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Medicine

Submission + - New Imaging Technique Explains Unconsciousness (manchester.ac.uk)

Submitted by smitty777
smitty777 writes: A new imaging technique called fEITER (for functional Electrical Impedance Tomography by Evoked Response) attempts to explain the process of slipping into unconsciousness. The fEITER is a portable device that creates 3D imagery based on evoked potentials measured hundreds of times a second.

The interesting finding from these studies is that unconsciousness appears to result from a buildup of inhibitor neurons. From the article: “Our findings suggest that unconsciousness may be the increase of inhibitory assemblies across the brain’s cortex. These findings lend support to Greenfield’s hypothesis of neural assemblies forming consciousness.”
Robotics

Submission + - cheap swarm robot (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: hey're fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other. On an individual basis, this isn't particularly impressive, but Kilobots aren't designed to be used on an individual basis. Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, you don't just get yourself one single Kilobot. Or ten. Or a hundred. They're designed to swarm in the thousands,

Submission + - First exploit on quantum cryptography confirmed (physicsworld.com)

Submitted by
Vadim Makarov
Vadim Makarov writes: "The Physics World reports researchers demonstrating a full eavesdropper on a quantum key distribution link. Unlike conventional exploits for security vulnerabilities that are often just a piece of software, spying on quantum cryptography required a box full of optics and mixed-signal electronics. Details are published in Nature Communications, and as a free preprint. The vulnerability was known before, but this is the first actual working exploit with secret-key recording confirmed. Patching this loophole is in progress.

Disclaimer: I am one of the researchers who worked on this."

Comment Re:Very interesting I'm sure (Score 3, Insightful) 395

by apetrelli (#36472952) Attached to: US Senate Votes For Repeal of Ethanol Subsidies

It's about ethanol and biofuel. I think that many of us have different ideas about biofuel (e.g. I don't like it, it reduces food fields) that might be discussed.
And there's the problem of funding biofuel, that may not be fair comparing it to other alternative technologies, like hybrid or pure electric cars.
Science

Submission + - Student finds universe's missing mass (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.
Facebook

Submission + - Zuckerberg Only Eating Animals He Personally Kills

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has begun personally slaying animals for food, part of a resolution to fully appreciate the meat he eats by limiting it to that which he personally kills. Zuckerberg has mostly been vegetarian since making the vow, but his hands-on kills thus far include a goat, pig, chicken and a lobster. 'He cut the throat of the goat with a knife,' Zuckerberg pal Jesse Cool told FORTUNE, 'which is the most kind way to do it.' Guess it beats a chocolate bars and milk subsistence.

Submission + - Employee Termination Procedures 3

Submitted by RoyaleA
RoyaleA writes: I've worked in the IT industry for 8 years and for whatever reason I've never had to deal with a disgruntled employee that either quits or is terminated. It just happened last week. This employee was a VP, so they had access to a lot of company data (client information, financials, etc). Now, I like to think of myself as paranoid when it comes to keeping records of everything that goes on since I still have access log files from 2003, but I'm wondering what exact procedures other SysAdmins take when dealing with this. It's a small company (10 client nodes, 2 servers) so there's no real policy in place to go by. So far, I've disabled the account on the LDAP, disabled the employee's website credentials, archived all of the access logs to an encrypted flash drive, and cloned their old PC to an offsite backup machine. Being a responsible admin, I need to ask...is there anything I'm overlooking? This employee was pretty pissed off...
Patents

Submission + - Senate Panel Backs Patent Overhaul Bill

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes: A bill to reduce the likelihood of massive damage awards in patent disputes took a step forward with approval by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee voted 15-0 to back the legislation that would give judges a major role in determining how important a particular patent is to a product, so that infringing minor patents would not lead to huge damages. The bill also gives patents to the first inventor to file, rather than the first to invent, making the patent application process easier for companies who apply for patents in multiple countries. This year, Microsoft, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Biotechnology Industry Organization support the patent legislation, while Dell, Cisco and others oppose it.
Security

Submission + - Peering through the malicious iframe (iseclab.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Boffins at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Birmingham, UK have published a report describing their infiltration and take over of the Mebroot drive by download campaign. For over 4 months, they had access to the malicious web sites used to exploit unsuspecting visitors and they observed the victims, the infected web sites and the behavior of the criminals running the campaign. Some interesting data points: 25%-42% of the visitors used vulnerable browsers; the majority of the infected web sites remained infected for 25 days and 20% remained infected the whole time. The result: the campaign managed to exploit over 91K visitors per week.
Google

Submission + - Filesharing is under threat from IPv6 transition (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by Incisive
Incisive writes: FILESHARING and other data transfer activities could come to an end if the world does not move to IPv6, say experts who expect the Asia Pacific region to run out of Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses first.

To head off global chaos and more widespread cons similar to the Millennium Bug, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and Number Resource Organization (NRO) told the world today, don't panic, but make the move to IPv6.
Idle

Submission + - A smile on facebook cost a woman her benefits (cnet.com)

Submitted by satuon
satuon writes: According to the Associated Press, Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Bromont, Quebec, was suffering from depression and took time away from work, relying on sick-leave benefits from her insurer, Manulife Financial.

The monthly payments were suddenly halted. When she called Manulife to ask why, she says she was told that it had espied photos on her Facebook page that showed her cheerful. Ergo, the argument allegedly went, she was able to work. Which led to the second ergo: no more payments.
Japan

Submission + - Piracy boost sales, says Japanese Government study (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new official study seems to confirm what a lot of the Slashdot crowd thinks, and the opposite of what the **AAs say:
"A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese Government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs. The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry’s claims that ‘illicit’ downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt."
More specifically, "(1) YouTube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny [a popular P2P program in Japan] file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales."

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