itwbennett writes"Tomorrow morning at 7:30 EDT, NASA is going to crash a probe into the moon as part of its LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite) mission, the main purpose of which is to discover if there's any water on the moon. 'If you happen to have a 10-12" telescope (or larger) then you might be able to see the plume from your backyard,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'For the rest of us, the impact will be streamed live over the web in a few places. NASA will have a feed, beginning at 6:15 EDT. The NASA feed includes live footage from the spacecraft itself as well as expert commentary and other goodies. Astronomy service SLOOH is offering a double-shot of earth-bound feeds, with one feed from New Hampshire and the other from Arizona. The SLOOH feeds start at 6:30 am EDT.'"
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At the LHC
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 08, @10:14AM
from the i-can't-believe-i-used-the-transportation-topic dept.
from the i-can't-believe-i-used-the-transportation-topic dept.
KentuckyFC writes"In 1924, the influential German mathematician David Hilbert calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light (as seen by a distant inertial observer). Now an American physicist has pointed out that the equal and opposite effect should also hold true: that a relativistic particle should repel a stationary mass. This, he says, could form the basis of a 'hypervelocity propulsion drive' for accelerating spacecraft to a good fraction of the speed of light. The idea is that the repulsion allows the relativistic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, an effect that is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass. Unlike other exotic hyperdrive proposals, this one can be tested using the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, which will generate beams of particles with the required energy (abstract). Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by should confirm the theory — or scupper it entirely."
Significant Risk' Of Oil Production Peaking In Ten Years, Report Finds
Prelude from Busted - Just to help out here on what the significance is. Peak oil means that we have used half of the oil available in the earth. On the surface this does not appear to be too important until you consider our use of oil grows every year, and by a percentage, we use twice as much oil per day as we did 36 years ago and assuming steady growth, you could extend this back to the 1930s and say that we use 8 times more oil per day today than we did back then. You can see the pattern known as doubling and most people can see that if you extend this into the future, we will not have the more than 100 years it too to get to half way but SIGNIFICANTLY less, perhaps only 30-60 years after peak. Now of course as demand increases and the supply becomes both more expensive to access and drops, gas prices will go up, probably significantly if we don't have a viable alternative. Coal, most people accept as dirty no matter how you slice it. To me, the logical conclusion is that since prices are going to go up, let us more aggressively pursue clean fuel sources to be ready for the inevitable transition to a new and cleaner fuel source and while we are thinking in this vein, why not buy our scientists as much time as possible by conserving to make what we have last as long as possible.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — A new report, launched by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), argues that conventional oil production is likely to peak before 2030, with a significant risk of a peak before 2020. The report concludes that the UK Government is not alone in being unprepared for such an event - despite oil supplying a third of the world's energy.
Candy Linked To Violence In Study
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 08, @05:29AM
from the gummy-worms-and-steal dept.
from the gummy-worms-and-steal dept.
T Murphy writes"A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry links daily consumption of candy at the age of 10 to an increased chance of being convicted of a violent crime by age 34. The researchers theorize the correlation comes from the way candy is given rather than the candy itself. Candy frequently given as a short-term reward can encourage impulsive behavior, which can more likely lead to violence. An alternative explanation offered by the American Dietetic Association is that the candy indicates poor diet, which hinders brain development. The scientists stress they don't imply candy should be removed from a child's diet, although they do recommend moderation. The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style. The study can be found here, but the full text is behind a paywall."
Design Starting For Matter-Antimatter Collider
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 08, @03:02AM
from the dump-the-warp-core dept.
from the dump-the-warp-core dept.
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.
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.'"
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize
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.
from the nobody-expects-the-spanish-inquisition dept.
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
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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.
Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers
Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 30, @05:20AM
from the xbox-live-proved-this-years-ago dept.
from the xbox-live-proved-this-years-ago dept.
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."
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
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.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
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.
from the sand-gets-in-your-tubes dept.
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.
from the bang-for-your-buck dept.
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?"
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Drug raid turns into 9 hour Wii bowl-a-thon
by Thomas Ricker posted Sep 23rd 2009 at 9:03AM
[Thanks, Maurice]
Promised Platform-Independent GPU Tech Is Getting Real
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 23, @12:51AM
from the near-linear dept.
from the near-linear dept.
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
[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.
from the keep-watching-the-skies-dexter dept.
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.'"
Monday, September 21, 2009
"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email
Posted by kdawson on Monday September 21, @04:34AM
from the visibility-in-the-clouds dept.
from the visibility-in-the-clouds dept.
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.')"
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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.
from the to-improve-your-customer-experience dept.
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.
Google Wants To Ease News Browsing With Fast Flip
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."
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