Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Submission + - When a Jet Hits a Soap Film, opens up an entirely new way to control microjets (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: Today, Geoffroy Kirstetter and buddies at the Universite de Nice Sophia-Antipolis in France ask what happens when a jet of liquid hits a soapy film.

These guys used a bowl of washing up liquid to generate a soap film some 10cm across in a wire frame. They then pumped a stream of soapy water through a sub-millimetre nozzle to create a jet with a size and velocity they could vary. Finally, they fired the jet at the film at various different angles to see what happens.

It turns out that the film is surprisingly robust. "Regardless of its velocity, radius and incident angle, the jet never breaks the soap lm," say Kirstetter and co.

But something else happens instead: the film bends the jet by an amount that depends on its angle of incidence. In effect, the film acts like a lens and Kirstetter and co are able to derive a kind of Snell-like law to describe this kind of refraction.
Technology

Submission + - Gamers solve molecular puzzle (msn.com)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases. The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said.

Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"

They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days," Khatib said.
Science

Submission + - Bristol physicists break 150-year-old law (physorg.com)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law.
Security

Submission + - The EFF is asking people to set up TOR relays. (eff.org)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: Operate a Tor relay to help Tor users all over the world!

Activists worldwide use Tor to protect their anonymity online and to circumvent Internet censorship. But they all rely on a limited number of user-provided "relays" to protect themselves and communicate with others. Internet users worldwide need your help to make the Tor network stronger and faster, so take the Tor Challenge today!
Technology

Submission + - Game developer David Braben creates a USB stick PC (geek.com)

Submitted by KPexEA
KPexEA writes: Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has a HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? $25.

The hardware being offered is no slouch either. It uses a 700MHz ARM11 processor coupled with 128MB of RAM and runs OpenGL ES 2.0 allowing for decent graphics performance with 1080p output confirmed. Storage is catered for by an SD card slot. It also looks as though modules can be attached such as the 12MP camera seen in the image above.

We can expect it to run a range of Linux distributions, but it looks like Ubuntu may be the distro it ships with. That means it will handle web browsing, run office applications, and give the user a fully functional computer to play with as soon as it’s plugged in. All that and it can be carried in your pocket or on a key chain.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

Close