Welcome to iOS8

Last year marked the biggest change for mobile devices with the introduction of a new iOS system. Many had been using the operating system that they were used to for many year and the introduction of a new system took some adjusting and getting used to. Nowit seems that the evolution of iOS is on a fast track. So, what is better about iOS8 that we didn’t have with iOS7? Apple has yet to introduce all of the new features of the operating system, but here is what they have revealed so far.

First, the notifications center has changed. There is an interactive notifications feature. This allows you to do new things like swiping down to quickly reply to a message, even from the lock screen. These types of interactive notifications are very similar to those found in OS X Mavericks. Other features in the interactive notifications section include quickly favorite-ing contacts simply by double-tapping to multitask. In Safari, with this new OS you can look at multiple tabs by simply clicking “tab view,” which is on the top right corner of the iPad. This feature is also available on the brand new Yosemite OS X. Other features include a Mail change where you can use a swiping gesture to go straight from a message you’re writing to your inbox and then easily pop back to the drafted message.

These changes are exciting and usually make things easier, if you are able to adapt and know how to use them. Other new features in iOS8 include a new version of the keyboard. This change is known as Quick Type. It is advanced enough to suggest keywords and it is context and person sensitive. It recognizes other words you type and suggests words appropriate to that conversation. It also looks at who you are talking to or messaging and suggests words that are most appropriate to that conversation.

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Grass Eating Bacteria Produce Biofuel

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Georgia have successfully engineered bacteria that eat switchgrass and convert it into ethanol by digesting it. This process is much faster and cheaper than any other method of producing biofuel. It is a wonderful re-producible resource, but has been much more expensive than other fuels, making biofuel largely economically impractical. The creation of the bacteria changes the game because it is cheaper than crude oil. The only issue is that it is not known if biofuel is any better for the environment that traditional fossil fuels. Although we are able to reproduce it and the source is plant matter, burning it may be just as harmful on the environment, so it doesn’t solve too many problems in that respect. However, the researchers ability to create the bacteria is a triumph and a stepping stone for other projects.

The next phase of this idea is taking place at Arizona State University. Here synthetic biologists are working on generating bacteria that can turn carbon dioxide into crude oil. If this process is successful it could change the world. One of the researchers on the project, Joel Garreau states that the chemical process to turn Co2 into crude oil takes 27 steps. They have a biotechnology lab where they are growing algae “and taking these 27 chemical steps and stitching them together in one organism.” It seems that our energy future lies in creating bacteria to make fuel for us. Using the power of bacteria’s biological process can quickly and cheaply create fuels like ethanol and crude oil. While the Co2 eating bacteria is still in the works, the grass eating and biofuel producing bacteria is a reality. The researchers are now mass producing the bacteria to get them up to an economically viable scale to work on larger scale production.

Tooth Decay High in Children

Tooth decay is the top oral health issues for many children in Qatar. A recent study was conducted by the Al Wakra Hospital’s Prosthodontics consultant, Dr. Mohamed Sultan al-Darwish and found that of 2,113 students 85 percent of them had tooth decay. These students come from 12 different government schools and 4 different private schools and were 50 percent boys and 50 percent girls. Dr. al-Darwish received his PhD in the UK from the University of Gloucestershire based on this research. He used four other dentists and six data-entry dental assistants with him on the project to evaluate the students.

Dr. al-Darwish explained that tooth decay is usually caused by many factors, but has to do with plaque bacteria which diffuses into hard dental tissues that dissolves the mineral content of teeth. He adds, “the three essential factors for dental caries are dental plaque, which can contain harmful bacteria, carbohydrates in the diet and susceptible teeth. The prevalence of dental caries among the school children in Qatar is 85%. The mean value of DMFT is 4.6, 4.8, and 5.5 for 12, 13, and 14-year-old children, respectively. These values are well above the recommended levels of the World Health Organization (WHO), which suggests no more than a DMFT of 3 at the age of 12 years.” He concludes that there needs to be more of an awareness of the oral health needs of schoolchildren in Qatar. Dr. al-Darwish’s study also looked at the associations of the children’s oral health with their knowledge of oral health, their teeth irregularity, and their lifestyle (TV habits, Internet use, passive smoking, and diet).

Dr. al-Darwish’s research will probably be added to the world database of oral heath and diseases to supplement the records of the WHO. The WHO may compare this study in Qatar with similar results that they have found in the Eastern Mediterranean in order to find some sort of solution. Dr. al-Darwish’s study recommends the best way to improve the student’s oral health is to educate parents and school teachers with accurate information in order to raise the general health awareness of those in the area.

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Welcome to the Godzilla Revival

Since the first Japanese film debuted 60 years ago, Godzilla has been a popular film subject. The first movie was mostly to help the Japanese work through the terror that had occurred nine years earlier when two atomic bombs were dropped on their country. Godzilla was a warning story, as well as a way to acknowledge horrors and make them a little less frightening by working through them on screen with a large lizard. Since the first movie was released in 1954 many other Godzilla themed movies followed. The first was an American adaptation of the original Japanese film. This version was released in 1956 and named, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. A few movies had situations where Godzilla met other famous characters like King Kong and Venusian princesses, Megalon, the robot Jet Janguar, and Ultraman. In 1998 Roland Emmerich released a film titled, Godzilla, that tried to find realism and made Godzilla into a T. Rex. Godzilla appeared again in the 2004 film, Godzilla: Final Wars. In this most recent adaptation Godzilla comes from outer-space with 13 other monsters.

