About 50,000 bikers and spectators converged on port over, Ontario for the traditional Friday the 13th festivities.

The police had been expecting about 15,000 however the rain held off in the town of 5,500 swelled by more than 20,000 motorcycle enthusiasts and spectators.

The attendees were kept entertained by live bands and beer tents as booths did a brisk business selling Friday the 13 T-shirts and other items.

This was a 51st Friday the 13th celebration since the tradition began in November 1981 when about 25 friends got together at Port Dover hotel.

This was taken from the Canadian  Press

This image was taking at the winery in Niagara on the Lake. There are 16 bottles deep.

The facts about prostate cancer

The Canadian Press


Published Sunday, May. 08, 2011 8:37PM EDT


Last updated Sunday, May. 08, 2011 8:38PM ED


Former Olympic champion swimmer Alex Baumann has
been diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer.
Some facts about the disease from the Canadian
Cancer Society and Prostate Cancer Canada:

- 24,600 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer
in 2010 and 4,300 of those cases were fatal.

- Some symptoms of prostate cancer are the need
to urinate often, difficulty urinating, painful
urination, blood in urine or semen and painful ejaculation.

-­ One in six men will develop prostate cancer.

-­ The two tests available to detect prostate
cancer early are a digital rectal exam and a
prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test.

-­ If caught early, prostate cancer is more than 90 per cent curable

Race to save digital art from the rapid pace of technological change

Pioneers of computer art are in danger of becoming the lost generation of our cultural heritage because scientists are unable to
preserve their work

Vice Versa Et Cetera by Simon Payne

Vice Versa Et Cetera by digital video artist Simon Payne, who argues
that the temporary lifespan of this art form is often part of the
experience. Photograph: Simon Payne

A race is on against the fast pace of technological change as
scientists search for ways to preserve today's most innovative artworks.

A team of experts is warning that some of Britain's contemporary
artistic landmarks will be no more than memories within a decade
unless conservationists can effectively archive digital works and
stop them degrading.

"The threat is very real that, unless we do something, we will have a
'lost generation' in terms of our cultural heritage," said Dr David
Anderson, who, together with his colleague Dr Janet Delve at the
School of Creative Technologies at the University of Portsmouth, is
leading efforts to save the more complex artworks of the digital age
from oblivion.

"Past generations captured who they were and what they did via
museums and books," Anderson said, "but the pace of technological
development in the digital age has now outstripped our capacity for
preservation."

At the same time as the visual artist
Hilary Lloyd is
nominated for this year's Turner Prize for her inventive work in film
and video, "digital preservationists" are campaigning for more shared
research and have organized the first of a series of symposiums to be
held at King's College London and Cambridge next month.

The fast pace by which technology changes means that many of the
earliest works of art created on computer are in danger of being
lost, or are already impossible to read, while new interactive
digital artworks, such as visualizations and video games, are so
complex that scientists are not yet capable of faithfully preserving them.

"Digital preservation is desperately important," said Anderson. "In
technology little things change all the time. Over the course of a
20- or 30-year working life, the software we use is updated or made
obsolete all the time, but most of us aren't really bothered by the
changes. But in terms of science and art, digital preservation is
increasingly important."

Preserving today's works of art poses more of a challenge to science
than continued efforts to restore and conserve the great oil
paintings and sculptures of the past, Anderson and Delve argue.

It is a problem already faced by collectors and contemporary art
galleries, as formats are updated and CDs, DVDs and digital recordings degrade.

Lloyd, 48, from Halifax, creates innovative work that poses typical
problems for conservators. Her recent film and video footage,
previously on display at the Raven Row gallery in London, was put
together in a way that subverts expectations of art. A piece that
initially appeared to be a still life, for example, turned out to be
in perpetual motion. Projectors and monitors formed a part of the work itself.

"In digital art, the key is to find ways of preserving the colour and
visual aspects of a piece of art. If we don't preserve the digital
art made today, it could be like walking into a world-famous gallery
and seeing nothing on the walls, that no art has survived some global
meltdown," said Anderson.

