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Comment Re:Gluten free fad (Score 1) 177

by mhwombat (#33178330) Attached to: Researchers Pinpoint Cause of Gluten Allergies
I agree that's wheat's not necessary for its flavour, even in bread. Other grains might not taste identical but who cares, unless they taste worse? Amaranth for instance is much more delicious than wheat.

In reply to some posts below, it's also not necessary to use barley in beer. Other grains work and there are a couple of companies making gluten-free beer. Barley's just traditional.

However we don't have any substitute for wheat in terms of the texture of bread. In this case it's kind of a catch-22 as it's the gluten specifically (not just the wheat) that achieves the soft, springy effect you want. I have tried a lot of recipes and honestly think that nothing else works as well. So yes, I want gluten that is more tolerable to people with Coeliac disease, please.

Comment Re:Gluten free fad (Score 1) 177

by mhwombat (#33178308) Attached to: Researchers Pinpoint Cause of Gluten Allergies

I have Coeliac and I find this "gluten-free fad" thing cuts both ways. On the one hand, I'm sure it makes gluten-free products more available and so I know I should be happy about it. But I can't help finding it annoying to have people say "oh yes, I have that too!" when it's perfectly obvious they don't because they only avoid gluten when they feel like it, and they've never got themselves tested. The other annoyance is staff at some restaurants & cafes have encountered this fad and assume me asking for gluten-free is just some kind of lifestyle choice, and they are accordingly unhelpful.

What I want this discovery to lead to is not a test but a fix! Maybe a "cure", but that's very ambitious. Or maybe a gluten-like substance that I can use to make "real bread" but which doesn't contain the trigger protein fragments. Gluten makes bread springy and soft. Plenty of other grains taste just as good, but none of the gluten subsitutes (xanthan gum etc) give you the texture of bread. If I could get something that worked like gluten and didn't trigger the autoimmune reaction, I would be very happy.
Biotech

Researchers Pinpoint Cause of Gluten Allergies 177

Posted by kdawson from the no-more-reuben-sandwich-on-soy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When patients with celiac disease consume foods containing gluten — a protein present in wheat, barley and rye — their immune systems send out an alarm, triggering a response that can damage their intestines and prevent them from absorbing certain nutrients. Now, scientists have pinpointed the culprits most responsible for this harmful reaction: three small fragments within the gluten protein that spark chaos in the gut."
Australia

A How-To Website For Australian Voters 158

Posted by timothy from the voting-by-esp-was-ruled-out dept.
Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.)
Security

Submission + - Silent, easily made Android root kit at Black Hat (electronista.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Not only did they make it an App but they gave it out on DVD! (I guess that's better than putting it on Google's marketplace).

(They claim) they did this to prompt Google to issue a fix. However, since the carriers seem to be very slow in updating the Android OS for their phones (a substantial number, perhaps a majority have never received an update), when can we expect a fix to get to the millions of phones out there? Compare this to the Apple ecosystem which received an update for their (admittedly widely publicized) Antennagate issue within weeks (whether or not it actually fixed anything is another question). In general Apple devices are (forcibly?) updated much more quickly. Perhaps this is because of his holinesses... I mean Steve Jobs powers of persuasion. ;)

From the link:
"SpiderLabs showed a rootkit at the Black Hat conference today that could compromise an Android phone without its owner's knowledge. The exploit, handed out on DVD at the hacking and security meetup, would let the wielder get complete control and personal data from an Android phone without triggering alerts. Team lead Nicholas Percoco said the app took just two weeks to build and would affect even modern Android 2.1 devices such as the HTC Desire and Legend."

Submission + - Slashdot is Dying, New York Times Confims It (nytimes.com) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is running a story about how Slashdot has dropped in popularity compared to other news sites in social web space. Quote: "Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community."
Mars

Mars Site May Hold 'Buried Life' 63

Posted by kdawson from the is-that-calcium-carbonate-or-are-you-just-glad-to-see-me dept.
sridharo sends in a report from the BBC that researchers have identified ancient rocks from Nili Fossae that could contain fossilized remains of life. These rocks are very similar to Pilbara rocks in northwest Australia. The rocks are estimated to be up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars. "[Many] scientists had hoped that they would soon have the opportunity to get much closer to these rocks. Nili Fossae was put forward as a potential landing site for NASA's ambitious new rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, which will be launched in 2011. ... But Nilae Fossae was eventually deemed too dangerous a landing site and it was finally removed from the list in June of this year." The research, led by a scientist from the SETI Institute, was published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Comment Can you actually replicate this article's issue? (Score 2, Insightful) 101

by mhwombat (#33055650) Attached to: How Google Trends & News Pollute the Web

When I google for "Chocomize", my top three results are the source chocolate-making company - not spam. The fourth, the only thing remotely resembling pollution, is this searchengineland article itself.

