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Programming

Submission + - 10th ICFP Programming Contest Starts July 20th (icfpcontest.org)

Submitted by
antientropic
antientropic writes: "Registration is now open for the Tenth Annual ICFP Programming Contest, which runs for 72 hours starting July 20, 12:00 (noon) CEST. As in the previous nine editions, this is your chance to show that your favorite programming language (or your team) is better than all others! The ICFP Programming Contest is organised as part of the International Conference on Functional Programming in the hopes of showing off functional programming, but contestants can use any language(s) they like. Previous winners have included Cilk, OCaml (3x), Haskell (3x), C++ and 2D. Previous problems have ranged from programming intelligent ants to cracking the secrets of an ancient civilization. This year's contest seems to have something to do with visitors from outer space."
Robotics

Submission + - Rat-brained robot solves animal puzzles

Submitted by Galactic_grub
Galactic_grub writes: A robot controlled by software modeled on the neuronal pathways in a rat's brain has proven itself to be a remarkable rodent mimic in classic animal experiments. When the robot was placed inside a maze, it 'instinctively' used landmarks to explore. Just like a real rat, it identified familiar places and even distinguished between locations that looked alike, after a single training session. The robot's control software models "place cells" — neurons in the hippocampus that light up when an animal is in a familiar place.
Displays

Submission + - Magnetic Nanotechnology for Displays

Submitted by westcoaster004
westcoaster004 writes: Researchers have reported a new means of inducing colour-change in a system using magnetism. The technology is suggested to have potential as a new display technology. The results are reported in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (abstract). Using polymer-coated iron oxide nanoparticles, a magnetic field organizes the nanoparticles into a 3-D array which acts as a photonic crystal which shows brilliant colours by reflecting light. By varying the magnetic field, a full spectrum can be obtained. Not only is this a first variable-colour photonic crystal, it is also done with iron, a rather inexpensive material. Here's another press release.
Google

Submission + - Forget Google: South Koreans Use Naver, Daum

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "Despite the enormous popularity of Google in the U.S. and other countries, it barely has 2% of the market in South Korea. There, the most popular search results are gotten through Naver or Daum, according to a recent New York Times article. These sites are more like Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia in their approach, where participants freely answer other people's questions, building private databases of information that Google and other traditional search engines simply can't match."
Music

Submission + - Amazon announces DRM-free MP3 Downloads

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060 &p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1003003&highlight="
Communications

Submission + - BBC news looks back at the history of online news

Submitted by
IngramJames
IngramJames writes: "This article at BBC news is written by a chap retiring from the online news service after 13 years. An interesting read about the development of the "deluxe computer messaging system accessible via the telephone network" (that's "Internet" to you and me) news services down the years."
Announcements

Submission + - Portugal Celebrates Massive Solar Plant

Submitted by SolarPower
SolarPower writes: A project slated to become the world's largest-producing solar power plant was inaugurated Wednesday in Portugal, though construction actually began last summer. The 11-megawatt 61 million euro ($78.5 million) plant, a joint project of U.S. and Portuguese energy companies, spreads across a 150-acre hillside in Serpa, 124 miles southeast of Lisbon.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Argonne Hydrogen Catalyst Tools For Desalination

Journal by cakilmer
Argonne Labratories has just announced some advances in catalysts for fuel cells. They have developed some cool tools for catalytic research in doing so -- which I think might be applicable to desalination research as well. The idea would be to have a catalyst settle Na & Cl out of solution and skim off the fresh water. This would be an extremely cheap process. So cheap it would make it
Space

Submission + - A decade-long mystery has been solved

Submitted by
justelite
justelite writes: "A decade-long mystery has been solved using data from ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton. The brightest member of the so-called 'magnificent seven' has been found to pulsate with a period of seven seconds. The discovery casts some doubt on the recent interpretation that this object is a highly exotic celestial object known as a quark star."
Toys

Submission + - New Personal Mini-sub announced

Submitted by
Shimes
Shimes writes: "A new personal mini-sub has just been announced. U-Boat Worx have announced 1-man and 2-man models, which according to The Times will be available at a cost from £65,0000.

With a maximum depth of 50m, a dry 1 atm cabin and in-built safety features, could this be the first affordable personal sub?"
AMD

Submission + - AMD plans an absolute GPGPU monster

Submitted by socram
socram writes: ATI is preparing something really, really special. If it manages to pull it off, it will be a breakthrough even Captain Hook couldn't have dreamt of. We are talking about a GPGPU product, the FireStream/Stream Processor board with no less than four (4) Gigabytes of local video memory. Did we mention real purpose of GPGPU? — annihilating the importance of CPU and server CPU margins, which cannot compare with R600 or G80 in terms of pure processing power. Of course, this comparison is valid only in GPGPU-friendly case scenarios, so we're talking about streamlined computing only. Engineers at PeakStream and Stanford Uni are already having wet-dreams about the possibilities that a single-GPU configuration will do, yet alone multi-GPU one. www.GPGPU.org

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