Get ready for London

We are going to London, a big city with a lot of things to do and lots of things to visit! Because of that, it's important to know a little bit where can we do during our stay in the capital.

We are staying in the Safestay Holland park. The first think we like to now is that there is free Wifi! Well, the other important things to know about the place is that it is in the Holland Park wich is very close to the center and is very close to some places to visit like Kensington Palace, the Opera Holland Park...

One of the important things, when we stay in London, is to know where are the nearest stations.Near the hotel, we have the Holland Park station and we also have High street Kensington wich is the one wich can bring us to the center and to Picadilly Circus. Is there where we could found a lot of things to do. Nearest we can find the Soho, China town and Trafalgar Square. And the National Gallery wich is one of the places you must visit. It's in Trafalgar Square and it's an art museum founded in 1824. It means it's an enormous building and  it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.  But personally, there are two museums I can't wait to visit in London. One of the is the Natural History Museum of London wich is in South Kensington. The Natural History Museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology and zoology. Is there where we can find the famous dinosaur bones. The other one is the Science Museum that is also in South Kensington. 

But beyond museums in London, there is a lot more to do! Other places to visit are for example the London Eye, the Big Ben, the Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, the Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Shakespeare's Globe Teatre, Harrods, the Tated Modern, St.Paul's cathedral, Camden Town, Borough Market, the Tawer of London, Notthing Hill, Oxford Street, the Speaker's Corner, etc etc and more etc. 

How you can see there are too many things to do in London and we don't have time to lose. I can't wait to be there!

Women Inventors

If you look around you will see them. They are revolutionary inventions that in some cases have saved lives and others have made it better. This is the inventions created by women from different times that you maybe didn't know who was the inventor. 

Helen Free created the urine test strips that are used around the world to diagnose diseases, detect pregnancy and to monitor diabetes. It consists of narrow strips impregnated with chemistry substances. When we have a pathological change in our organism, it makes the composition of our urine also change. For example the concentration of glucose. The strips are sensitive to this kind of stimulus and in depend on of this concentration the strip will mark one colour or another. This kind of strips has allowed us to improve our urine and blood analysis in a fast an effective way. 

All the new discoveries that allow us to improve in the medicine field are often those we consider most important. So we can say that the medicine against leukaemia is one of the important and it was invented by Gertrude B Elion. This medicine is known as 6-mercaptopurina and it blocks the body's rejection of foreign tissues making easier the kidney transplants. But this is not the only contribution to medicine that the pharmacologist Gertrude Elion made, she also lead the group that carry out the medicament to treat gout and the antiviral to fight against the herpes virus. 

Imagine you are in your car and suddenly a seagull shits on your windshield. Yes, disgusting. Well, imagine now that you have to get off the car and clean the shit by yourself. No exactly for this reason but for something similar, Mary Anderson invented the windscreen wiper. She was travelling in a tram to New York and she noticed that the drivers had to open  their windows very often to be able to see and sometimes they had to stop the tram and clean the window because the snow or the rain didn't allow them to see properly. It was when Mary Anderson think in a kind of controlled from inside the tram to clean the window without having to go out and stop the train. And in 1903 born the first windscreen wiper of the history.

   

This may be one of the important machines in the USA. I'm talking about the machine for make paper bag. Bags had been consolidated as another "typical" of the United States. We can recognise them in all the films and TV series, they are part of the USA! So this machine was created by Margaret Knight. In an automatic way, her machine cut the paper, folder it and then stick it to create a the famous bags. Before the Knight machine, the paper bags only could be made by hand and they carried a high cost.

 

The investigations made by Katherine Blodgett were the beginning of a new scientific discipline with monolayers. Monolayers are an organic layer with a single molecule thick. This kind of monolayer had had applications in a huge number of different fields as the conversion of solar energy or in the manufacture of integrated circuits. Blodgett goes into detail about their job and she could create nonreflective multilayer of multiple glass layers. In other words, she was the first who was able to create the first 100% transparent glass of the world. This new kind of glass eliminated the distortion created by the reflected light in optical equipment like sunglasses, telescopes, microscopes, cameras and projectors. It means that the investigations of Blodgett have help to improve the science and other fields indirectly through the improvement of the glasses and optical materials. For all of this, Blodgett is also know because she was the first women to get a doctorate in physics from the Cambridge University. 

ExoMars 2016

Europ is ready to carry out their last change is the spy: land in Mart. The next Monday, a Russian rocket will take off to start the important spy mission more beyond Earth orbit that has never realised the European Space Agency (ESA). This mission is the first part of ExoMars project wich aims to search for life on Mars. 

The fact of sending a rocket to Mart suppose a huge deployment of technology. Until then both USA and Russia are the only ones able to land on Mars. The problem is the thin atmosphere of the planet. But the next ESA mission will try a new lander wich has been designed particularly to the enter in Mart. In addition, this new vehicle will try more kinds of landing as well as parachute, a heat shield and also retros.

