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Submission + - Paramedics use Google Translate while Delivering Baby

Submitted by myatari
myatari writes: Maria Herlihy at the Corkman writes that Irish paramedics transporting a pregnant Congolese woman to a maternity hospital in Cork had to use some quick thinking when the mum-to-be went into labour en-route. The two paramedics (neither of whom had Swahili as a language) fired up Google Translate to communicate via English-Swahili and successfully delivered baby girl 'Brigid' (named after an Irish Saint no less!). The first page of the linked article is free, the rest are behind a paywall. Disclaimer: one of the paramedics is my brother.

Submission + - Comets Form Like Deep Fried Ice Cream Scoops (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., have added another oddity to the cometary ‘weird list’: comets are best described as scoops of deep fried ice cream. “The crust is made of crystalline ice, while the interior is colder and more porous,” said Murthy Gudipati of JPL, co-author of a recent study appearing in The Journal of Physical Chemistry. “The organics are like a final layer of chocolate on top.”

Submission + - Which Freelance Developer Sites Are Worth Your Time? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Many websites allow you to look for freelance programming jobs or Web development work. (Hongkiat.com, for example, offers links to several dozen.) The problem for developers in the European Union and the United States is that competition from rivals in developing countries is crushing fees for everybody, as the latter can often undercut on price. (This isn’t a situation unique to software development; look at how globalization has compelled manufacturing jobs to move offshore, for example.) With all that in mind, developer David Bolton surveyed some freelance developer marketplaces, especially the ones that catered to Western developers, who typically need to operate at price-points higher than that of their counterparts in many developing nations. His conclusion? 'It’s my impression that the bottom has already been reached, in terms of contractor pricing; to compete these days, it’s not just a question of price, but also quality and speed.' Do you agree?

Submission + - LXQt 0.9 Released

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The fans of lightweight desktop environments should be pleased, as LXQt, the effort to convert LXDE to use Qt, is advancing nicely. Version 0.9 has just been released. Regarding the GUI toolkit, this version moves from Qt 4 to Qt 5. LXQt 0.9 also brings in the first KDE Frameworks dependencies. KWindowSystem is a true-and-tested library for handling window events. It replaces the custom XFitMan library and will greatly help in becoming fully compatible with Wayland. KGuiAddons also replaces a hard dependency on Xlib in lxqt-panel. There is still a Qt regression which impacts drag & drop in PCManFM, but that is fixed in the upcoming Qt 5.4.1 release. Go to the download page to try out the new version. For issues, suggestions, and wild new ideas, head to the official issue tracker. Want to contribute? LXQt is always looking for new developers, now more than ever.

Submission + - $10K Ethernet Cable Claims Audio Fidelity, If You're Stupid Enough To Buy It (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: There are few markets that are quite as loaded-up with "snake oil" products as the audio/video arena. You may have immediately thought of "Monster" cables as one of the most infamous offenders. But believe it or not, there are some vendors that push the envelope so far that Monster's $100 HDMI cables sound like a bargain by comparison. Take AudioQuest's high-end Ethernet cable, for example. Called "Diamond," AudioQuest is promising the world with this $10,500 Ethernet cable. If you, for some reason, believe that an Ethernet cable is completely irrelevant for audio, guess again. According to their claim: "AudioQuest's Diamond RJ/E is a directional Ethernet cable made with the same hallmark materials, philosophy, care and attention that is applied to all their interconnects, whether it's an entry level introduction to Hi-Fi or a died-in-the-wool music connoisseur. Another upgrade with Diamond is a complete plug redesign, opting for an ultra-performance RJ45 connector made from silver with tabs that are virtually unbreakable. The plug comes with added strain relief and firmly lock into place ensuring no critical data is lost." It's too bad AudioQuest limits itself to just audio, because descriptions like that would prove a welcome sight in other markets. Just imagine how tempting it would be to own 100% solid paper clips made with uncompromising materials that take a no-nonsense approach to holding paper together. Unfortunately, in this case, there's the issue of digital data being, well, digital. But hey, a 1 or a 0 could arrive at its destination so much cleaner, right?

