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Paper centrifuge can help detect diseases in developing nations
A piece of paper, some twine and plastic could make testing for certain diseases more accessible even in the poorest areas of developing nations. Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, used those materials to create a simple centrifuge alternative that he calls the "paperfuge." Centrifuges are rapidly rotating machines in the lab that scientists use to separate the different components of a liquid by density. If you want to test for diseases like African sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis or even HIV, that liquid is blood. Heavy red blood cells settle at the bottom, plasma floats to the top, while parasites and pathogens occupy the middle part. The machine is effective, but it's also expensive and needs electricity to work.
Microsoft Research project uses drones to track emerging diseases
Mosquitoes are the worst -- but they could also be the key to giving us a heads up about emerging diseases before they become full-blown outbreaks. That's the focus of Microsoft Research's "Project Premonition," which aims to trap mosquitos and analyze their genomes to see the diseases they're carrying. And while that concept isn't exactly new, the method of doing so certainly is: Microsoft is using drones to autonomously identify ideal locations for mosquito traps, as well as placing and retrieving them. After that, the mosquitos will be sequenced and their massive amounts of metagenomic data will be sorted with cloud computing. The hope? To find new strains of pathogens before they begin wreaking havoc, which will help us to prepare for potential outbreaks and maybe even develop cures.
Lichborne: 5 Abilities death knights could lose in Warlords of Draenor
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. On Twitter a few days ago, Technical Game Designer Celestalon asked on twitter what abilities people would hate to see cut in the great button bloat purge. Interestingly enough, when I saw the tweet, the first thing that come to my head was abilities I would LOVE to cut. Still, the tweet was inspirational enough that today I figure we can talk a bit about some abilities. What active, button pressing abilities could death knights stand to lose? What abilities would we like to see stick around even if they seem perfect for chopping? Here's 5 skills I think the devs may be taking a hard look at. Feel free to add any you think I missed in the comments.
Lichborne: Final notes on patch 5.3 and a legendary shortcut
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. By the time you read this, patch 5.3 should be on live servers. We've already written a couple columns on what patch 5.3 will mean for death knights, but as always, things change on the PTR. With that in mind, this week we'll take a final look at patch 5.3 for death knights and what you can expect and do once the servers are back up (if they aren't already). I also have a couple notes on completing Wrathion's legendary quest line for death knights.
Lichborne: What I learned about death knights by playing my alts
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. I love my death knight. He will probably be my main for as long as I play WoW. That said, sometimes you want a change of pace. Sometimes, you've finished all the dailies, ground all the factions to exalted, and run every heroic dungeon and raid on a single character until your eyes are bleeding. Sometimes you want something else. And for that, we have alts. Of course, alts don't mean you've completely abandoned your death knight. Sometimes, alts teach you something about your death knight. In my case, most of my alts were created before the death knight, since he didn't come along until Wrath. That means that a lot of what I learned playing them has informed how I play my death knight from day one. This week, I'm taking a look at my stable of alts and seeing what lessons they've taught or reinforced for me about my death knights. Keep your diseases up I've been playing a warlock alt since the vanilla era, sticking mostly to affliction, although demonology's been proving pretty fun so far in Mists. My priest I don't play quite as much, but I still like taking shadow out for a spin every once in a while.
Lichborne: More death knight glyphs in Mists of Pandaria and patch 5.0.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Last week, we started our discussion of the redesigned glyph system for Mists of Pandaria. This week, we'll finish out that discussion, covering the remaining major glyphs as well as minor glyphs. The glyph system continues to look remarkably alien compared to what we have had before, but there are still some familiar glyphs, as well as a few long sought-after cosmetic additions. As we mentioned last week, there are very few mandatory glyphs, so a lot of this is going to come down to your personal preferences and playstyle. Be sure to read part 1 of this guide if you haven't already, then read on for the rest.
Lichborne: Death knight glyphs in Mists of Pandaria and patch 5.0.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. In redesigning the glyph system for Mists, Blizzard's taking away the prime glyph tier. More than that, though, they've essentially gutted the system, removing many glyphs and changing others in incredibly drastic ways. In the case of death knights, what this has done is leave us with very few mandatory]glyphs and even fewer glyphs that greatly affect our ability to do our jobs or climb higher on the damage meters in any meaningful way. With this in mind, lets take a look at death knight glyphs in Mists of Pandaria as they stand. You will be able to use three major glyphs and three minor glyphs at any given time. There's a lot of glyphs to cover, so we'll do this in two installments. We'll cover most of the major glyphs today, and next week we'll finish off the major glyphs and talk about the minor glyphs.