The new ESA mission will be realized in collaboration with Rusia and with the rocket will also travel a satellite to study the gases. One of the biggest secrets of the red planet is the presence of methane gas in the atmosphere. In Erth, this gas is a signal of life and because of that one of the main objectives of the satellite will be analyse the atmosphere. According to the experts of the mission, the capacity of this satellite is such that will mark whether it is worthwhile or not to continue the search for life on Mars. Another instrument that will travel in the rocket next Monday is a machine to search for underground ice water.

The mission will take three months to reach the planet. This is the first time that different objectives are combined in a single mission. And this is what makes the mission more complicated. ExoMars 2016 will help to determinate where could land the future mission that Europe will throw in 2018 if is possible a place with water where we can find life on Mars. The final decision about the right place to land will be take on 2017. 

Personally, this is a kind of theme I really like and I really enjoy to read in news, too. I tink that one of the fields with more future forecasts is the field of astronomy. In the last years, we have made important advances and the fast progress and improvement of technology are allowing us to enlarge our expectations and also our possibilities. A few years ago we were asking ourselves if it would be possible to reach the moon and now we are seriously considering the possibility to find live on other planets, what will be the next?

The Hatton Garden theft

The Hatton Garden is the largest theft in England, but it is not knowing, for this reason, The Hatton Garden is known because of the robbers.They are pensioners. The authors are seven and all of them have already been sentenced to prison. They have an age between 59 and 79 years old and all of them have an old and extensive career in the world of crime. The defendants burst into a security room from the diamonds district in London and they took a loot wich is value in 14 million pounds. 

Who is considered to be the leader, Brian Reader (also knowing as The Master), could not be tried because of his health. The Master is 77 years old is now in the intensive care unit watch over nine armed officers. His lawyer has asked to revoke the sentence because of his poor state of health. 

The high punishment in Egland for theft that is not in houses are 10 years. The other three leaders of the robbery, John Collins (75 years old), Daniel Jones (61 years old) and Terry Perkins (67 years old), had been convicted to seven years in prison, and the other two more accomplices, Carl Wood (59 years old) and William Lincoln (60 years old), has also been convicted to six and seven years of prison. 

The band members were suffering from typical diseases of people their age like diabetes, arthritis, and urinary incontinence. They planned the robbery during three years and they could take the jewelry from 73 security boxes after bursting into the room through a hole drilled in a concrete wall half a meter thick. The loot has not been repaired completely, some objects are still missing and it is suspected that some of them to have already been out of the country. 

I have found this news very funny although it may not be. I'm imagining the situation: seven retired that between the game of dominoes and card game at the bar engaged in planning the large-scale theft. And what is the best: they carry it out and it works! 

We are in an age where there are no thieves but hackers. All companies, banks and also ordinary people care more about the security of their computers and information systems than about their material things. And these seven thieves have star in a robbery at the old-fashioned. They had an schematic plan to follow organized and planned in a perfect way. They have have the leading role in a type of theft increasingly rare. They also know what they were doing because they didn't let any physical trace during the two nights that lasted the theft. But they make a unique mistake that we can say is only one they can make because they are not used to new technologies: license plate readers and modern microphones. 

It's not to praise the robbers but we must recognize that the facts have their grace and they can be the perfect plot for a Hollywood film. 

Suffragette

I'm coming with a real story. Suffragette is a film that related the sad reality that takes place no as long ago as we like to think. If we think about the fact that the two supposed "big democracies" of the occidental world (England and France) didn't let their women vote until 1928 and 1948 make us think no only about the past but about the present. The fact that women couldn't vote means that almost the half of the humanity can't participate in the decisions. But it wasn't only the vote, women have always been considered in a different way than men. Women have always had fewer rights and has always been treated like a s***. Why? Because not even imagining the worst of the reason I can find any to justify this abuse, because yes, we can call it so. 

Suffragette is set at the beginnings of the XX century few years before the first world war. Women demand their politic rights and their vote right. This is the story of the first feminist movement. But nobody wants to listen what women has to say, nobody take care about the half of the population and nobody believes in what women are demanding. And after several years of peaceful fights that have any result, the suffragettes decided to radicalize themselves and start using the violence, like break the shop windows or detonate the postbox, to force the change and get their rights like any other man. This is the only way suffragette can be heard. 

The film relates how Maud Watts, a young girls that has been exploited in a laundry since she was little (like his mother and many other women), undergo a process of ideological and politic change from a women who accepted the role that she had to live in the society to an activist in the feminine movement who risk everything: her husband, her house, her job and her son to be heard.

She is one of the women who fought for her dignity, that of her companions and that of all of the women in the world. 