A new digital art gallery is to launch on Monday in the centre of
Cambridge. The vaulted section, set up by Anglia Ruskin University
inside the Ruskin Gallery, which was opened by the art critic John
Ruskin in 1858, has been fitted with cutting-edge plasma screens
to enable digital artists to experiment.

But the preservation of this kind of work, in contrast, is still a
work in progress.

Dr Simon Payne, a
digital video
artist and senior lecturer in film and media at Anglia Ruskin
University, who will be exhibiting at the gallery, points out that
many contemporary artists are happy for their work to have a short
lifespan, or at least can accept that its temporary nature is a key
part of the experience for viewers.

"Some artists who make digital art that is ephemeral, who are almost
like performance artists, are dedicated to the idea that it will not last.

"But from an academic point of view, of course, you want to be able
to recreate the culture of the past and to show it to students."

Payne's own work is what he describes as "perceptual", playing with
what the viewer can see, such as the Op Art movement of the 60s and 70s.

"It is designed with the idea of creating a discrete physical effect
on the viewer and for me, ideally, it should be shown in the context
of a cinema, so I don't know how you would ever preserve it effectively."

Ironically, an artwork made or recorded on celluloid, or even on
videotape, is more likely to survive the test of time than more
recent work created or archived digitally, Payne added.

Albert Einstein was right, say scientists, 100 years on

The theory of general relativity is as relevant
to us today as it was when it was formulated, as
a discovery about space-time reveals


After working for half a century and spending
£500m, scientists last week revealed that they
have detected strange fluctuations in Earth's
orbit.
Space-time
is bent and then twisted round our planet as it
rotates, announced researchers with Nasa's Gravity Probe B project.

The effect is tiny but crucial, they added – and
was predicted almost 100 years ago by
Albert
Einstein in his great theory of gravity, general
relativity. According to Einstein, an apple falls
to the ground not because it feels the force of
Earth's gravity but because the apple is
responding to the curvature of space-time near
the Earth's surface caused by the planet's huge
mass. In the same way, the Sun bends space in a
manner that allows Earth to revolve around it.

Crucially, the theory raised a host of other
predictions that scientists have been confirming
for the past century. The findings of Gravity
Probe B are the latest in a long list of these
many vindications of Einstein's genius and reveal
how his great theory touches our lives in unexpected ways.

"We have completed this landmark experiment of
testing Einstein's universe," said project leader
Francis Everitt, of Stanford University. "And Einstein survives."

Everitt began work on Gravity Probe B in 1962 and
has worked on nothing else since, although he had
many close shaves, with the satellite being
cancelled and then revived on seven occasions
before it was eventually launched in 2004. Then,
after the probe reached orbit, spurious
electrical signals were found to be distorting
data that it had sent back. It took five years'
study before scientists found how to extract clean data from it.

Results of the analyses of this data were
revealed last week. They showed that Earth does
indeed bend space-time. It was also found that,
as our planet rotates, it drags space-time with
it – a phenomenon known as frame-dragging. The
effect is like spinning a spoon in a cup of tea,
causing the liquid to start swirling round inside the cup.

These phenomena are tiny, it should be noted. In
the case of frame-dragging, space around Earth
turns at a rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second
every year because our planet pulls it round as
it revolves – a rate predicted by Einstein.

"The probe's results are a great achievement, but
we should not think of them as a new proof that
general relativity is right," said Graham
Farmelo, physicist and author. "Einstein was
shown to be correct long ago, only a few years
after he came up with the theory. However, we are
still testing out all its predictions. The
results from Gravity Probe B are just the most recent, successful outcomes."

In fact, the premise of Einstein's theory of
general relativity was proved within three years
of its publication in 1916. British astronomer
Arthur Eddington was involved in an expedition to
Príncipe island in west Africa, where he
photographed the total solar eclipse of 1919. The
photographs showed that the positions of stars
whose light rays passed near the Sun appeared to
have been slightly shifted because their light
had been curved by the Sun's huge gravitational
field. This was noticeable only during an eclipse
because the Sun's brightness would otherwise obscure the affected stars.

