Design Starting For Matter-Antimatter Collider

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 08, @03:02AM
from the dump-the-warp-core dept.

scifi

science

technology

couch_warrior writes"The Register is carrying a story on the early design efforts for the next generation of high-energy particle accelerators. They will be linear, and will collide matter and antimatter in the form of electrons and positrons. The obvious question will be: once we have a matter-antimatter reactor, how long till we have warp drive, and will the Vulcans show up for a sneak-peak?"

Avatars To Have Business Dress Codes By 2013

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 08, @01:25AM
from the no-flaming-hair-at-pretend-work dept.

nk497 writes"With businesses increasingly using digital tech like virtual worlds and Twitter, their staff will have to be given guidelines on how they 'dress' their avatars, according to analysts. 'As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise's reputation,' said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. 'We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.'"

Video Game Dubbed “Lose/Lose” Doesn’t Really Offer a Way to Win/Win

Posted 09/30/09 at 05:57:40 PM by Jason barry

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If you thought Red Faction 2 was a destructive game, download Lose/Losefrom Zach Gage and play it for a few hours. You might not be able to boot your computer after a marathon session of alien bashing.

Zach Gage developed the game to have real life consequences, and real life consequences it has. “Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted.” Sounds dangerous, right? Well, that was the intention.

According to his “manifesto,” he hopes to invoke the question of moral obligation and blur the line between virtual and physical possessions and their priorities in a technical world.

While the best solution is never fire a single shot, it could be the least fun game ever...unless you play it on a co-workers computer.

Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 05, @09:47AM
from the i'm-still-getting-older-here dept.

medicine

science

An anonymous reader writesThis year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres, and in an enzyme that forms them."

Monty Python 40 Years Old Today!

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 05, @10:35AM
from the nobody-expects-the-spanish-inquisition dept.

humor

entertainment

cheros was one of several readers to note that today, Oct 5, in 1969 was the very first airing of Monty Python. Although not every sketch has aged particularly well, you'd be hard pressed to find a more influential and funny show. Heck, look at the Icon we use here to indicate humorous stories! Who among us can't claim to have viewed the Holy Grail at least somewhere in the double digits.

Columbia Bugathermo hiking boots are heated, rechargeable

by Thomas Ricker posted Oct 5th 2009 at 3:27AM

If you live in the northern hemisphere then you've already felt it; the cold chill that signals the onset of nature's respite. So while not slip into these Columbia Bugathermo "high-performance" hiking boots and give the Earth a trample while its defenses are down? These heated boots feature dual-heating elements with visual indicators for battery and heating levels on the outside of that Omni-Tech waterproof skin. Three temperature settings provide as little as 3-hours, or up to 8-hours, of tootsie toasting heat from the internal lithium polymer batteries. Hell, might as well bring along a gasoline-powered generator so you can recharge 'em and show mother nature her real daddy. $250 and available now.

Minimally Invasive Procedure Effective For Treating Snoring, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2009) — Radiofrequency ablation, a procedure that uses heat to shrink the tissue of the soft palate, is an effective and minimally invasive procedure that can be used to treat patients who snore.

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Special Brain Wave Boost Slows Motion

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2009) — Researchers have found that they can make people move in slow motion by boosting one type of brain wave. The findings offer some of the first proof that brain waves can have a direct influence on behavior, according to the researchers, who report their findings online on October 1 in Current Biology.

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Key To Subliminal Messaging Is To Keep It Negative, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — Subliminal messaging is most effective when the message being conveyed is negative, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust.

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Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 30, @05:20AM
from the xbox-live-proved-this-years-ago dept.

games

science

TheClockworkSoul writes"According to NewScientist, victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone — but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. Interestingly, when male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, their levels of the hormone plummeted. This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous. Against a group of strangers — be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone's effects on aggression offer an advantage. 'In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you're better for it,' says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study. However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn't make sense. 'You can't alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,' he says."

A Pet In Your Life Keeps The Doctor Away

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2009) — Lowers blood pressure, encourages exercise, improves psychological health— these may sound like the effects of a miracle drug, but they are actually among the benefits of owning a four-legged, furry pet.