Actually, this film is an excuse to talk about the inequality that there are between men and women. When I saw the film I end with a terrible fury. Suffragette show the shame we have to feel when we think that all was real, that it has happened and is still happening. But the vote wasn't the only problem. Still now there is a big difference between man and women and that only means that we still have a big problem in our society. We only could say we have improved the situation when we can't find any difference between man and women, until then, we can't take nothing for granted.

In many countries, women are still officially considered less than man. But in our own country, there is still inequality. At the beginning of the century began a war to say "no, it has already been enough. We have tolerated too many years and we don't continue in this way", but this war hasn't finished yet and this is the true sadness. We can't be content with improvements, we have to get the full equality.

Neurostimulation

We all agree that technology, in the last years, has improved a lot and has created new ways to change our daily routine and make it more comfortable. But technology doesn't is the only one that has had an improvement because science has changed a lot, too. And what can happen if we mix both technology and science? One of the last and more important fields where technology and science have joined forces is the field of neuroscience. And from this union are emerging possibilities like these:

From Londres, foc.us company offers us neurostimulation techiques to improve the score in the games. For example, foc.us gamer headset is developed to improve the work memory and the surveillance. The product consists in a diadem with two electrodes that send small electric shocks to the front of the brain. Foc.us propose an overclock of our brain to improve the speed and the plasticity of the brain and bring the player to anther level. 

But it isn't the only product the foc.us has. They also offer a neurostimulation treatment to electrify our dreams. Lucid dreaming send small waves to the brain's prefrontal cortex (wich is in charge of the higher functions of the brain) to make that the person can have a lucid dream, it means a dream where the person is conscious that he is dreaming and can change the logic of the dream. Lucid dreaming can give us the experience of the improbable, can allow us to solve problems with our subconscious and remember the solutions when we get up and allows us to create and explore without limits. 

But foc.us isn't the only page that is selling this kind of products. From thync.com, we can buy think Vibes. Think Vibes is a small device that is placed on the brow and is connected to adhesive strips that attach to different parts of the head. It depends on where we set it, through an electric shock, think Vibes can make us to feel energy or calm. And only in less than five minutes. 

  

Finally, I would like to talk about another company, PriorMind. This one from Hong Kong gives us the opportunity to improve our cognitive capacities, search our best potential and take the control of our future. The product they sell consists in a little device that creates electric shocks and two sponges which go to different parts of the cranium to stimulate the zone. With PriorMind, we can improve our cognitive sensitive and our ability in mathematics, language and our creativity. 

This is only a little research of some of the applications of neurostimulation. The field of neuroscience is very new and there are still a lot of tings to discover. Thanks to technology neurosciences can advance and can provide us with products like these. All it seems that have to take us very far but at the same time we have to be very careful because we really don't know what we are changing in our brains when we apply any electric shock. It means that the fact that some products of this type are already available fro a general public may seem dangerous. Although they have shown their effectiveness nobody knows about the second side effects or their long term effects.

News

Hands Free by Google

Google has started with his new mobile-phone payment system that allows the user to ay without have t use the hands. This is what Google has called Hans Free and allows people to buy items using only the voice.
The new app uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and location service to detect when you are n a store where you can use the Hands-Free. The way it works seems to be apparently easy: first of all, you have to configure your smartphone with the app and introduce your personal information as your credit card number or your picture. Then you can complete your transaction saying "I want to pay with Google". Then the app will verify your identity and you will be ready to use the Hands-Free.

The Hands-Free is still an experiment but the company believes that it represents how could be the future of mobile payments.

At the moment, Hands Free is only available in few McDonald's and Papa John in the zone where Google started to prove this system but the company has obtained positive results wich show how people are adopting the new Android payment method. Google has registered an average of 1,5 million of new registers every month since they started to prove Hands Free last year. 

This is the video that Google has made to promote his new system of payment. Google says that it's is the best way to simplify your life. We have a lot of other things to think about and where to take the money can't be another one to worried about. In addition, there are a lot of times we can't remember where we have put our wallet. So for this reason, Goole has created a new way to pay from our smartphone. It's true that nowadays there are some similar systems to pay from our mobile phone but this one use the voice of the user to make the payment. 

Sincerely I don't think it's a good invention. The excuse to make it doesn't have much sense, too. Are we really as busy to can't pay by ourselves? Is it really as difficult as Google sais to pay with our credit cards? of course, no. It's true that at first it can seem to be really cool and useful, but it actually is one of this kind of invents that seems to want to change the world but it isn't really necessary. And I think that Hands-Free will bring more problems, than benefits. 