Lichborne: Death knight DPS presences get some major changes
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. If you've been following death knight news at all, you know that presences -- specifically, the interplay between Frost Presence and Unholy Presence -- have been a hot button issue for some time now. The flames only got hotter in the Mists of Pandaria beta, as massive changes to presences caused severe issues in our class mechanics and rotations. Luckily, Blizzard's heard our pleas and recently released a huge overhaul to the DPS presences on the beta. This week, we'll take a look and see what they did. The basic rundown The base global cooldown for all death knights is now 1 second. As a result, Unholy Presence no longer provides this bonus. Unholy spec death knights now get Improved Unholy Presence, which provides an extra 10% rune regeneration and attack speed when in Unholy Presence. Frost Presence lost a good chunk of its extra runic power regeneration (it's down to 20% from 100%), as well as the extra 30 base runic power. Frost spec death knights now get Improved Frost Presence, which reduces the cost of Frost Strike by 15 runic power when in Frost Presence. Might of the Frozen Wastes no longer generates 15 runic power per a hit but does make your Obliterates cause 50% more damage while using a two-handed weapon. Threat of Thassarian no longer has an off-hand damage bonus but does increase your Frost Strike damage by 50% Improved Icy Talons is now Unholy Aura, and both DPS specs gain use of it.
Lichborne: Death knights remain in holding pattern in Mists of Pandaria beta
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. When one takes a two-week vacation, one generally looks forward to things having changed, even slightly, when one returns. This is especially sure when speaking of the Mists of Pandaria beta test. Strangely, that hasn't been exactly the case for death knights. There have been changes, certainly, but not as drastic as we might have hoped -- and not as well-explained, either. Today, we'll take a look at a few of the more important changes and what they imply for our class. In addition, we'll see what Ghostcrawler did and didn't say about death knights in a recent post. Plague Leech and disease issues There've been a few changes to death knights, but the most interesting one comes with Plague Leech. This first-tier talent, which replaces Vile Spew, will allow you to generate a death rune by canceling the diseases from your target. The nice thing about this skill is that it gives us another much-needed Blood Tap replacement now that Blood Tap itself has been turned into a somewhat more restricted talent. The bad thing about this skill is that it's probably going to become mandatory for min-maxing DPS death knights. If your diseases are about to expire anyway and you can eat them for an extra death rune, it's hard to see how that won't become a DPS increase. Once we all reach level 90 and the math has been sufficiently mathed, it seems relatively obvious that Plague Leech will be considered mandatory by the hardcore PvE community, for better or for worse.
Lichborne: The state of the patch 4.2 death knight
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Now that patch 4.2 has been out for a few weeks, it's a good time to look at the fruits of our nerfs. Patch 4.2 saw a surprising amount of death knight changes, from the nerfing of Obliterate to the last-minute buffing of Unholy Might. Nearly as conspicuous was the near complete lack of blood tanking changes. With all of this in play, we definitely expected some shakeups when patch 4.2 went live; now, it's time to take a look at how those shakeups have played out. Most stuff went more or less as expected, but there have been a few surprising twists. We'll tackle it all after the break.
ArcheAge dev diary talks housing, questing, and spreading diseases
XL Games' ArcheAge is starting to pick up a bit of a following here in the West, and that can only be a good thing for starving fans of the sandbox subgenre. Jake Song's fantasy opus is currently undergoing closed beta testing in its native Korea, and as XL's devs post Q&A features on the game's website, dutiful fans translate them into English. The latest set comes to our attention courtesy of ArchAge Online.com, and covers a wide range of topics including questing (both local and regional variants), player housing, the game's achievement system, and player and NPC illnesses. "If you wander into a town that's full of infected characters, you'll probably catch something yourself! Then again, you could get sick on purpose and then pay a visit to someone you don't really like, but that's risky in it's own way," the dev diary explains.
Researchers debut one-cubic-millimeter computer, want to stick it in your eye
This as-of-yet-unnamed mini computer was fashioned as an implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients, but its creators envision a future where we're all crawling with the little buggers. Taking up just over one cubic millimeter of space, the thing stuffs a pressure sensor, memory, thin-film battery, solar cell, wireless radio, and low-power microprocessor all into one very small translucent container. The processor behind this little guy uses an "extreme" sleep mode to keep it napping at 15-minute intervals and sucking up 5.3 nanowatts while awake, and its battery runs off 10 hours of indoor light or one and a half hours of sun beams. Using the sensor to measure eye pressure and the radio to communicate with an external reader, the system will continuously track the progress of glaucoma, without those pesky contacts. Of course, the mad scientists behind it look forward to a day when the tiny device will do much more, with each of us toting hundreds of the computer implants all over our bodies -- looks like a bright future for cyborgdom.