Also, if this is an issue, I really don't think the right solution is to hide the information.
Science

Possible Room Temperature Superconductor Achieved 264

Posted by kdawson from the beware-of-puppeteer-breeding-experiments dept.
TechkNighT_1337 sends news that surfaced on the Next Big Future blog, concerning research out of the University of Bengal, in India. The report is of a possible superconducting effect at ambient room temperatures. Here is the paper on the ArXiv. (Note that this research has not been peer-reviewed or published yet.) "We report the observation of an exceptionally large room-temperature electrical conductivity in silver and aluminum layers deposited on a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) substrate. The surface resistance of the silver-coated samples also shows a sharp change near 313 K. The results are strongly suggestive of a superconductive interfacial layer, and have been interpreted in the framework of Bose-Einstein condensation of bipolarons as the suggested mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. ... The fact that the results described above have been obtained from very simply-fabricated systems, without the use of any sophisticated set-up and any special attention being given to crystal purity, atomic perfection, lattice matching, etc. suggests that the physical process is a universal one, involving only an interface between a metal and an insulator with a large low-frequency dielectric constant. We note in passing that PZT and the cuprates have similar (perovskite or perovskite-based) crystal structures. This resemblance may provide an added insight into the basic mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity."
Privacy

Submission + - Chatroulette to log IP addresses, take screenshots (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by littlekorea
littlekorea writes: Chatroulette, the strangely addictive online game in which users are connected via webcam and microphone to random strangers at the click of a button, has had enough of users exposing themselves to the unsuspecting public, among other disgraces. The founder of Chatroulette has announced the company has hired developers to collect IP addresses and take screenshots of those users breaking the rules.
Australia

Submission + - Australia and a micro-trenching fibre option (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: Australian firm Broadband Network Communications (BBNC) had tendered to use "micro-trenching" to roll out fibre in urban areas to be covered by Australia's national broadband network.
The fibre-laying technique being used by Google has been licensed and could allow fibre to be rolled out in straight line up to a "kilometre a day".
Books

Submission + - Amazon Provokes Big-Time Ebook Rights Fight (fictioncircus.com)

Submitted by
Miracle Jones
Miracle Jones writes: "The biggest NYC agent (Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie) and the biggest NYC publishing house (Germany's Bertelsmann Corporation, also known as "Random House") are no longer doing business together, at odds because of a big-time fight about electronic rights. Last week, Wylie started its own ebook publishing company called Odyssey Editions in order to distribute backlist books exclusively to the Amazon Kindle. Random House, calling Wylie direct competition, has declared they will no longer buy books from the agency. Either way, Amazon wins."

Comment Obligatory xkcd reference (Score 1) 388

by mhwombat (#33040008) Attached to: A New Take On the Fermi Paradox

http://xkcd.com/638/

Seriously though, I actually find this a fairly depressing theory as it suggests two states for the galaxy - either galactic civilisation, or very low chances of contact. And it doesn't really seem like we're in the former.

That paper doesn't look like a published paper btw, just an arxiv post.
Programming

Submission + - Reducing Executable Size of a C++ App?

Submitted by goruka
goruka writes: Often, when programming large applications in C++, the executable tends to get huge (several megabytes). I know that some factors (C++ features) such as inline abuse, templates, constructors, strings, etc. contribute to adding fat to the binary executable. Although this isn't a big problem in desktop PCs, which have gigabytes of RAM nowadays, it is very serious when writing for mobile or embedded devices. So my question is, are there any tools or profiling techniques to somehow "detect" which sections of a binary (functions, constants, , etc) are consuming the most space? I know that there are many memory, cpu, I/O profilers around, but executable binary size profiling seems not to be a common area of optimization...

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