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News

Smart Rubber Promises Self-Mending Products 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the we've-heard-it-all-before dept.
An anonymous reader writes "French scientists have developed a new rubber that can heal itself after being cut or broken. If two broken ends of the material are pushed together, and left for an hour, they join to become just as stretchy as before. There is even a video of the supposed creation in action. 'Regular rubber gets its strength from the fact that long chains of polymer molecules are coupled, or "crosslinked," in three different ways: through covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonding between molecules. Of these three bond types, only the hydrogen bonds can be remade once a material is fractured, although normally there are not enough hydrogen bonds for the rubber to re-couple in this way. The solution devised by Leibler and colleagues is to simply get rid of the ionic and covalent bonds. They developed a transparent, yellowy-brown rubber in which crosslinking is performed only by hydrogen bonds.'"
Earth

New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2 285

Posted by Soulskill from the who-needs-plants-anyway dept.
Socguy brings us a story from CBC News about a recently developed crystal that can soak up carbon dioxide gas "like a sponge." Chemists from UCLA believe that the crystals will become a cheap, stable method to absorb emissions at power plants. We discussed a prototype for another CO2 extraction device last year. Quoting: "'The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome,' said UCLA chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in a statement. The porous structures can be heated to high temperatures without decomposing and can be boiled in water or solvents for a week and remain stable, making them suitable for use in hot, energy-producing environments like power plants. The highly porous crystals also had what the researchers called 'extraordinary capacity for storing CO2': one litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2."
The Media

Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS 71

Posted by Zonk from the anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better dept.
Ian Lamont writes "The New York Times, and the Tribune, Gannett, and Hearst companies have launched their own ad network, called QuadrantOne. It will let advertisers place ads on media sites in 27 major markets, and let them target readers by content type, demographic information, and online behavior. Notably absent from the deal: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both Google and Yahoo have their own ad networks focused on newspapers, but, as the article says, 'if newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google.'"
Robotics

Prosthetic-Limbed Runner Disqualified from Olympic Games 509

Posted by Zonk from the street-sams-are-right-around-the-corner dept.
contraba55 wrote with a link to an Engadget story on a sign of the postmodern times. Oscar Pistorius, a world-class sprinter, has been denied a shot at participating in the Olympics this year. He's a double-amputee, but he's not out because of his handicap; he's disqualified because he's faster than most sprinters. "The runner — who uses carbon-fiber, prosthetic feet — was reviewed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (or IAAF), a review which found the combination of man and machine to be too much for its purely human competitors. According to the IAAF report, the 'mechanical advantage of the blade in relation to the healthy ankle joint of an able bodied athlete is higher than 30-percent.' Additionally, Pistorius uses 25-percent less energy than average runners due to the artificial limbs, therefore giving him an unfair advantage on the track."

Comment Definitely pong (Score 1) 718

by OnceWas (#22053124) Attached to: What Was Your First Gaming Experience?
My father was lent a Pong unit. Ugly black and brown console, two rheostats. Semi-crappy B&W display on the tube TV. And that's about all. Looked like a rejected sci-fi prop.

And it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Roll forward a few years (past the Atari 2600, which was much like the Pong console, in retrospect). I walk by a computer store, and they're selling Apple II's. Every machine on display had a game running on it, and a line of kids waiting for their turn. It was at that moment that I knew that computers would be a pretty big thing in my life.

Not that I knew at the time that it would lead to a career in IT. But it was games that did it.
Software

IBM Jazz Edges Closer To Open Source 76

Posted by kdawson from the collaboration-wants-to-be-free dept.
hhavensteincw writes "IBM is molding its Jazz technology, which helps software development teams collaborate, in the image of its popular Eclipse open source community. IBM said that today's move to open access to its Jazz.net portal to anyone to peruse its code, access bug lists, etc. puts it on the path to completely open-source the Jazz technology."
Privacy

Should Apple Give Back Replaced Disks? 446

Posted by kdawson from the consider-it-a-trade-in dept.
theodp writes "As if having to pay $160 to replace a failed 80-GB drive wasn't bad enough, Dave Winer learned to his dismay that Apple had no intention of giving him back the disk he paid them to replace. Since it contained sensitive data like source code and account info, Dave rightly worries about what happens if the drive falls into the wrong hands. Which raises an important question: In an age of identity theft and other confidentiality concerns, is it time for Apple — and other computer manufacturers — to start following the practice of auto mechanics and give you the option of getting back disks that are replaced?"
Software