"Eddington presented these as a triumph for
general relativity, and Einstein, who was known
to physicists but not the public, became a star overnight," said Farmelo.

For his part, Einstein never had any doubts that
he was right. When asked how he would have
reacted if Eddington's observations had disproved
his theory, he replied: "I would have felt sorry
for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

Since then, scientists have produced many other
confirmations. One example was provided by US
astronomers Russell Hulse and John Taylor, who
discovered two dense collapsed stars, known as
neutron stars, that were in orbit around each
other and that were losing energy that could only
be explained through the gravitational radiation,
another phenomenon predicted by Einstein. In 1993
Hulse and Taylor were awarded that year's Nobel
prize for physics.

"General relativity touches our lives in many
unexpected ways," added physicist Dr Charles
Wang, of Aberdeen University. "Another effect
that is predicted by general relativity is the
phenomenon known as gravitational time dilation.
This states that time slows down as gravitational
strength increases, a fact that has been
confirmed by GPS satellites. These carry atomic
clocks that have to run at a different speed to
those on the ground because gravity is greater
there. If you didn't, the world's GPS system would break down."

"Einstein's theory of general relativity is one
of the most beautiful pieces of scientific work
in history," added Farmelo. "But it is not the
whole story. It explains how massive objects
affect space and time, but it tells us little
about how very small sub-atomic particles behave."

This point was acknowledged by Wang. "We still
have to test how gravity behaves at a sub-atomic,
quantum level," he said. "We hope to do that with
a project called the Space-Time Explorer Quest,
which the European Space Agency is now studying."

Together with Wang's group, scientists at
Birmingham, the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory
and the National Physical Laboratory, along with
German researchers, have proposed building a
probe that would use caesium or rubidium atoms,
cooled close to absolute zero, to test the effect
of gravity at the sub-atomic level and, they
hope, provide data that could reconcile relativity and quantum theory.

"That won't be for another 10 years or more,"
said Wang. "That means we are going to have a lot
of work to do on general relativity for quite some time."

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Saturn's Moon Titan May Have Been Planetary Punching Bag

Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor
Date: 08 May 2011 Time: 01:00 PM ET
[]

This false-color image from NASA
CREDIT: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
View full size image

An untold number of cosmic impacts could have created the
mysteriously thick atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon Titan, suggest
experiments with laser guns.

Titan has always stood out as the only moon in the solar system with
a substantial atmosphere. In fact, the surface pressure on Titan is
50 percent greater than the pressure on Earth.
[Photos:
The Rings and Moons of Saturn]

The main ingredient of
Titan's
atmosphere is nitrogen, just as it is on Earth. Where this nitrogen
came from has long been debated. For instance, it could be
primordial, accumulating as Titan formed, or it could have originated later.


Weighing the options

In 2005, the Huygens probe carried by
NASA's
Cassini spacecraft to Saturn ruled out a primordial origin for this
nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere apparently has extremely low levels of
the isotope argon-36, while high amounts are expected in an
atmosphere rich in primordial nitrogen.

There are a number of other explanations for how this atmospheric
nitrogen might have formed after Titan's birth. For instance,
sunlight in Titan's atmosphere might have broken apart ammonia, a
molecule made of nitrogen and hydrogen.

However, nearly all these suggestions require that Titan formed at
relatively high temperatures, which would have led the moon to
differentiate into a rocky core and an icy mantle layer, and
Cassini's radar scans suggested that Titan is not fully
differentiated. Comets loaded with nitrogen might have delivered it
to Titan, but that would have also led to higher levels of argon-36
than currently seen.

Now scientists in Japan suggest that countless numbers of
asteroids
and comets slamming into ammonia ice on Titan could have converted it
to nitrogen gas several hundred million years after the moon's formation.

"Our results suggest that hypervelocity impacts have played a key
role," researcher Yasuhito Sekine, a planetary scientist at the
University of Tokyo, told SPACE.com.

