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Submission + - Evidence of Majorana fermions seen by Purdue physicist (purdue.edu)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: A Purdue University physicist has observed evidence of long-sought Majorana fermions, special particles that could unleash the potential of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The pursuit of Majorana fermions is driven by their potential to encode quantum information in a way that solves a problem dogging quantum computing. The current carriers of quantum bits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing, are delicate and easily destroyed by small disturbances from the local environment. Information stored through Majorana fermions could be protected from such perturbances, resulting in a much more resilient quantum bit and 'fault-tolerant' quantum computing

Submission + - Animal Rights Group Claims Tetris-like Game is 'Animal Abuse (koreabang.com)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Netizens have leaped to defend Anipang, a game for smartphones that combines KakaoTalk, a popular Korean chat application, with a Bejeweled or Tetris-like puzzle.
Picket signs at a protest by Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth (CARE) seemed to criticise the game’s allegedly controversial puzzle-solving format, whereby players burst the cute faces of rabbits, cats, and other small animals by shifting them into color combinations or by dropping ‘bombs’ on them.
At over 10 million downloads, the hugely popular game can be found at the mercy of many a subway or bus-bound Korean thumb. In response to the protest, eager players of the game have been swift to criticise what they see as the animal rights organization’s overreaction.
A spokesperson for CARE admitted that they did post the signs at a recent protest; but were criticising animal-killing games in general and, not Ani Pang in particular. The spokesperson added that they wished that there were more games where the intent was to be kind to animals, rather than to kill them.

Comment So, where were last July's riots? (Score 1) 926

Quote from the actual paper: "[T]he underlying trend of increasing prices will reach the threshold of instability in July 2012 if we consider current prices [current when the paper was written]" Or maybe the inflation was so rampant, that a correction was necessary, as in "April 2013 if we correct prices for reported inflation." Alrighty.

Submission + - Neil Armstrong has died, NBC News reports (nbcnews.com) 1

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, has died. NBC News broke the news, without giving other details. Neil was recovering from a heart-bypass surgery he had had a couple of weeks ago. Sad news, marking the end of a glorious and more optimistic era...
RIP, Neil.

Submission + - Fedora 18 to feature the Gnome2 fork Mate (fedoraproject.org)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: It's not just Mint: Fedora will also feature Mate in their upcoming release (Fedora 18). According to Fedora's Dan Marshal, "many users have expressed interest in this feature since Fedora 15 in which Fedora was switched from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3."

Submission + - Carl Sagan papers donated by 'Family Guy' creator (sfgate.com)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Seth MacFarlane once included a gag on his animated TV comedy "Family Guy" about an "edited for rednecks" version of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," featuring an animated Sagan dubbed over to say that the earth is "hundreds and hundreds" of years old.
Jokes aside, his admiration for Sagan runs deep.
The Library of Congress announced Wednesday that, thanks to MacFarlane's generosity, it has acquired the personal papers of the late scientist and astronomer, who spoke to mass audiences about the mysteries of the universe and the origins of life. While MacFarlane never owned Sagan's papers, he covered the undisclosed costs of donating them to the library.

Submission + - Fidelity of women determined by gene compatibility with mate (ucsd.edu) 1

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Preferences for mates that possess genes dissimilar to one’s own at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a polymorphic group of loci associated with the immune system, have been found in mice, birds, sh,
and humans. As the proportion of MHC alleles couples shared increased, women’s sexual responsivity to their partners decreased, their number of extrapair sexual partners increased, and their attraction to men other than their primary partners increased, particularly during the fertile phase of their cycles.

Submission + - Neutrons escaping to a parallel world? (arxiv.org)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Theoretical physicists Zurab Berezhiani and Fabrizio Nesti from the University of l'Aquila, Italy, reanalysed the experimental data obtained by the research group of Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France. It showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied. This anomaly could not be explained by known physics. Berezhiani believes it could be interpreted in the light of a hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles. Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other. The probability of such a transition happening was predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic fields, and could therefore be detected experimentally.This neutron-mirror-neutron oscillation could occur within a timescale of a few seconds, according to the paper. The possibility of such a fast disappearance of neutrons — much faster than the ten-minute long neutron decay — albeit surprising, could not be excluded by existing experimental and astrophysical limits.

This interpretation is subject to the condition that the earth possesses a mirror magnetic field on the order of 0.1 Gauss. Such a field could be induced by mirror particles floating around in the galaxy as dark matter. Hypothetically, the earth could capture the mirror matter via some feeble interactions between ordinary particles and those from parallel worlds.

Submission + - 'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, made observations about the Adelie penguins' sex life. To his horror, the penguins' sexual activity included auto-erotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females, including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks and homosexual behaviour. When he returned to England, he deemed this part of the study to be too shocking and removed it "to preserve decency." Today, it is unearthed at the Natural History Museum.

Submission + - Ray Bradbury has died (io9.com)

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Ray Bradbury — author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and many more literary classics — died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91

Submission + - Expectation of extraterrestrial life built more on optimism than evidence (princeton.edu) 1

Submitted by dsinc
dsinc writes: Princeton University researchers have found that the expectation that life — from bacteria to sentient beings — has or will develop on other planets as on Earth might be based more on optimism than scientific evidence.
Princeton astrophysical sciences professor Edwin Turner and lead author David Spiegel, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher, analyzed what is known about the likelihood of life on other planets in an effort to separate the facts from the mere expectation that life exists outside of Earth. The researchers used a Bayesian analysis — which weighs how much of a scientific conclusion stems from actual data and how much comes from the prior assumptions of the scientist — to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life once the influence of these presumptions is minimized.
The researchers concluded that the current knowledge about life on other planets suggests that it's very possible that Earth is a cosmic aberration where life took shape unusually fast. If so, then the chances of the average terrestrial planet hosting life would be low.

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