GNU Octave 3.0 Released After 11 Years 222

Posted by kdawson from the math-just-works dept.
Digana writes "GNU Octave is a free numerical computing environment highly compatible with the MATLAB language. After 11 years of development since version 2.0, stable version 3.0 released yesterday. This version is interesting because unlike other free or semi-free MATLAB competitors like Scilab, specific compatibility with MATLAB code is a design goal. This has manifested itself in goodies like better support for MATLAB's Handle Graphics, a syntax closer to MATLAB's own for many functions, and many functions from the sister project Octave-Forge ported to the core Octave project for an enriched functionality closer to the toolboxes provided by MATLAB. GUI development is underway, but still no JIT compiling, which is a show-stopper for Octave newbies coming from MATLAB with unvectorized code."
Biotech

Genetically Engineered Mouse is Not Scared of Cats 286

Posted by Zonk from the good-for-the-cat-not-so-much-the-mouse dept.
Gary writes "A team from the University of Tokyo has genetically engineered a mouse that does not fear cats. By tweaking genes to disable certain functions of the olfactory bulb (the area of the brain that receives information about smells directly from olfactory receptors in the nose) the researchers were able to create a 'fearless' mouse that does not try to flee when it smells cats, foxes and other predators. 'The research suggests that the mechanism by which mammals determine whether or not to fear another animal they smell -- and whether or not to flee -- is not a higher-order cerebral function. Instead, that decision is made based on a lower-order function that is hardwired into the neural circuitry of the olfactory bulb.'"
NASA

Whose Laws Apply On the ISS? 344

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-mine-do-of-course dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Whose laws apply if astronauts from different countries get into a fight, make a patentable discovery, or damage equipment belonging to another country while on the International Space Station? According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 98 nations, states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. When the space station was assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency (ESA), partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. "It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking," said Dr Frans von der Dunk of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden. So what happens if a crime is committed in space? "If somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction," Dr. von der Dunk added."
Software

South Africa Adopts ODF as a Government Standard 107

Posted by Zonk from the few-down-few-dozen-to-go dept.
ais523 writes "As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards (pdf) for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out)."
The Courts

Submission + - SCO blames Linux for bankruptcy filing 4

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.

In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux."

McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."
Microsoft

MS Requiring More Expensive Vista if Running Mac 545

Posted by Zonk from the they've-got-to-make-money-somehow-right dept.
ktwdallas writes "Mathew Ingram from Canada's Globe and Mail writes that Microsoft will require at least the $299 Business version of Vista or higher if installing on a Mac with virtualization. Running the cheaper Basic or Premium versions would be a violation of their user agreement. According to the article, Microsoft's reasoning is 'because of security issues with virtualization technology'. Sounds suspiciously like a 'Mac penalty' cost that Microsoft is trying to justify."
Windows

Submission + - The Greatest Game You Never Played

Submitted by Alan
Alan writes: FiringSquad has been running their "American Idol wannabe" contest for a little over a month now. Now that they've weeded out the dredge, there are actually some awesome entries now. One of the best from this round is an article on The Greatest Game You've Never Played: Allegiance R3 Release. Apparently, it's a game Microsoft released several years ago and *gasp* ultimately made open source. It's since been developed further into an incredibly user-centric game. Good read.
Spam

Submission + - Can spam be reduced by checking domain maturity?

Submitted by gmHumfrey
gmHumfrey writes: It seems to me that most of the URLs in spam email contain domains that were registered in less than 90 days. If the whois databases could be snapshotted, and released as a bulk download + incremental updates for anti-spam software, then a lot of spam (including the picture-spam that is becoming more frequent,where they still try to provide something for you to click on) could be eliminated before reaching the person's inbox. Not a solution, but it would help significantly reduce the amount of spam that is able to be sent. There would be workaround's for this eventually, such as using a redirector url which the antispam engine would have to fetch the url to see where it actually resolves to. What does the slashdot community think about this?

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