Logitech wireless drum kit

Hot on the heels of the fabulous PS3/PS2 wireless guitar controller ,Logitech are filling the Guitar Hero controller gap with a drum kit.

This can only be good for the Guitar Hero community with the drum kit receiving the lion’s share of quality and breakage complaints since the World Tour release.

Logitech’s foray into drum controller intends to target many of the quality issues. Comments out of the company indicate an emphasis on quiet pad design, recessed rims (to avoid the clang or accidental hits) and a kick-pedal with adjustable spring tension.

The kit uses an RF USU dongle rather than Bluetooth for signalling to remain backwards compatible with PlayStation 2 versions of the game and to cut down on latency – the killer of rhythm games.

Twenty ideas

why he seems more sanguine about our prospects of taming climate change than many of his peers, and he'll tell you about the day he first toured the museum's library and archives. Surrounded by the thousands of designs and patent applications that traced the great Victorian lurch into modernity, he was struck by the power of human ingenuity. "It seemed clear that if we could somehow focus all that creativity and energy on clean energy then we'll be OK."
Anyone watching an hour or two of the "hearings" in Manchester last weekend on which this report was based could not fail to have been similarly cheered. The idea behind them was simple: we hear endlessly about the havoc unabated climate change will wreak, about long-term emissions targets and diplomatic wrangling over who will commit to them. But the countless ingenious ideas for tackling the problem emanating from universities, thinktanks, front rooms and sheds across the planet get rather less attention. So the Guardian teamed up with the Manchester International Festival to mount a search for the best of them.
Why Manchester? As the world's first great industrial city, it was arguably the birthplace of man-made warming. So just as Robert Angus Smith pioneered our understanding of atmospheric pollution here in the 1840s, experts and thinkers from around the world would gather in the city to grapple with the longer term legacy of its once mighty mills and factories.
To underscore the project's connection to the city's carbon hungry past, the hearings were held in Manchester Town Hall, Alfred Waterhouse's neo-gothic cathedral to manufacturing and mercantilism. Above the scientists, entrepreneurs and inconoclasts presenting their ideas, the great vaulted ceiling documented the countries and cities to which the city once dispatched its wares; outside the mosaic floors were decorated with the bees that embodied its 19th century self-image as a hive of industry.
The hearings themselves were perhaps best described as a cross between a judicial inquiry and an episode of the British TV show Dragons' Den. Chaired by Lord Bingham – formerly Britain's most senior judge – a panel of experts heard half hour pitches from advocates for each of 20 ideas shortlisted following a global appeal for innovative solutions to climate change. The panel, in consultation with the eminent climate scientist John Schellnhuber, picked the 10 most promising ideas – somewhat reluctantly since our experts felt all of the proposals aired in Manchester were worthy of more consideration. Now it's over to you: you can watch short video presentations of each of the ideas featured in this supplement on our website and vote for the ones you think will be most effective. Better still you might help to implement them by offering support or capital.
The ideas heard in Manchester ranged from the wackier edges of science fiction to well-advanced products poised to roll off production lines. From the wilder shores came Professor Stephen Salter, an Edinburgh University engineer with a plan to increase the whiteness of clouds using a fleet of remote-control sailing ships spraying a fine mist of seawater into the air. But anyone tempted to dismiss his plan as the product of a crank who has spent too much time in the shed would do well to note that Salter was the man behind the Edinburgh Duck, a pioneering 1970s design for harnessing wave energy.
Another variation on the marine theme came from former management consultant Tim Kruger who proposed tipping large amounts of lime into the ocean. This, he claimed, would increase the sea's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as reduce the dangerous acidity which has also been a byproduct of decades of emissions. His compelling presentation was only slightly undermined by his own admission that such a plan would currently be illegal.
Mark Capron, a former naval engineer from California, was also frustrated by prosaic legal considerations. His idea involves farming algae out at sea and then digesting it in thousands of "giant stomachs" under the surface. The algae would absorb carbon dioxide and produce methane which could be used to produce energy. The trouble is that he fears building a prototype in his garage would breach local safety regulations.
Among the more developed ideas presented, Peter Scott made the case for simple, super-efficient cooking stoves. Burning wood (and other biomass) for cooking, largely in the developing world, was responsible for 10-20% of global emissions he told the panel. His stoves could cut the annual CO2 emissions of a household by 1-3 tonnes. The only downside, he noted ruefully, was that a local manufacturer in Malawi had been so successful that he had splashed out on a fleet of SUVs. "I haven't worked out the CO2 implications of that yet."
Another idea tantalisingly close to crossing the threshold from brainwave to reality was proposed by entrepeneur Mike Mason. He described dishwasher sized "ceramic fuel cells" which could produce enough electricity to power a home as well as hot water. Because they were vastly more efficient than the power stations which produce electricity for the grid, and also obviated the need for hugely wasteful transmission of power along along hundreds of miles of cable, they could achieve massive carbon savings. And the first domestic models would go on sale next year with a price tag of around £3,000.
Many green activists are intensely sceptical about the search for technological "fixes", particularly those that aim soley to mitigate the effects of warming. They warn that trying to invent our way out of trouble is a way of avoiding the changes to our way of life that are really required. But by no means all the advocates presenting in Manchester placed their faith in technology.
One of the most quietly inspiring presentations came from Rosemary Randall, a Cambridge psychotherapist who had been puzzled by the ability of people at the same time to acknowledge the threat of climate change and in no way change their high carbon lifestyle. Randall designed a series of in which she encourages people to explore their attitude to consumption, identity and status. People who have been on her course of six meetings typically reduce their emissions by a tonne immediately and then plan to cut in half within two to five years. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation offered an even simpler prescription: consume less. It might even make us happier too.
Some of the ideas presented were so lateral that even our panel of seasoned experts looked wide-eyed at times. An engaging Australian accountant and farmer called Tony Lovell showed photographs of arid, dust-blown landscapes alongside images of lush vegetation. The difference? The farmer on the green side had been forcing his cattle to mimic the great migratory wildebeest herds of the Serengeti.
If some of the schemes outlined in Manchester would once have seemed too radical to attract serious attention from governments and money men, the presence of climate secretary Ed Miliband at the event suggested that policymakers now recognise that they must cast the net for solutions wider than in the past. Here we lay out the best ideas that our net brought in. Now, Mr Miliband, what will you do with them?

