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Submission + - Can Candies Combat Cavities? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Your dentist told you to avoid sweets, but you may actually be able to fight tooth decay by sucking on candy—if it’s laced with the right dead bacteria. In a new study, volunteers who consumed such candies lowered the levels of cavity-causing bacteria in their saliva, presumably because the dead bacteria tie up the living ones, which are then swallowed.

Submission + - ISS laptops switching from Windows XP to Debian

Submitted by SgtKeeling
SgtKeeling writes: Dozens of Windows XP laptops on the International Space Station are being switched to Debian 6. A manager involved in the switch said, "We needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could." The Linux Foundation provided two development courses to help with developing apps related specifically to the needs of the ISS.
In 2008 Slashdot noted a story about a virus on the ISS laptops which had come up on an astronaut's USB flash drive.

Submission + - Elon Musk hates 405 Freeway traffic, offers money to speed widening (latimes.com)

Submitted by S810
S810 writes: Elon Musk, one of the main people behind PayPal, Space Exploration Technologies and Tesla Motors, has paid $50,000 to help Los Angeles speed up construction of the 405 Freeway, making it better and says that he will pay more if needed.

From the article: Musk said he is open to pay the cost of adding workers to the widening project "as a contribution to the city and my own happiness. If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I've super had it." — Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.

For those who aren't familiar with this issue, the 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Torro and runs by LAX. Residents are getting frustrated that this widening project is over budget and well over the anticipated timeframe that it was supposed to completed by.

Submission + - Google's future: Doing the impossible (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: Google’s first-quarter earnings beat Wall Street expectations, aided by a lower tax rate and a research credit. Even though the stock moved on the numbers, it was what was said on the call that was most important. CEO Larry Page said on the conference call that it is his job to make sure that Google and its engineers are working on big, bold bets to not only advance the company and its earnings, but society as well. “A big part of my job is to get people to focus on things that are not just incremental,” Page said during the earnings call. Google is working on ambitious projects, such as Google Fiber, self-driving cars and other projects like Google Glass “because no one else is crazy enough to try.”...
Cloud

Submission + - A glimpse of a truly elastic cloud (erlangonxen.org) 1

Submitted by
cloudozer
cloudozer writes: "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OS entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. Radically lower startup latency means that the computing infrastructure may be woven striclty on demand, during the processing window alloted for a given request. Currently cloud providers round an instance uptime to the full hour when calculating charges. They might need to switch to per second billing if OS-less instances get traction. The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."
Government

Submission + - DARPA wants unique automated tools to rapidly make computers smarter (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Researchers at DARPA want to take the science of machine learning — teaching computers to automatically understand data, manage results and surmise insights — up a couple notches. Machine learning, DARPA says, is already a the heart of many cutting edge technologies today, like email spam filters, smartphone personal assistants and self-driving cars. "Unfortunately, even as the demand for these capabilities is accelerating, every new application requires a Herculean effort. Even a team of specially-trained machine learning experts makes only painfully slow progress due to the lack of tools to build these systems," DARPA says."
Debian

Submission + - Distributed File System for Debian-based Road Warriors?

Submitted by hweimer
hweimer writes: I manage a small network which includes some clients that are regularly deployed in locations where there is no or only poor internet access. Currently, local copies of data for these clients are created and merged back more or less manually, which naturally creates all sorts of problems. So I'm looking now for a distributed file system so that each client has always access to a local copy, which is automatically re-synced once it comes back online. Storage space is not critical, nor is obscene read/write performance. An additional requirement is that it has to be included in Debian, at least in the upcoming "wheezy" release. Any recommendations?
Transportation

Submission + - AgustaWestland Unveils World's First Electric Tilt Rotor Aircraft (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: The engineers at UK-based aerospace firm AgustaWestland are no slouches when it comes to tilt rotor aircraft, having recently developed the intriguing commercial-use AW609. It seems, however, that they’ve been holding out on us ... over a year and a half ago, they began secretly test-flying what they have now publicly unveiled as being the world’s first electric tilt rotor airplane. It’s known simply as Project Zero.
Games

Submission + - Following 800 poor reviews, Amazon stops selling download copies of SimCity (geek.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In what must be a big blow for EA and Maxis, Amazon has stopped selling download copies of the just released SimCity. The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That’s because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There’s few better ways to gauge how a game has been received, and this is pretty damning as to how EA has handled the launch.
Data Storage

Submission + - CARFAX® Selects MongoDB to Power 11 Billion Record Database (10gen.com)

Submitted by
Kmnichols
Kmnichols writes: "Today Carfax announced it is using MongoDB to power its vehicle history database, which includes more than 11 billion automotive records to date.

MongoDB will be the primary data store for the company’s products, including its CARFAX Vehicle History Reports (VHR), which help millions of people buy and sell used cars with more confidence. MongoDB was selected after the company outgrew the capabilities of its previous 30-year old relational database technology. The switch to MongoDB will provide the company with a significant increase in performance and will allow for significant growth that the previous database could not have handled."
Open Source

Submission + - 5 Linux Distros You Should Watch Out For in 2013 (maketecheasier.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "As we welcome in a new year that many are saying will finally be “the year of the Linux desktop,” we want to take a look at some of the up-and-coming Linux distros for 2013. The mainstream tech media has already covered distro giants like Mint and Ubuntu in great depth and breadth, so we won’t reiterate what you’ve already heard a kazillion times. Read on to learn about some newer distros that we expect to continue rising in popularity, maybe even to the level of stardom, over the year."

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