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Submission + - What Struck Earth in 775? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In 775 C.E., while Charlemagne was ruling his Frankish kingdom, something mysterious struck Earth. An analysis of the rings of two Japanese cedar trees reveals that from 774 to 775 C.E., the atmospheric level of radioactive carbon-14 jumped by 1.2%. This indicates that cosmic rays—high-speed, charged particles from space—bombarded our planet and converted some atmospheric nitrogen-14 into carbon-14. The scientists argue against two logical suspects: solar flares are too weak to do the job, and no supernova explosion was seen at the time, nor do any nearby supernova remnants date back to Charlemagne's time. So the cause remains a mystery, but whatever it was, something similar could presumably strike again.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - The Adventure Bundle: Old-School Adventuring in the Underground?

Submitted by gh0stnaV
gh0stnaV writes: A very young and fresh generation of old-school point-and-click adventures seems to be quietly brewing in hiding among the grass roots. Several developers have recently organized themselves into yet another bundle, dubbed the Bundle-in-a-Box. Some of the games here are already well-known, e.g. Gemini Rue (Wadjet Eye Games) or Ben There, Dan That! (Size Five Games), but there's also the newcomer The Sea Will Claim Everything (Jonas Kyratzes) as well as a couple of games for those who choose to pay above the current average. Most of the offerings come from one-man teams, as true to the indie tag as can get. The question remains, though: will this underground development model prove viable? And does the world of point-and-click belong only to heavy hitters like Double Fine? Right now, the numbers point to an affirmative on the second question, while the first one hangs in the balance.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - ToS a new genre of DRM? (rockpapershotgun.com)

Submitted by kenshin33
kenshin33 writes: And they wonder why people pirate. The story, In a nutshell : some people are being banned from EA forms for violating ToS => ban from Origin (EA store) which leads to not being able to play games that those people have paid for. This guy in particular has lost his access to even EA games bought on STEAM for something he didn't even do (banned because someone caused at him in a post and included his username in that post ) :
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.328868-EA-now-issuing-permanent-Origin-bans-through-content-filter?page=1 .

Submission + - Miyamoto Steps Down (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by RobinEggs
RobinEggs writes: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator and producer of the Zelda and Mario franchises among other works, is stepping down at Nintendo.

After personally managing Nintendo's blockbuster franchises for ~20 years, Miyamoto said today: ""What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself. Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small."
Robotics

Submission + - Robots to patrol South Korean prisons (wsj.com)

Submitted by bukharin
bukharin writes: As reported by various sites, South Korea is planning a trial of robotic prison guards in Pohang. The idea is that the robots will roll around the prison monitoring conditions inside the cells and communicate back to human guards if they detect a problem such as violence. Apparently the human guards are happy with the idea because they get to do less, especially overnight. And if you were worried about Skynet, you needn't be: according to Prof. Lee Baik-chul of Kyonggi University, who's running the trial, '... the robots are not terminators. Their job is not cracking down on violent prisoners. They are helpers.' Good to know.
Games

Submission + - A Profile of Women Gamers (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Some stereotypes might have been blown away in a a recent survey from Gameshouse. More than half (55%) of online gamers (people who play online games on their computer, social networking sites, or mobile devices) are women. The survey then went on the provide a profile of these female gamers and revealed the typical modern online gamer as a woman in a serious relationship who works out, is more social than non-gamers, plays games in the evenings, and has more sex than a woman who doesn’t play online games. Perhaps we need some new avatars?

Submission + - European Court of Justice: ISPs can't be forced to (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by mmcuh
mmcuh writes: Back in 2004, Belgian copyright group Sabam managed to get a court order forcing the ISP Scarlet to filter out filesharing traffic. Scarlet took the case to a national appeals court, which in turn asked the European Court of Justice for an opinion. The opinion was delivered today: "EU law precludes an injunction made against an internet service provider requiring it to install a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services which applies indiscriminately to all its customers, as a preventive measure, exclusively at its expense and for an unlimited period. [...] It is true that the protection of the right to intellectual property is enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. There is, however, nothing whatsoever in the wording of the Charter or in the Court's case law to suggest that that right is inviolable and must for that reason be absolutely protected."
Earth

New Estimates Say Earth's Oceans Smaller Than Once Believed 263

Posted by timothy from the deeper-than-my-love-for-you dept.
Velcroman1 writes with this snippet from Fox News: "Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big? As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume — the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute set out to more accurately answer that question — and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles. And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor."
Censorship

Pakistan Court Orders Facebook Ban Over Mohammed Images 949

Posted by timothy from the certainly-should-block-wikipedia-too-then dept.
jitendraharlalka writes with this excerpt from Al Jazeera English: "A Pakistani court has issued a ban on the social networking site Facebook after a user-generated contest page encouraged members to post caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. The Lahore High Court on Wednesday instructed the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to ban the site after the Islamic Lawyers Movement complained that a page called 'Draw Mohammed Day' is blasphemous. ... 'We have already blocked the URL link and issued instruction to Internet service providers,' Khurram Mehran, a spokesperson for the PTA, said."
Games

All the Best Games May Be NP-Hard 322

Posted by kdawson from the easy-for-you-to-say dept.
Catullus writes "Following in the footsteps of Tetris and Minesweeper, the simple yet addictive multiplatform game Flood-It is the latest puzzle to be proven to be hard — NP-hard, to be exact. This means that there's no way to write an efficient program to beat the game, unless P=NP. This research by computer scientists from Bristol University raises the intriguing question: are these games fun precisely because they're hard for computers to solve, and need a spark of human creativity?"
Role Playing (Games)

Can a Video Game Solve Hunger, Disease and Poverty? 72

Posted by Soulskill from the edible-games-are-the-future dept.
destinyland writes "Dr. Jane McGonigal of the RAND Corporation's Institute for the Future has created a game described as 'a crash course in changing the world.' Developed for the World Bank's 'capacity development' branch, EVOKE has already gathered more than 10,000 potential solutions from participants, including executives from Procter & Gamble and Kraft. '[Dr. McGonigal] takes threats to human existence — global food shortage, fuel wars, pandemic, refugee crisis, and upended democracy — and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures.' And by completing its 10 missions, you too can become a World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator. (The game designer's web site lays out her ambitious philosophy. 'Reality is broken,' but 'game designers can fix it.')"
Medicine

Science Attempts To Explain Heaven 692

Posted by kdawson from the what-gene-codes-for-the-harps dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek about the thesis that heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event, but rather something that happens in your brain as you die. The thesis is based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience. According to a 2000 article by Bruce Greyson in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had an NDE. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details, describing: a tunnel, a light, a gate or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism when, in order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory has gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a short-acting, hallucinogenic, dissociative anesthetic. 'I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God,' wrote one user of his experience under ketamine. 'Dante said it better,' writes Miller, 'but the vision is astonishingly the same.'"

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