DNA fragile sites

Telomeres, the repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of linear chromosomes, have an important function: They protect vulnerable chromosome ends from molecular attack. Researchers at Rockefeller University now show that telomeres have their own weakness. They resemble unstable parts of the genome called fragile sites where DNA replication can stall and go awry. But what keeps our fragile telomeres from falling apart is a protein that ensures the smooth progression of DNA replication to the end of a chromosome. The research, led by Titia de Lange, head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, and first author Agnel Sfeir, a postdoctoral associate in the lab, suggests a striking similarity between telomeres and common fragile sites, parts of the genome where breaks tend to occur, albeit infrequently. Humans have 80 common fragile sites, many of which have been linked to cancer. De Lange and Sfeir found that these newly discovered fragile sites make it difficult for DNA replication to proceed, a discovery that unveils a new replication problem posed by telomeres.
At the center of the discovery is a protein known as TRF1, which de Lange, in an effort to understand how telomeres protect chromosome ends, discovered in 1995. Using a conditional mouse knockout, de Lange and Sfeir have now revealed that TRF1, which is part of a six-protein complex called shelterin, enables DNA replication to drive smoothly through telomeres with the aid of two other proteins.
"Telomeric DNA has a repetitive sequence that can form unusual DNA structures when the DNA is unwound during DNA replication," says de Lange. "Our data suggest that TRF1 brings in two proteins that can take out these structures in the telomeric DNA. In other words, TRF1 and its helpers remove the bumps in the road so that the replication fork can drive through."
The work, published in the July 10 issue of Cell, began when Sfeir deleted TRF1 and saw that the telomeres resembled common fragile sites, suggesting that TRF1 protects telomeres from becoming fragile. Instead of a continuous string of DNA, the telomeres were broken into fragments of twos and threes. To see if the replication fork stalls at telomeres, de Lange and Sfeir joined forces with Carl L. Schildkraut, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Using a technique called SMARD, the researchers observed the dynamics of replication across individual DNA molecules the first time this technique has been used to study telomeres. In the absence of TRF1, the fork often stalled for a considerable amount of time.
The only other known replication problem posed by telomeres was solved in 1985 when it was shown that the enzyme telomerase elongates telomeres, which shorten during every cell division. The second problem posed by telomeres, the so-called end-protection problem, was solved by de Lange and her colleagues when they found that shelterin protects the ends of linear chromosomes, which look like damaged DNA, from unnecessary repair. Working with TRF1, the very first shelterin protein ever to be identified, de Lange and Sfeir have not only unveiled a completely unanticipated replication problem at telomeres, they have also shown how it is solved.
The research lays new groundwork for the study of common fragile sites throughout the genome, explains de Lange. "Fragile sites have always been hard to study because no specific DNA sequence preceeds or follows them," she says. "In constrast, telomeres represent fragile sites with a known sequence, which may help us understand how common fragile sites break throughout the genome and why."