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Comment Re:Bird brain (Score 2, Insightful) 117

by subgranules (#29436497) Attached to: Birdsong Studies Lead To a Revolution In Biology
So nobody read TFA? It is from 2002. Research since then has shown that the mouse, rat and human hippocampus (specifically the dentate gyrus, the region that if destroyed produces antereograde amnesia, like in Memento) can grow new cells that replace old ones. This also happens in the olfactory bulb - a region that helps us tell the difference between similar odors.
Books

xkcd To Be Released In Book Form 198

Posted by kdawson from the my-normal-approach-is-useless-here dept.
History's Coming To writes "xkcd creator Randall Munroe has revealed on his blag that the acclaimed stick-figure comic will be produced in real dead-tree book form. Fantastic news for all fans of comedy, maths, science, and relationship screw-ups — especially given that the book will be sold in aid of the charity 'Room To Read.' Rumors that the book contains a joke in the ISBN remain unconfirmed." The NY Times article that Munroe links (registration may be required) is from April of this year, and I am amazed that this community didn't note the story at that time. The book will be published by breadpig, which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit.

Comment Re:Legos. (Score 1) 396

by Crafack (#28688285) Attached to: My toy collection is ...

Lego is a product name / brand.

I've always called them Lego bricks (or rather "klodser" in Dansih).

The term LEGO is (as you may know) coined from the Danish words "LEg GOdt" (direct translaton: play well), and was already used back when the company made wooden toys.

(I'm not associated with the company, I don't even play with their stuff anymore (although I'd like to lay my hands on a large Mindstorms set :-) /Crafack
Earth

Submission + - Could 'liquid wood' replace plastic? (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by Ostracus
Ostracus writes: Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics.

But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Sensing a hazard, researchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive.
Security

Downadup Worm — When Will the Next Shoe Drop? 295

Posted by timothy from the it-looks-like-you're-using-windows dept.
alphadogg writes "The Downadup worm — also called Conflicker — has now infected an estimated 10 million PCs worldwide, and security experts say they expect to see a dangerous second-stage payload dropped soon. 'It has the potential to infect about 30% of Windows systems online, a potential 300 to 350 million PCs,' says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence in the counter threat unit at SecureWorks. The worm, first identified in November and suspected to have originated in the Ukraine, is quickly ramping up, and while Downadup today is not malicious in the sense of destroying files — its main trick is to block users from accessing antivirus sites to obtain updates to protect against it — the worm is capable of downloading second-stage code for darker purposes."
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Radio May Stream North to Canada

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With U.S. copyright royalties threatening to kill Internet radio in the U.S., Michael Geist explains why webcasters considering a move to Canada will find that the legal framework for Internet radio trades costs for complexity. There are two main areas of concern from a Canadian perspective — broadcast regulation and copyright fees. The broadcast side is surprisingly regulation-free, but there are at least three Canadian copyright collectives lining up to collect from Internet radio stations.
Data Storage

Submission + - Starfish: GoogleFS for the Masses

Submitted by HighlyAvailable
HighlyAvailable writes: The recent studies published by Google and others indicate that hard drives are not as reliable as we thought they were. A possible solution would be for small and large companies to move to commodity PC clusters running parallel distributed fault tolerant storage systems. Google has such a system but hasn't released it for public consumption. An announcement was made on the FUSE mailing list last night mentioning the release of a GoogleFS-like file system for Linux and Mac OS X called Starfish. It is targeted at replacing NFS and Samba, includes source code, and they mention releasing it as open source in the near future.
Math

Submission + - No such thing as a constant constant?

Submitted by
Matthew Sparkes
Matthew Sparkes writes: "Feynman called alpha, "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number". One puzzle is whether this constant of nature has always had the same value. A signal from the early universe could answer that. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have suggested measuring the 21-cm line from about 400,000 years after the big bang, when neutral hydrogen formed, to about 150 million years later when the first stars flared up, to see if alpha has changed in that time."
Music

Submission + - Store says DRM causes 3 of 4 support calls

Submitted by Carter
Carter writes: Ars Technica reports that Musicload, one of Europe's largest movie stores, says that 75% of its customer support problems are caused by DRM. Users have frequent problems using the music that they have purchased, which has led Musicload to try selling independent label music with DRM. The results? Artists choosing to abandon DRM have seen 40% growth in sales. Good to see someone in the business both "gets it" and is willing to do something about it.
Democrats

Submission + - YouTube 1984/Hillary Ad Stirs Controversy

Submitted by
fistfullast33l
fistfullast33l writes: "A supposedly viral video mashup of the 1984 Apple ad and Hillary Clinton has gotten the political world talking about how much of an effect these types of videos will have on the 2008 presidential race. The video, whose author is analyzed at techPresident.com, features the famous Super Bowl ad that was remade recently to feature the iPod (look closely at the woman with the hammer — she's wearing an iPod). It also features Obama's campaign logo on the woman's shirt and Hillary Clinton speaking as "Big Brother." The debate rages as to whether the ad was made by the Obama campaign or another political operative to cause trouble, or whether it was made by grassroots supporters of the campaign. The author emailed techPresident

"The idea was simple and so was the execution. Make a bold statement about the Democratic primary race by culture jacking a famous commercial and replacing as few images as possible. For some people it doesn't register, but for people familiar with the ad and the race it has obviously struck a chord."
More analysis is offered at MyDD, a well known progressive blog that has a pretty good list of links talking about the ad."
Music

Submission + - CRB moves to destroy Internet Music radio in USA

Submitted by
knorthern knight
knorthern knight writes: "...and the rest of the world is probably next as the RIAA pressures politicians worldwide to "harmonize their policies" with the US. The United States Copyright Royalty Board has basically accepted the big business position, and raised internet radio royalty rates to punitive, indeed destructive levels. Some details are at Broadcast Law Blog. The implications are discussed in more detail at the Save Internet Radio website. To summarize, nobody but the biggies can afford it. Note that these royalties are *IN ADDITION TO* ASCAP/SESAC/BMI royalties that terrestrial radio stations pay. Terrestrial radio will *NOT* have to pay these additional royalties, unless they stream their feeds over the internet."
Security

Submission + - Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection

Submitted by
Manequintet
Manequintet writes: "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."

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