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Aussie Data Centres Brace For Dust Storm Barrage

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 24, @12:48AM
from the sand-gets-in-your-tubes dept.

technology

An anonymous reader writes"Data centers and telcos in the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today. The storm is said to be the worst of its type ever recorded in Australia. Macquarie Telecom disengaged automatic deployment of fire-prevention gas from the fire alarm to prevent gas being released on a false alarm. Other major data center operators reported clogged air filters and heat exchangers and said they would be performing cleaning and maintenance operations this week."

Best Tablet PC For Classroom Instruction?

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 23, @10:11PM
from the bang-for-your-buck dept.

education

news

dostert writes"With all of the recent hype of multitouch notebooks, the Apple Tablet, the Microsoft Courier, and the CrunchPad, I've been a bit curious about what happened to the good old pen and slate tablet PCs. I'm a mathematics professor at a small college and have been searching for a good cheap tablet (under $1000) which I can use to lecture, record the lecture notes along with my voice, and post up video lectures for the class. I have seen some suggestions, but many are large scale implementations at state universities, something my small private college clearly cannot afford. All I have been able to find is either tiny netbooks (like the new Asus T91), expensive full featured tablets (like the Dell XT), or multitouch tablets, that really wouldn't allow for the type of precision mathematics needs. I know a Sympodium device would work great, but we really can't afford to put one of those in each room, so something portable would be ideal. All I've been left with is considering an HP tx series. It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime, and HP, Fujitsu, and Dell are just doing incremental updates to their old designs. Does anyone have experience with this?"

Drug raid turns into 9 hour Wii bowl-a-thon

by Thomas Ricker posted Sep 23rd 2009 at 9:03AM

Know what's more alluring to the five-O than glazed confectionary goods? Nintendo's Wii, apparently. Or at least the lure of bowling without all the heavy lifting. See, a team of undercover cops raiding the home of a convicted Florida drug dealer was smitten enough by the console to quit their search and fire up Wii Sports for a bit of taxpayer fun over a period of, oh... about nine hours -- unaware that the home security system was recording the whole thing. Your dose of self-righteous indignation can be found after the break.

[Thanks, Maurice]

Promised Platform-Independent GPU Tech Is Getting Real

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 23, @12:51AM
from the near-linear dept.

graphics

hardware

technology

Vigile writes"Last year a small company called Lucid promised us GPU scaling across multiple GPU generations with near-linear performance gains without restrictions of SLI or CrossFire. The company has been silent for some time, but now it is not only ready to demonstrate the 2nd generation hardware, but also to show the first retail product that will be available with HYDRA technology. In this article there is a quick look at the MSI 'Big Bang' motherboard that sports the P55 chipset and HYDRA chip and also shows some demos of AMD HD 4890 and NVIDIA GTX 260 graphics cards working together for game rendering. Truly platform-independent GPU scaling is nearly here and the flexibility it will offer gamers could be impressive."

R2D2 turned into retro gaming shrine, includes head-mounted projector

by Vladislav Savov posted Sep 23rd 2009 at 5:30AM

We don't know exactly how to say this without overloading your nerd subsystem, but this R2D2 unit packs eight consoles, an integrated sound system and a projector for throwing your Jet Grind Radio sessions onto a wall. The only extras you'll need are the masses of controllers you see above and the steady constitution to not erupt into geek euphoria. Popular Science reader Brian De Vitis is the man you have to thank for this splicing of console goodness, and he's been kind enough to also provide a picture of the R2's mobo-laden innards. It awaits just past the break.

[Via Hack N Mod]

Alabama Wages War Against the Perfect Weed

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 23, @05:43AM
from the keep-watching-the-skies-dexter dept.

earth

news

pickens writes"Dan Berry writes in the NY Times that the State of Alabama is spending millions of dollars in federal stimulus money to combat Cogongrass, a.k.a. the perfect weed, the killer weed, and the weed from another continent. A weed that 'evokes those old science-fiction movies in whichclueless citizens ignore reports of an alien invasion.' Cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica) is considered one of the 10 worst weeds in the world. 'It can take over fields and forests, ruining crops, destroying native plants, upsetting the ecosystem,' writes Berry. 'It is very difficult to kill. It burns extremely hot. And its serrated leaves and grainy composition mean that animals with even the most indiscriminate palates — goats, for example — say no thanks.' Alabama's overall strategy is to draw a line across the state at Highway 80 and eradicate everything north of it; then, in phases, to try to control it to the south. But the weed is so resilient that you can't kill it with one application of herbicide, you have to return several months later and do it again. 'People think this is just a grass,' says forester Stephen Pecot. 'They don't understand that cogongrass can replace an entire ecosystem.' Left unchecked, Pecot says 'it could spread all the way to Michigan.'"