The new Godzilla film, directed by Gareth Edwards’s is epic and utilizes excellent CGI effects. It doesn’t focus solely on the monster, but instead tries to imagine how the modern world would react to encountering Godzilla for the first time. Creatively, the movie is very interesting. Edwards starts it with a sequence of images from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species along with footage of historic events like famous presidents and experimental nuclear bombs and some fictional sequences. The characters in the movie that make up most of the action and are largely at the center of the plot are Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) who is a nuclear engineer and his son Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is a military explosives-disposal expert. The arrival of the monster mends their relationship after Joe Brody was convinced of foul play when the plant where he worked in Japan was destroyed. Ford and Joe discover that the government is using the plant to grow a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) that hatches when the two are there and is a giant, prey-mantis figure. The giant bugs destruction allows Edwards to keep the suspense of Godzilla’s arrival at bay for a while. He can also show off the special effects that make this movie so enjoyable. Head to the theatres with popcorn in hand to see how the rest of the movie plays out and pay homage to the old while embracing the new.

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The News of Acquisitions

Tech and start up acquisitions have been occurring at a faster rate this year than they have in the past ten years. The deals cost more and they seem to be happening all over. The most recent big news flash came from the stir around the possibility of Apple acquiring Beats Electronics. This transaction would be huge because it is the largest acquisition for the computer company since 1996 when they bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT for $429 million. The Beats Electronics acquisition makes the NeXT transaction look like peanuts because the price tag is $3.2 billion. The Apple deal goes along with many other, so called “unicorn” acquisitions in the tech industry. Over the past year Facebook bought WhatsApp and Oculus, Google bought Waze and Nest Labs, Microsoft bought Nokia, and Yahoo acquired Tumblr. This rush in acquisitions will surely change the industry and how companies operate and how investors choose to apply their money. These companies that are consuming other now have an ability to quickly grow the companies they have acquired through sales. This fact is why Google has been pushing the advertising business for much of the revenue from their acquired companies. This is simply the fastest way to make money from a recently acquired company. Because so many companies have been so successful recently with acquiring and building revenue from acquisitions, any hesitance of bringing in new product lines has essentially disappeared. Now Apple, Facebook, and Google are eagerly buying up companies that make any sense to own. This is why Apple felt comfortable buying up Beat Electronics to put the headphones in along with their existing product lines. Google buying Nest also made sense for them because of the data the company could provide and the fact that it is central in the home. It is clear these tech companies are flourishing because of their acquisitions, which means that the flood of transactions won’t stop anytime soon.

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Manziel Needs Gordon

The Cleveland Browns almost had a great team this year. They recruited Johnny Menziel in the draft and they hold one of the top five wide receivers in the country, Josh Gordon. Together, they are great. Separately, Manziel will have a hard time getting the team together to stand up to the very physical division of the NFL they are in. The problem is that Manziel was able to throw deep in college, but he depended on his teammates to be there to catch whatever he presented them with. Gordon is still currently on the team, but he may be suspended for a year. This leaves Manziel alone, without someone to lean on like Gordon. The rest of the team is not strong enough to help him the way that Gordon could have so this leaves Manziel with a pretty bleak looking rookie year.

It comes down to the Browns not being smart about Gordon’s possible suspension and taking some risks during the draft. During the 2014 National Football League Draft the Browns traded down to No. 9, hoping that they could get a receiver from Texas A&M named Mike Evans. However, Evans didn’t slip and went to Tampa Bay as many predicted. When that didn’t work out in their favor they went for a corner instead after trading up to 8 and then they stopped looking for a receiver. The draft game is tricky, but it doesn’t seem like the Browns did a good job of anticipating what they needed to do to make this draft work in their favor. This is a shame because Manziel is a good player, but without a team to back him up, the Cleveland Browns are in for a pretty tricky season. Manziel has been described as a quarterback that plays like a running back, but his skills may not be enough. The matchups for this season may see that he is the only valuable player and have even more incentive to sack the Browns quarterback.

Nets Win in First Round of Playoffs

The NFL playoffs are in full swing and the Nets have proven they are worthy opponents. They had a great win on Sunday in Toronto against the Raptors in front of 20,547 fans. At the end of the game, after they won by a thread in the last minute, Paul Pierce let out a scream and started pumping his fist in the air. He said after the game that he was in the right place at the right time to make the block on Kyle Lowry that won game 7 for the Nets at the end of this series. It came down to Pierce’s block in the end because Deron Williams missed 3 of the 6 free throws in the last few minutes of the game. This meant that the Nets only had a 104-103 lead in the last 8.8 seconds so Pierce needed to block to bring his team to victory. Garnett also contributed to the game 7 win by saving his best performance of the series for Sunday’s game. He had 12 points, 11 rebounds and one big block during this game. Regardless of who made mistakes and who brought their best game, the overall team came to a victory, which means they get to move on to their real opponents, the Miami Heat.

Joe Johnson says of taking on the Heat, “we know we can beat them.” The Nets did have success against the Miami Heat and LeBron James during the regular season this year. The Nets swept the four-game season series with Miami. This is remarkable because Miami hasn’t lost four games in a row to one team during the regular season since a former era with the Big Three. They probably won’t have the same calls they did when they played Miami during the season, but after coming off this victory in Toronto, the Nets are confident that they will win against Miami in the upcoming games.

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