Submission + - Boston Introduces their new four-legged robot, "Spot". (youtube.com)

Submitted by MicroHex
MicroHex writes: Boston Dynamics, creators of "Big Dog" recently unveiled their newest creation, "Spot". Originally funded by DARPA to develop the technology behind Big Dog, Boston Dynamics is currently owned by Google and continues its robotics research.

From the video: "Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain. Spot weighs about 160 lbs."

Submission + - 1st low cost arm64 hardware

Submitted by turb
turb writes: Announced today at Linaro Connect in Hong Kong was the HiKey board the first in the 96board program. (http://www.96boards.org) For $129, the HiKey is a 64 bit 8 core Cortex-A53 at 1.2Gz SoC with 1 Gig of LPDDR3, Mali 450, OTG, 2 USB ports, wifi, bluetooth, HDMI, uSD and eMMC. Demoed as part of the announcement were builds of Debian and Android using a 3.18 kernel. Boards will be shipping in March.

Submission + - The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

“How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”

Submission + - NASA confirms results for 'impossible' space drive that uses no rocket fuel (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Last August, NASA’s Eagleworks, an advanced space propulsion lab located at the Johnson Spaceflight Center south of Houston, created a great deal of excitement when it announced that it had tested a prototype of something called a Cannae Drive. Using microwaves, the device seemed to exert a minute but measurable degree of thrust when mounted on a pendulum in a vacuum chamber. NextBigFuture provided an update on the experiments on an engine that uses no fuel and seems to violate Newtonian physics.

In essence, the team at Eagleworks has been able to replicate the results of the original experiment, exerting a thrust in the area of 50 micro-Newtons. The team has been hampered by a lack of funding to fight through equipment failures. Nevertheless, they are working, very slowly, to scale up the thrust to 100 micro-Newtons. At that point, they intend to take the device to the Glenn Research Center for another replication effort.

Submission + - Woman suffers significant weight gain after fecal transplant (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."

Comment Cringe-worthy. (Score 1) 55

by leftover (#49001111) Attached to: Students Demo Firefighting Humanoid Robot On US Navy Ship

Having been both a squid and a robotics researcher in a previous century, this has issues. Shipboard fires truly are environments where no human wants to be, as anyone could easily believe. Somewhat fewer people know all of the factors involved: Navy ships are not stable platforms in anything but dead-calm water, which rarely occurs. Next, passageways are designed with 'walking through them' as an afterthought. You have to step over and duck under something every few feet belowdecks. While the ship is bucking and rolling, remember.
Navy ships can be quite large and can have large interior structures that you need to go the long way around. Unless you pre-position an entire horde of walking robots all through the ship, they won't have time to get to the fire.
As a way to send some money so a robotics program can build something physical it is admirable. It is not the future of shipboard firefighting.

Submission + - Crunchbang Linux Halts Development (crunchbang.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Philip Newborough, the developer behind CrunchBang Linux, has put an end to work on the distro. CrunchBang was built as a layer on top of Debian using the Openbox window manager that focused on performance and customization. Newborough says the changing landscape of Linux over the past decade has obviated the need for a distro like CrunchBang. "Whilst some things have stayed exactly the same, others have changed beyond all recognition. It’s called progress, and for the most part, progress is a good thing. That said, when progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind. I’m leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian."

Comment Another aspect of 'legitimacy' (Score 1) 645

by leftover (#48999659) Attached to: Does Showing a Horrific Video Serve a Legitimate Journalistic Purpose?

It is good to see multiple posts challenging the idea of 'legitimate' news and to see the positive recognition of them. One aspect I've not seen mentioned is the idea of a 'terrorism expert'. Exactly how does anyone actually rate being considered a terrorism expert?
When someone can make accurate and specific predictions or, even better, identify high-leverage actions to change terrorist behavior, they would rate being considered experts. Otherwise, they are no better than 'futurists'.

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