Solar system dodgeball

During an era known as the Late Heavy Bombardment about four billion
years ago, the solar system was very much like a shooting gallery,
with cosmic impacts regularly blasting planets and moons. To see if
such impacts would deliver enough energy to convert ammonia ice to
nitrogen, researchers used laser guns and "bullets" made of gold,
platinum or copper foil. The beams vaporized the back of these
bullets, propelling them at high speeds at targets made of ammonia
and water ice.

The researchers found "ammonia is very easily converted to nitrogen
molecule by impacts," Sekine said.

They calculated that 330 million billion tons (300 million billion
metric tons) worth of impactors could have produced the current
amount of nitrogen seen on Titan, "a plausible mass of impactors
during the Late Heavy Bombardment," noted planetary scientist
Catherine Neish at Johns Hopkins University, who did not take part in
this research.

"It's an interesting new hypothesis," Neish told SPACE.com.
"Differentiating between the different hypotheses will require a more
detailed understanding of Titan's internal structure, and the
composition of comets and-or other Saturnian satellites." She
suggested that a future mission to a comet would very likely provide
key evidence to help confirm or refute the idea.

One question would be where all the craters from such impacts might
be. Titan has only about 50 recognized craters, Neish said. "Does
this imply that Titan's surface is very young?" she asked, suggesting
a young surface could have covered up most of the
craters
on Titan.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 8 in the journal
Nature Geoscience.

Follow SPACE.com contributor Charles Q. Choi on Twitter
@cqchoi. Visit SPACE.com for the latest in
space science and exploration news on Twitter
@Spacedotcom and
on Facebook.

guardian.co.uk home





The mobile phone app that can identify a tree by its leaf

Leafsnap uses face-recognition software to
identify a species of tree. Can it create a new generation of conservationists?
Leo Blog : leafsnap mobile phone app

Screengrab of Leafsnap mobile phone app. Photograph: leafsnap.com

To date, the world of mobile phone apps has
largely left me cold. Yes, I can see how you can
easily lose an hour of your life – or more – to
Angry
Birds. But the most interesting and potentially
useful developments I have seen so far are apps
such as Shazam and
RedLaser. The power to
identify and recognise non-text based things such
as images and music points to just how potent and
useful
mobile phones are becoming.

It now appears that we could be about to reach a
significant new landmark. An app has just been
launched that can identify a species of tree from
a photograph of its leaf. Apps exist already that
help you identify flora and fauna – the Forestry
Commission recently launched an app called
ForestXplorer
for identifying trees – but they have
traditionally relied on the user deducing the
species from a list of possible characteristics.

Leafsnap promises something
different: a joint effort by
Columbia
University, the
University of
Maryland, and the
Smithsonian
Institution in the US, it uses the same
technology as face-recognition software to identity the species itself:

This free mobile app helps identify tree species
from photographs of their leaves and contains
beautiful high-resolution images of their
flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark.
Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York
City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to
cover the trees of the entire continental United States.
Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists,
automatically sharing images, species
identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species
locations with a community of scientists who will
use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.
The Leafsnap family of electronic field guides
aims to leverage digital applications and mobile
devices to build an ever-greater awareness of and
appreciation for biodiversity.

Personally, I think this is a tremendously
exciting development. Just think what species
recognition software could be next: edible fungi;
rock-pool inhabitants; butterflies; wild flowers;
the list is endless. Couple this with the app's
"geo-coding" potential and it could help to
generate some very powerful data. (Please do
share below any "nature-spotting" apps you have found particularly useful.)

There is a slight lament to note, though. As a
child, I used to enjoy flicking through
wildlife
pocket guides trying to identify species when out
on long walks, or on the beach. I wonder what
impact this software will have on children today
when they know they can identify something within
a matter of a few seconds without any real effort
or engagement? Will that help to educate and
inspire them? Or, conversely, will it tune them
into things they might have otherwise simply ignored?
*
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011