organization

Scientists grow working, miniature livers

Let's just say it's a good thing this breakthrough didn't come around when I was in my early twenties, or I may have been tempted to spend a little more time at my favorite neighborhood watering hole.

Scientists at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center say they've successfully used human liver cells to create miniature livers that function like their larger, more naturally derived counterparts.

Using a process called decellularization, the team rinsed real livers from an unspecified animal with detergent, stripping them of all their cells and leaving only … Read more

PDF splitter

Junko is a free tool that lets you split PDF files into separate documents by page range or number or combine many PDFs into larger files. By splitting large PDFs into multiple smaller files, you can work on just the pages or sections you need, and they're easier for small apps to handle. Combining multiple PDFs is useful for creating manuals and other multipage documents. Junko is powered by PDFsharp, the open-source .NET library of PDF wares.

Junko's interface is very basic and opens with a blank main view, but it's Aero-compatible and has a customizable toolbar. … Read more

Better visualize your projects and ideas

PersonalBrain is a full-featured mind-mapping program, designed to create a "digital home for your mind" that can help you visually organize almost any sort of process or project as a dynamic, interconnected system of Thoughts (called a Brain). PersonalBrain gives you a fairly intuitive interface for collecting, organizing, viewing, and navigating ideas, tasks, Web sites, related documents, and more.

Whether you're building a complex Web site or conducting academic research, this app can help you build searchable networks of information with tools for taking notes, creating shortcuts (pins), zooming out to get a higher-level view of your … Read more

Disk cataloging tool

WinCatalog Light is a free disk cataloging tool that scans and catalogs your system's disks or files. You can use the listings it creates to quickly find specific files in your disk collection without having to insert a bunch of removable disks and search them one by one. It also extracts file descriptions and automatically fetches MP3 song names online. It can scan any storage device that Windows can access.

WinCatalog Light's interface is a slightly smaller version of the familiar Windows app style: File menu, icon-based toolbar, left-hand navigation panel, and main window. With a pretty good … Read more

Online security toolkit

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes Tor, a free suite of Internet communications and security utilities. Tor enables safe, anonymous online browsing and publishing, instant messaging, and more. It has potential uses ranging from helping casual Net surfers protect themselves from online attacks and predators to giving programmers the tools to develop applications with built-in safety and privacy features. Tor protects your online privacy and anonymity by linking your PC to the Tor network, which then links to the "outside world." Tor's developers stress the importance of understanding what Tor does and doesn't do; it stands not … Read more

GE buys company that turns waste heat into power

You got heat? General Electric wants to make power out of it.

GE on Friday said it has acquired Calnetix Power Solutions, a privately held company which makes systems for converting heat from industrial equipment into electricity. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The company will be integrated with GE's current Austria-based Jenbacher gas engine business, which makes engines that run on different gases, including natural gas and biogas.

Calnetix's system is designed specifically for small-scale power generation at places, such as factories which give off a lot of unused heat. It can also be used to make electricity … Read more

Get things done

Things for iPhone is a well-designed, easy-to-use, highly scalable task-management app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it's even better when paired with the Mac desktop app of the same name. Like its desktop counterpart (with which it can sync over Wi-Fi), Things for iPhone offers a clean, intuitive interface based around the popular "Getting Things Done" productivity method. Tasks are collected under Projects (sets of smaller subtasks), Areas (areas of responsibility, such as work or family), and an Inbox "waiting area" for unsorted tasks.

Things also has a handy Today list (which also … Read more

Are the days of kidney dialysis numbered?

There's no gentle way to put it. Chronic kidney failure is ugly and often deadly, and more people in the States are suffering from it every year, with increasing rates of diabetes and hypertension contributing to the problem.

What's more, the treatment that keeps many waiting for kidney transplants alive--dialysis--involves several sessions per week, at several hours per session, during which blood pumps through an external circuit for filtration to replace just 13 percent of kidney function, leaving many patients exhausted both physically and financially.

(The U.S. Renal Data System estimates that dialysis costs roughly $… Read more

Waste Management going for 'black gold'

The trash and recycling services company Waste Management is expanding into the organic gardening business, the company announced Wednesday.

The Houston-based company has acquired Garick, which manufactures things like mulch, garden compost, and playground turf made from recycled organic materials.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. WM only went so far as to announce that Garick's composting facilities will be used to augment WM's existing organic recycling services, and offer a line of organic garden products made from WM-collected biomass waste.

The new line of products will include organic garden compost, which is often referred to … Read more

CERN to seek antimatter in space

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a module that will go into space to conduct particle physics experiments, is set to leave CERN for the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.

The AMS module is being prepared for its transportation to the space center in Florida on board a U.S. Air Force Galaxy transport aircraft, CERN--the European Organization for Nuclear Research--said in a statement Wednesday. Once launched, AMS-02 will operate as an external module on the International Space Station (ISS). It will look for antimatter and dark matter while measuring cosmic ray composition, in a series of experiments designed to complement the … Read more