The Hateful 8

I would like to talk about one film I really enjoyed. It is The Hateful 8. Thi film is a kind of western, and I say a "kind of" because although it is, it also has some elements that are not the usual in the western films. For example, if we think in a western film we should think in a film that it's set up in the desert, or in a film that develops on the outside in open spaces and we also have to think in a film with a lot of duels. Different to this "topics", in The Hateful 8 we can find a snowy landscape and the plot happens practically all in the shelter of a refuge. But even so we find in The Hateful 8 all the characters we like to find in any western: the bounty hunter, the executioner, the confederated, the sheriff, the Mexican, "the little man", the cowboy and the prisoner. So Tarantino presents his latest film, a film that makes us feel the cold as if we were in the refuge and a film that makes us hate the characters as if we were with theme. So this is the second western of the director and it has a unique premise: someone to hate.
 

The story is set few years later after the Civil War in America. The stagecoach passengers move through the snow road to Red Rock town. Is there where the bounty hunter John Ruth will deliver his prisoner Daisy Domergue to the authorities to be pay the bounty for the Daisy's head. By the way to Red Rock John Ruth run into two unknowing: the major Marquins Warren who now is another bounty hunter and with Chris Mannix who says to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. 

Because of a storm, they are forced to take refuge into the Minnie's haberdashery. But there they don't find what they expect but another group of four more unknowns: a Mexican, the executioner, a cowboy and a confederated general. All theme seems not to have any relationship but, after all, as the storm falls on the haberdasher the eight travelers find out that they may not reach Red Rock.

The film has mystery, suspense, action and a great plot. Nobody knows nobody and nobody can trust in nobody. They are eight unknowing (or maybe they are more?) and they haven't met by change. Everybody seems to have a different reason to be in the refuge, but all of them have something in common: all of them have several thing to be hate that nobody could imagine. This is what happened when they all meet in the same refuge for only one night.

Tarantino take us a completely western between four walls. All happens in a little refuge, all they have a reason to be there and all of them have a story that better they don't explain. If we know Tarantino films for something is for their great dialogues. The Hateful 8 doesn't have less and the three hours of film are three hours full of excellent and extraordinary dialogues by amazing characters interpreted in a perfect way. If I like something of Tarantinos films are they dialogues and I can say that this film has a spectacular ones. Each sentence said by each character fits in a perfect way with the personality of the character and with the moment. 

Taking into account that this is a Tarantino film, something that can impress us is that Tarantino keep the action during all the film without make use of the guns, something that is unusual both in Tarantino films and in western films. But all happens in a way that makes not necessary the use of the arms since there aren't any other way. Little by little the secrets have been discovered and the refugees have been "eliminated", but when it seems that all is clear suddenly take place a new success that gives a twist to the above. What at first seems to be only eight unknowing, ends beeing eight enemies and they are in the same place for a reason that we only could know at the end. 

And now I have great news: this is only the second of the three westerns that the director wants to do. If I like the first, Django Unchained and I loved this second, I can't wait for the third!

The Revenant

This is one of the movies for which I was waiting for more to see. Not only because the director always leaves us waiting for more after his films (Birdman was his last film) but also to see the performance of DiCaprio in the film by wich he is again nominated for an Oscar.

The Revenant is set in the decade of 1820 All starts with a group of trappers in the north-American territory taken leathers when they are attacked by a group of Sioux Indians who stole their leathers and massacre the invaders. Nevertheless, some of them can escape in a little boat  on the river. Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) is one of the survivors and he is the only man who knows the route to the fortress. He is traveling with his son. While they are returning Hugh Glass is attacked by a bear who let him gravely injured. The captain of the expedition is forced to abandon him in the forest because he has become in a huge load that doesn't let the group advance quickly. But Hugh Glass will have the company of his son Hawk and tow more members of the group, Jim and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) since the rest could arrive in the fortress and send more help. But the wether is very hard and they know that the Sioux are near. Fitzgerald tries to murder Hugh Glass but Hawk can prevent it and him receives a stab by Fitzgerald that kills him. Hugh Glass, even injured and unable to move, see all. Then Fitzgerald deceives his mate and they leave Glass alone in the forest. It is there when starts a story of revenge. Hugh Glass will only survive to kill the person who unfairly killed the only thing he has, his son. Hugh Glass will go to the search of Fitzgerald overcoming all kind of adversities: his wounds, the forces of nature, the cold, the lack of food and other humans. And he will be alone at all time.

This is an amazing film. The film is about three hours but they are three fantastic hours of hundred of emotions and feelings. One of the thing that I appreciate more in any film are the dialogues. In the Revenant, there are few of them. Even the duration of the film there aren't time to dialogues, we are too busy escaping and leading all he disadvantages that Hugh Glass has to overcome. And between change and change we don't have time to anything than contemplated the amazing landscapes that the film offers to us. The film has spectacular shots of photography of the wild nature. And after all of that, the film is more: it is the story of a man who fights alone against everything for revenge of wich who had taken his son.

Summarizing, you have to see this film! Everybody who appreciates cinema should do it because really worth it. And now that we know that DiCaprio finally has won the Oscar it's another good reason to see The Revenant.