Addon Spotlight: DKIRunes/Diseases
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. This mod is strictly for Death Knights. Fortunately, I figure at least half of the WoW population has a Death Knight at this point, so a post like this isn't so much of a problem. What is a problem is Blizz's official rune UI (at right). I love Blizzard to tiny pieces, but they dropped the ball there, in my opinion. Aside from the icons being a bit ugly and inscrutable, it's flat-out difficult to tell the state of your runes at a glance on the default display. The little rotating line that is supposed to tell you when your runes is ready again is also hard to read, at least for me. And watching critical debuffs on the default target frame is less than pleasant. Fortunately, DeathKnight.Info Runes and Disease are here to give us all that vital information in readable and flexible form. The default state of the addon (as seen at the top right of this post) has way too much artwork for me; any pixels that don't contain information don't have a place on my screen. There's too much info I want to keep track of. But that's alright, because DKi Runes is extremely customizable.
The Arena is about to get diseased
As we're already starting to see, our good friends the Death Knights juggle some abilities centered around an as-of-yet unrepresented PC damage type: Disease. There is a variety of plagues and diseases which will obviously have direct application in the arena. I wonder if, as PvP-guru Zach put it, Death Knights might be the rock to the Druid's scissors. This isn't the first time we've seen Blizzard willing to put a strong counter to Resto Druids in the hands of a single class. (Arguments about Hunters/Druids being the strong counter to Warrior/Druids are kind of aside here - both comps still have Druids.) You don't see how this new damage type is the Druid counter? It's pretty simple -- Druids don't have a cleanse that works against Disease.If Death Knights become a favored arena class, then the presence of Disease in the Arena could help provide solid reason to go Paladin or Priest over Druid. Of course, that assumes the disease effects are significant enough to matter. And cleansing all that Disease is still going to be a pain even for our Paladins: they can only cleanse one at a time, and they'd blow through quite a few global cooldowns trying to clear their partners.I don't know if this dynamic was intentional, but I would find it hard to believe that Blizzard's ignorant of it. They tend to have an idea about what's going on. We don't know what new gear will be available to combat diseases (Resistance? Resilience?), and it's still way early to be hedging bets -- but introducing the Death Knight and their diseases should certainly mix things up.Edit: I've not forgotten about Shamans, but I was mostly focused on Druids in this article. My apologies to any Shaman who issued a rightful reminder for the call out.
Blizzard changes the description of the Death Knight talent trees
Curse has noticed a very intriguing change to the Death Knight information page. The descriptions of each of the talent trees has been changed. Here are the old descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on damage dealing abilities. Blood Presence increases damage output by a percentage. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on tanking abilities. Frost Presence increases threat and lowers damage taken by a percentage. Unholy: Talents in this tree have a variety of functions including summons, diseases, and PvP-focused abilities. Unholy Presence increases attack speed and reduces the global cooldown on death knight abilities. And now, the new descriptions: Blood: Talents in this tree focus on weapons, armor, and strikes. Frost: Talents in this tree focus on control, counters, and combos. Unholy: Talents in this tree focus on spells, summons, and diseases. This is quite a drastic change, but what could it mean? Let's look at the possibilities after the break.
Augmented vision device may aid tunnel vision sufferers
As people age and develop ocular diseases such as glaucoma and retinitis pigmentosa, an unfortunate side effect is the gradual inability to locate and recognize objects not directly in front of them -- a condition more commonly known as tunnel vision. Previous gadgets designed to combat this problem, such as so-called reverse binocular glasses, have indeed been successful in providing patients with additional visual data; however, their miniaturizing effect took much of the detail away from peripheral objects, making them uncomfortable and ultimately ineffective for everyday use. Fortunately for tunnel vision sufferers, a new, higher-tech option may soon be available to aid them in their plight, in the form of an innovative device designed by a team at Harvard Medical School affiliate Schepens Eye Research Institute. Developed in conjunction with MyVu HMD manufacturer MicroOptical Corp., the augmented vision device consists of a video camera and transparent display attached to a pair of glasses and tethered by wire to a small computer. The computer processes the incoming visual data from the camera and projects a real-time outline of the wearer's surroundings right onto the center of the glasses, effectively "filling in the blanks" for the peripheral objects that would not normally be viewable. In tests conducted by the team, affected patients with only an hour of training were able to significantly increase the directness of their searches, while at the same time reducing the amount of time necessary to locate an object by about 22%. Further long term studies are necessary to determine how effective the device would be with more training and regular usage, but with such promising initial results, tunnel vision sufferers may finally be able to step out of the shadows and literally see the light.[Via Medgadget]
