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Earth

Global Warming 'Undeniable,' Report Says 1657

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-can't-fool-pudge dept.
BergZ writes "Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming. 'A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,' the annual State of the Climate report declares. Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada, the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its analysis of 10 indicators that are 'clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.'"
Earth

Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635

Posted by samzenpus from the sunlight-is-free dept.
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."
Java

Java IO Faster Than NIO 270

Posted by kdawson from the question-conventional-wisdom dept.
rsk writes "Paul Tyma, the man behind Mailinator, has put together an excellent performance analysis comparing old-school synchronous programming (java.io.*) to Java's asynchronous programming (java.nio.*) — showing a consistent 25% performance deficiency with the asynchronous code. As it turns out, old-style blocking I/O with modern threading libraries like Linux NPTL and multi-core machines gives you idle-thread and non-contending thread management for an extremely low cost; less than it takes to switch-and-restore connection state constantly with a selector approach."
Image

Plastic Bottle Catamaran Crosses The Pacific Ocean 56

Posted by samzenpus from the not-your-usual-trash-barge dept.
The Plastiki, a catamaran made with plastic bottles, has completed a 8,000 mile trip between San Francisco and Sydney. Captain David de Rothschild said, "The Plastiki is literally a metaphorical message in a bottle about beating waste and reducing our human fingerprints on our natural environment." The boat will go on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum for the next month.
Input Devices

Apple Launches New Magical Trackpad, 12 Core Macs 432

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-oh-oh-its-magic dept.
theappwhisperer writes "The Magic Trackpad is basically a larger version of the MacBook Pro touchpad, with 80% more surface area for all your swiping and pinching. The entire surface acts as a button, so it's also a possible mouse replacement. And all of the expected gestures are here: two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, fingertip rotation, and three- and four-finger swipes. You can enable and disable gestures at your discretion from System Preferences." They also launched 12-core Mac Pros coming in August.
Google

When Is It Right To Go Public With Security Flaws? 126

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yesterday dept.
nk497 writes "When it comes to security flaws, who should be warned first: users or software vendors? The debate has flared up again, after Google researcher Tavis Ormandy published a flaw in Windows Support. As previously noted on Slashdot, Google has since promised to back researchers that give vendors at least 60-days to sort out a solution to reported flaws, while Microsoft has responded by renaming responsible disclosure as 'coordinated vulnerability disclosure.' Microsoft is set to announce something related to community-based defense at Black Hat, but it's not likely to be a bug bounty, as the firm has again said it won't pay for vulnerabilities. So what other methods for managing disclosures could the security industry develop, that balance vendors need for time to develop a solution and researchers' needs to work together and publish?"

Comment Re:Can you spell W H I T E W A S H ? (Score 1) 701

by dwguenther (#32868372) Attached to: Climategate and the Need For Greater Scientific Openness
The UEA research group has been cleared by two independent British panels, the House of Commons, the University itself, Penn State, Nature editors, and the United Nations IPCC commission. UAE's research and conclusions continue to be supported by NASA, NOAA, CSIRO, NIWA, Canada AES and every other major climatology research group in the world. Now, you can try labeling NASA and NOAA corrupt organizations (like Limbaugh does), but if you keep following this trail of accusations far enough then you'll end up pointing back at yourself. And then you'll need to "spend some quality time behind bars for ... [having] perpetrated a number of obvious frauds".

Comment The Media is Not Science (Score 3, Insightful) 701

by dwguenther (#32867904) Attached to: Climategate and the Need For Greater Scientific Openness
Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost. Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important. Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.
Science

Submission + - Possible effects of radio waves on plants found (dailycamera.com)

Submitted by dwguenther
dwguenther writes: A Lyons (Colorado) area woman with no academic pedigree has published a scientific paper in the International Journal of Forestry Research about the adverse effects of radio waves on aspen seedlings.

Katie Haggerty, who lives north of Steamboat Mountain, found in a preliminary experiment done near her house that aspens shielded from the waves were healthier than those that were not.

"I found that the shielded seedlings produced more growth, longer shoots, bigger leaves and more total leaf area. The shielded group produced 60 percent more leaf area and 74 percent more shoot length than a mock-shielded group," she said.
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
Earth

Endangered Species Condoms 61

Posted by samzenpus from the make-it-growl dept.
The Center for Biological Diversity wants to help put a polar bear in your pants with their endangered species condom campaign. They hope that giving away 100,000 free Endangered Species Condoms across the country will highlight how unsustainable human population growth is driving species to extinction, and instill the sexual prowess of the coquí guajón rock frog, nature's most passionate lover, in the condom users. From the article: "To help people understand the impact of overpopulation on other species, and to give them a chance to take action in their own lives, the Center is distributing free packets of Endangered Species Condoms depicting six separate species: the polar bear, snail darter, spotted owl, American burying beetle, jaguar, and coquí guajón rock frog."
Science

Submission + - House of Commons Inquiry Clears Climate Scientists (npr.org)

Submitted by dwguenther
dwguenther writes: "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."

    The important thing here is not the inevitable I-told-you-so's; the much more critical discussion needs to be about how the media bought into a public-relations scandal, casting false doubt on research results that the public needs to know about in order to make informed decisions.
Open Source

Submission + - Berkeley Gets Willow Garage Robot to Fold Towels (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Researchers at UC Berkeley used Willow Garage’s PR2 robot to fold towels. The UCB programming used some innovative visual scanning allowing the PR2 to pick up a towel, find its corners, and fold it on a table perfectly. According to the paper presented at the 2010 ICRA, the robot successfully completed 50 out of 50 attempts to fold a single towel, and also folded 5 out of 5 towels when they were presented in a group. Is watching a robot do laundry really that exciting? Hell yes — wait until you see the video! UC Berkeley used a Willow Garage robot to develop their own sophisticated robotics program. That validates the whole premise of the PR2 – faster development by letting researchers use a common platform. Score one for open source robotics!

Submission + - Body Area Networks To Collect Physiological Data (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The FCC is considering a request by the healthcare industry to allocate radio bandwidth for the creation of body area networks, which would use small, disposable monitors in the form of patches or bracelets to collect physiological data on critically and chronically ill patients, such as temperature, pulse, blood glucose level, blood pressure and respiratory health. The body area networks would transmit the data to electronic medical records, which could be remotely monitored by care givers and could not only head off heart attacks and strokes but reduce staph infections in hospitals, which kill 200,000 people annually in the U.S.
Security

Submission + - Korea Becomes World's Biggest Malware Producer (net-security.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Korea now accounts for a massive 31.1 per cent of the world’s malware, a leap from February’s 8.9 per cent. This increase in Korean malware production is the result of the rise of compromised computers in Korea which are being used to send out phishing emails across the world. The US is the second most prolific producer of viruses, holding steady from February at 9.34 per cent. Next comes Brazil at 6.04 per cent, China at 5.05 per cent and India at 3.86 per cent.

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