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Science

Harder-Than-Diamond Natural Carbon Crystals Found 250

Posted by kdawson from the twinkle-twinkle dept.
HikingStick tips a piece from the science desk at MSNBC.com about a new, naturally occurring form of carbon found in a meteorite fragment. "Researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the polished surface they discovered carbon-loaded spots that were raised well above the rest of the surface — suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste... [G]raphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers — which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds... [The research] team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new 'phase' or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now."
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Technology

Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel 165

Posted by timothy from the you'll-need-some-big-batteries dept.
angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Earth

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

Posted by timothy from the hey-cut-that-crap-out dept.
hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."
Space

Submission + - How They Built it: The Software of Apollo 11 (linux.com)

Submitted by LinuxScribe
LinuxScribe writes: When Apollo 11's Lunar Module landed on the Moon 40 years ago this week, the software that helped take humans to another celestial body was essentially built using paper-tape rolls and thick cardstock that was punched with special holes. It wasn't open source in the sense we know today, but it was built for NASA under contract, then was tested, modified and fine-tuned by NASA engineers in ways that are similar to open source projects nowadays.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft releases Linux devices drivers as GPL (cnet.com)

Submitted by
mjasay
mjasay writes: "Microsoft used to call the GPL "anti-American." Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft's calls the GPL "ally." Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."
Space

Satellites Collide In Orbit 456

Posted by samzenpus from the starpocalypse dept.
DrEnter writes "According to this story on Yahoo, two communications satellites collided in orbit, resulting in two large clouds of debris. The new threat from these debris clouds hasn't been fully determined yet. From the article, 'The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds.' This is the fifth spacecraft/satellite collision to occur in space, but the other four were all fairly minor by comparison."

Comment Yeah, I'm not getting it... (Score 1) 268

by Mike Hicks (#26701415) Attached to: Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone

I've got a 3G phone that has two cameras in it -- one high-resolution camera for taking photographs on the back side, and one low-resolution camera in the face where the screen is. That way, I can look at the screen and get video of myself. I'm sure there must be a number of 3G phones with this layout, but I'm not a cell-phone junkie so I don't keep track of all of the features out there. Unfortunately, I'm on a carrier that has 3G, but on the wrong frequency band, so I'm stuck with EDGE...

Comment Re:Am I missing something? (Score 1) 87

by Mike Hicks (#26506873) Attached to: YouTube Coming To the PS3 and Wii

I tried YouTube's TV interface on my PS3 yesterday. While I appreciated some aspects of the simplified interface, it seemed that the video playback itself was less pleasant. The framerate just about chopped in half if I attempted to play video in full-screen, and there were some annoyances with the progress bar and control buttons -- the progress bar didn't seem to work right, and the play/fullscreen/etc. buttons were just aesthetically displeasing.

I also ran into the problem where some videos are "not available for television viewing". What's up with that?
Classic Games (Games)

PC Historian Finds Puzzling Game Diskette Image 232

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the golden-age-of-programming dept.
This past weekend, Trixter — a self-proclaimed IBM PC historian — picked up some old software for his archive. What he didn't count on was a couple of additional Avantage titles that had never been released into the wild. If this weren't enough of a find, one of these titles provided Trixter with an interesting puzzle: the diskette for Mental Blocks is apparently hand-formatted to work on both C64 and IBM (on a single side, not the "flippy disks" of old). Quite an interesting little piece of history.

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