Comment Way ahead of you (Score 1) 232
We swedes actually tried that with moose a couple of hundred years ago. The moose were actually quite good at killing people.
Sadly almost all of them were swedes.
Comment Why not allow the public to participate? (Score 1) 1
From the article: "The CMB is certainly visible but the image itself is colour-enhanced so you couldn't do any science with that.[...] We have also reduced the resolution of the image to something which is more manageable for people to look at. Otherwise it would just be too big."
I wonder why they don't put up a zoomable un-"enhanced" full-resolution image on the web. Especially when inviting the public to participate with scientific work is so big in science right now (at least where I'm doing research). Sure, most people wouldn't contribute with anything useful - but the same thing can be said of slashdot users...
Submission + - Ebooks Slower to Read than Paper
Hugh Pickens writes: "PC World reports that a study shows that reading from a printed book—versus an e-book on any of the three tested devices, an iPad, Kindle 2, and PC, was a faster experience to a significant degree. Readers measured on the iPad reported reading speeds, on average, of 6.2 percent slower than their print counterparts while the Kindle 2 clocked in at 10.7 percent slower. Jacob Nielsen had each participant read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Each participant was timed, then quizzed to determine their comprehension and understanding of what they just read. Nielsen also surveyed users' satisfaction levels after operating each device (or page). For user satisfaction, the iPad, Kindle, and book all scored relatively equally at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6 on a one-to-seven ranking scale (seven representing the best experience). The PC, however, did not fare so well with its usability score of 3.6. "Most of the users' free-form comments were predictable," writes Nielsen. "For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter." Neilsen concludes that the study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. "Even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.""
Submission + - First full-sky image from Planck (bbc.co.uk) 1
krou writes: Six months of work has produced a remarkable full-sky map from Planck.
It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes. Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. "It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.
... Of particular note are the huge streamers of cold dust that reach thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane. "What you see is the structure of our galaxy in gas and dust, which tells us an awful lot about what is going on in the neighbourhood of the Sun; and it tells us a lot about the way galaxies form when we compare this to other galaxies," observed Professor Andrew Jaffe, a Planck team member from Imperial College London, UK.
The ESA have more news here, with a higher-res JPG available.
Submission + - Tattoos for the Math and Science Geek 7
An anonymous reader writes: I've been thinking of getting a sleeve of math and science tattoos for quite a while now. With the money saved up, the only question remaining is, what equations/ideas should I get? I know for certain that I'm going to include some of Maxwell's equations, and definitely Ohm's Law. So, if you were going to put a tribute to the great math and science minds on your body forever, which ones would you choose?
Submission + - Biodegradable Sugar-Powered Batteries, Coming Soon (physorg.com)
srsguy writes: In the past, we've seen cell phones powered by cola. Now, researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri are attempting to commercialize batteries powered purely by sugar — not from just one source, either. The team is making claims that "[d]evices could be instantly recharged by adding virtually any convenient sugar source, including plant sap". This should keep the world's sugar-fueled youth with plenty of power — up to 4 times longer on a single charge, in fact.
Submission + - Wikileaks founder has passport confiscated in Oz (timesonline.co.uk) 2
qwerty8ytrewq writes: The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.
Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.
However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.
However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Submission + - Want to go to Israel? Leave your iPad at home (edibleapple.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: In fact, if you own an iPad and are planning to travel to the holy land anytime soon, you’d be well advised to leave the iPad at home, lest Israeli authorities confiscate it for not being compliant with the country’s wireless network standard.
Comment Finally! (Score 5, Funny) 204
Now I can finally get somewhat reasonable precision when calculating the radius of stuff!
Submission + - How to build a quantum propulsion machine (technologyreview.com)
KentuckyFC writes: According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence. It turns out that these waves can have various measurable effects, such as the Casimir-Polder force which was first measured accurately in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear. Today, however, a researcher at an Israeli government lab suggests how it could be possible to generate propulsion using the quantum vacuum. The basic idea is that pushing on the electromagnetic fields in the vacuum should generate an equal and opposite force. The suggestion is that this can be done using nanoparticles that interact with the vacuum's electric and magnetic fields, generating the well known Lorentz force. In most cases, the sum of Lorentz forces adds up to zero. But today's breakthrough is the discovery of various ways to break this symmetry and so use the quantum vacuum to generate a force. The simplest of which is simply to rotate the particles. So the blueprint for a quantum propulsion machine described in the paper is an array of addressable nanoparticles that can be rotated in the required way. Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with masterful understatement, this might have practical implications.
Submission + - CentOS Linux 5.4 Released
An anonymous reader writes: The fourth update in the CentOS Linux 5 family is released. Highlights of the new release include a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages, GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem etc. Grab a CD set from a mirror, and via BitTorrent 32bit, 64bit DVD. If you are already running CentOS-5.3 or an older CentOS-5 distro, just follow these simple instructions to upgrade over the Internet.
Submission + - Google Envisions 10 Million Servers (datacenterknowledge.com)
miller60 writes: Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. At this month's ACM conference on large -scale computing, Google's Jeff Dean said he's working on a storage and computation system called Spanner, which will automatically allocate resources across data centers, and be designed for a scale of 1 million to 10 million machines. One goal: to dynamically shift workloads to capture cheaper bandwidth and power. Dean's presentation is online.
Submission + - Sweden is Burning Biofuel Made from Bunnies (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: Sweden uses a pretty strange source for some of its heating fuel: rabbits. It turns out that Stockholm has an overabundance of the cotton-tailed critters, and the hungry bunnies are decimating city parks. To cut back on bunny populations and create a greener source of heating fuel for Swedes, city employees round up the rabbits, shoot them, freeze them and then ship them to a heating plant where they’re incinerated.
Submission + - SPAM: iPhone in "coma mode"
An anonymous reader writes: BBC Watchdog has a report on iphone's latest problem: coma mode! iPhone fans have been calling the problem 'coma mode' and when it happens the phone won't receive calls or emails. It becomes useless until the user puts it through a 'hard reboot', similar to shutting down and restarting a desk top computer when it crashes. But even worse, because this happens when the screen is locked, leaving it blank, the unlucky ones experiencing the problem don't know it's in 'coma mode' until they pick up the phone to check. They could go for hours without realising the phone's stopped working.
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Microsoft Plubin puts Firefox users at risk. (itworldcanada.com)
cbiltcliffe writes: The 'Windows Presentation Foundation' plugin that the .NET framework installs in Firefox is vulnerable to the same "browse-and-get-owned" situation that Internet Explorer is.
From the article:
"While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well," admitted Microsoft engineers in a post to the company's Security Research & Defense blog on Tuesday. "The reason is that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installs a 'Windows Presentation Foundation' plug-in in Firefox."
According to annoyances.org: "This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for Web sites to easily and quietly install software on your PC," said the hints and tips site. "Since this design flaw is one of the reasons [why] you may have originally chosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste."
Although Microsoft states that the MS09-054 update also patches this vulnerable component, so be sure to apply it to any machine(s) you maintain.
From the article:
"While the vulnerability is in an IE component, there is an attack vector for Firefox users as well," admitted Microsoft engineers in a post to the company's Security Research & Defense blog on Tuesday. "The reason is that
According to annoyances.org: "This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for Web sites to easily and quietly install software on your PC," said the hints and tips site. "Since this design flaw is one of the reasons [why] you may have originally chosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste."
Although Microsoft states that the MS09-054 update also patches this vulnerable component, so be sure to apply it to any machine(s) you maintain.