"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email

Posted by kdawson on Monday September 21, @04:34AM
from the visibility-in-the-clouds dept.

education

google

privacy

news

A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected."While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"

Microsoft Says No TCP/IP Patches For XP

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 15, @08:13AM
from the to-improve-your-customer-experience dept.

bug

networking

security

upgrades

windows

technology

CWmike writes"Microsoft says it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. 'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,' said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast, referring to Windows 2000 and XP. 'An update for Windows XP will not be made available,' Stone and fellow program manager Jerry Bryant said during the Q&A portion of the Webcast (transcript here). Last Tuesday, Microsoft said that it wouldn't be patching Windows 2000 because creating a fix was 'infeasible.'"

Common Pain Cream Could Protect Heart During Attack, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — New research from the University of Cincinnati shows that a common, over-the-counter pain salve rubbed on the skin during a heart attack could serve as a cardiac-protectant, preventing or reducing damage to the heart while interventions are administered.

Read More

Google Wants To Ease News Browsing With Fast Flip

Posted by timothy on Monday September 14, @10:58PM
from the see-page-17-for-details dept.

themedia

gui

google

technology

CWmike writes"Google is developing a product called Fast Flip that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse through news articles on the Web, a process the company says is cumbersome and discourages people from reading more online. Fast Flip, which lets readers glance at pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load, was expected to go live late Monday at the Google Labs Web site. The idea is to try to replicate online the ease with which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. This could motivate people to read more online, which Google argues will help publishers attract more readers and increase their revenue. However, when users click on a Fast Flip link, they will be taken to the corresponding publisher's Web site, where the Google technology will not be on hand to display the page more quickly."

New York Times Site Pop-Up Says Your Computer Is Infected

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 13, @07:59PM
from the if-you're-reading-this-you-have-a-virus dept.

security

themedia

news

Zott writes"Apparently, 'some readers' of the New York Times site are getting a bit more with their news: an apparently syndicated adware popup with a faux virus scan of the user's computer indicating they are infected, and a link to go download a fix now. It's entertaining when a Mac user gets it, but clearly downloading an .exe file isn't a good way to keep your computer clean ..."Update: 09/14 03:20 GMT by T : Troy encountered this malware,"and did basic forensics. Summary: iframe ad then series of HTML/JS redirects, ending at a fake virus scanner page with a "Scan" link (made to look like a dialog box button) that downloaded malware."Nice explanation!

Video: Robot hand shows off amazing dexterity, speed

by Vladislav Savov posted Aug 22nd 2009 at 2:20PM

So you want something to look forward to in your fast approaching old age, eh? If robots playing baseball doesn't quite cut it, how's about a robohand that redefines what we understand by the word "dexterity"? The Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory is at it again, this time demonstrating robotic appendages with a reaction time of a single millisecond. Using harmonic drive gears and a (really) high-speed actuator, the three-fingered hands can tie your shoelaces, tweezer your brow, and even perform some kung fu pen spinning for the ladies. Video after the break -- skip ahead if you must, but don't miss out on the slow-mo action at 2:40 in the demo, it's pure kinetic poetry.

[Via Hizook; Thanks, Thomas B]

Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 10, @09:24AM
from the revealing-trade-secret-super-poke-tech dept.

social

news

consonant writes"A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be "overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit"."

The Real-World State of Windows Use

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 09, @07:59PM
from the give-me-the-numbers dept.

microsoft

it

snydeq writes"Performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software has released an array of real-world Windows use data as compiled by itsexo.performance.network, a community-based monitoring tool that receives real-time data from about 10,000 PCs throughout the world. Tracking users' specific configurations, as well as the applications they actually use, the tool provides insights into real-world Windows use, including browser share, multicore adoption, service pack adoption, and which anti-virus, productivity, and media software are most prevalent among Windows users. Of note are the following conclusions: two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it; OpenOffice.org is making inroads into the Microsoft Office user base; and despite the rise of Firefox, Internet Explorer remains the standard option for inside-the-firewall apps."