerged tiny plastic fibers—each only 1/500 as big as a human hair—in an evaporating liquid, where they spontaneously and cooperatively supported the small green ball.

"Using the image, I tried to describe cooperative efforts across the world to save our Earth by going green," Hoon said.

The shot was selected as best photograph in the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual contest, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science, award outstanding artistic efforts to visualize complex scientific concepts. (See some of last year's winners.)

The winners will be announced in tomorrow's issue of Science.

—Brian Handwerk

Published February 18, 2010

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/photogalleries/100218-best-science-pictures 

Physicists in the US and Germany have used two fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics to perform a high-precision test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The researchers exploited wave-particle duality and superposition within an atom interferometer to prove that an effect known as gravitational redshift – the slowing down of time near a massive body – holds true to a precision of seven parts in a billion.

 http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41740 

Recently I learned about the city called Astana in Kazakhstan...


Here's a small gallery of Dubai-like enterprises:
 http://aboutkazakhstan.com/Astana_city.shtml 

* MULTIMEDIA * for windows is the apex of biological evolution on Earth.


There are two standalone players that require no other installations (of codecs and such):

Videolan.
http://www.videolan.org

MPlayer.
http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/home/?page=projects#mplayer



There is one codec pack in particular that covers all types of media files, with a player included. If you dislike player, you can use any particular player that you already have with this codec pack.

Combined Community Codec Pack.
http://www.cccp-project.net



The corporate players are used, because their streaming formats, coming from their streaming servers are patented. Universal players can replace them, but sometimes there is a media file that they cannot play in full quality.

www.real.com (real audio/video)
www.apple.com/quicktime (qt, mov)
(windows media player already present for wmv)



Winamp is the most popular audio player, in particular due to its ripping to the best formats available.
www.winamp.com



Free radio player.
http://www.screamer-radio.com



Adobe corporation free players for web media
Flash, Shockwave, Air, PDF.
www.adobe.com



VRML is a 3D manipulation environment for browsers.
http://www.parallelgraphics.com/products/cortona/



The DivX codec from divx makers is obsolete in the context of standalone players or combined codec pack, but it should provide the best divx quality (if at all).
http://www.divx.com



MV2 is an outdated reserve video player for last resort situations. It has uniquely the best subtitles, screen proportion and image zoom settings.
http://mv2.czweb.org



Cyberlink DVD player is commercial, unique for some image enhancement effects.
http://cyberlink.com



For encrypted DVD you need to use this little program (32-bit only).
 http://www.dvd43.com  or DVDFab…



Download videos from the internet, videos embedded in sites like YouTube...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006



Image viewer.
 http://picasa.google.com/ 



Windows movie maker is bundled here.
http://download.live.com/



To edit and record sounds for free, try Audacity.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net



Free disc recording:
http://cdburnerxp.se/



Free cataloger:
 http://www.boozet.org/visualcd.htm 

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase lockingMovie Camera. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

Dietmar Plenz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, wondered whether more complicated signatures also link groups of neurons. To investigate, they analysed neuronal activity using arrays of electrodes implanted in the brains of two awake macaque monkeys and embedded in dish-grown neuron cultures.

In both cases, the researchers noticed that the voltage of the electrical signal in groups of neurons separated by up to 10 millimetres sometimes rose and fell with exactly the same rhythm. These patterns of activity, dubbed "coherence potentials", often started in one set of neurons, only to be mimicked or "cloned" by others milliseconds later. They were also much more complicated than the simple phase-locked oscillations and always matched each other in amplitude as well as in frequency.
Perfect clones

"The precision with which these new sites pick up on the activity of the initiating group is quite astounding – they are perfect clones," says Plenz.

Importantly, cloned signals only appeared after one region had reached a threshold level of activity. Plenz likens this to the "tipping point" in human societies when a trend becomes adopted by large numbers of people. This threshold might ensure that our attention is only captured by significant stimuli rather than by every single signal.

Since the coherence potentials seemed unique, each one could represent a different memory Plenz suggests. Their purpose may be to trigger activity in the various parts of the brain that store aspects of the same experience. So a smell or taste, say might trigger a coherence potential that then activates the same potential in neurons in the visual part of the brain.

Karl Friston at University College London calls the discovery "a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle" in terms of brain message transmission.

Journal reference: PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000278

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Word from the authors explains in further detail...


Complex systems, when poised at the transition between order and disorder, exhibit scale-free, power law dynamics. These critical systems are highly adaptive and flexibly process and store information, which for decades prompted the conjecture that the brain might operate at criticality. Our discovery of neuronal avalanches in superficial layers of cortex in 2001 provides solid experimental evidence that indeed the brain might be critical. The spatio-temporal, synchronized activity patterns of avalanches form a scale-free organization that spontaneously emerges in vitro in slice cultures and acute slices and in vivo in the anesthetized rat and in awake macaque monkeys. Avalanches are established at the time of superficial cortex layer differentiation, require balanced fast excitation and inhibition, and are regulated via an inverted-U profile of NMDA/dopamine-D1 interaction, well known from cognitive task paradigms, e.g. working memory. Their internal organization forms a small-world topology that combines local diversity with efficient global communication. Neuronal synchronization in the form of avalanches naturally incorporates gamma-oscillations and cascades, e.g. synfire chains. Cortical networks that display neuronal avalanches optimize their internal information transfer and maximize the range of inputs that can be processed.

Imbedded in the scale-invariant avalanche dynamics, is a threshold-dependent mechanism that allows a local neuronal group, once it reaches a minimal size, to replicate its activity at multiple sites. We named such replication a coherence potential and it can be identified by the identical waveforms found almost simultaneously in the local field potential at many sites. This threshold dependent replication is indicative of a tipping point that bears analogy to the propagation of innovations and economic behavior in social networks, which can spread rapidly once they have garnered a local critical mass.

Overall, our results demonstrate that neuronal avalanches and coherence potentials are signatures of critical network dynamics at which the cortex gains universal properties found at criticality.

http://neuroscience.nih.gov/Lab.asp?Org_ID=117


It has long been thought that memories and behaviors arise from transient propagation of electrical activity among a sub-group of brain cells or neurons forming a 'cell assembly'. My work in Dietmar Plenz's Section on Critical Brain Dynamics led to the discovery 'coherence potentials' that allow identification of transient associations or cell assemblies.

Coherence potentials are complex negative-positive waveforms in the local field potential with durations between 50 and 250 ms that have exceeded a particular amplitude threshold and are therefore able to propagate to a large number of sites in the cortex without distortion of temporal structure or substantial loss of amplitude. The generation of coherence potentials appears to be a general property of the superficial cortex arising from the intrinsic network architecture and cellular properties and thus can be seen in in vitro. Phenomenologically, coherence potentials are like a network level action potential. However unlike action potentials which are stereotypical in shape, coherence potentials have diverse waveforms that are identical within a propagated sequence but distinct between sequences. We believe that the waveform serves for encoding of information as well as an identifier of associations between sites.

http://neuroscience.nih.gov/Fellows/Fellow.asp?People_ID=1643