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Submission + - Did Neurons Evolve Twice? (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla., first began studying comb jellies, he was puzzled. He knew the primitive sea creatures had nerve cells — responsible, among other things, for orchestrating the darting of their tentacles and the beat of their iridescent cilia. But those neurons appeared to be invisible. The dyes that scientists typically use to stain and study those cells simply didn’t work. The comb jellies’ neural anatomy was like nothing else he had ever encountered.

After years of study, he thinks he knows why. According to traditional evolutionary biology, neurons evolved just once, hundreds of millions of years ago, likely after sea sponges branched off the evolutionary tree. But Moroz thinks it happened twice — once in ancestors of comb jellies, which split off at around the same time as sea sponges, and once in the animals that gave rise to jellyfish and all subsequent animals, including us. He cites as evidence the fact that comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from our own. “When we look at the genome and other information, we see not only different grammar but a different alphabet,” Moroz said.

Submission + - Now It's Easy To Tell Congress To Fight Patent Trolls

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: Application Developers Alliance is running two campaigns to help get the message to Washington. First is the Fight Patent Trolls initiative, which includes a tool for sending a letter to Senators and Representatives.

The second campaign is Innovators Need Patent Reform, an open letter to Congress that makes the same key points along with a public list of signers.

As both letters note, there are already proposals in both the House and the Senate, plus recommendations from the President, that contain some of the all-important protections that the victims of patent trolls need. Though the future of these specific bills is uncertain, the building blocks are beginning to fall into place, and it's time to run with that momentum.

Submission + - Shape Shifting Frog Goes From Spiky to Smooth, Poses Problems for Taxonomists

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Carrie Arnold reports at National Geographic that on a nighttime walk through Reserva Las Gralarias in Ecuador in 2009, Katherine Krynak spotted a well-camouflaged, marble-size amphibian that was covered in spines. The next day, Krynak pulled the frog from the cup and set it on a smooth white sheet of plastic for Tim to photograph. It wasn't "punk "--it was smooth-skinned. She assumed that, much to her dismay, she must have picked up the wrong frog. "I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss," says Krynak. "The spines came back... we simply couldn't believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth."

Krynak didn't find another punk rocker frog until 2009, three years after the first sighting. The second animal was covered in thorny spines, like the first, but they had disappeared when she took a closer look. The team then took photos of the shape-shifting frog every ten seconds for several minutes, watching the spines form and then slowly disappear. It's unclear how the frog forms these spines so quickly, or what they're actually made of. The discovery of a variable species poses challenges to amphibian taxonomists and field biologists, who have traditionally used skin texture and presence/absence of tubercles as important discrete traits in diagnosing and identifying species. The discovery illustrates the importance of describing the behavior of new species, and bolsters the argument for preserving amphibian habitats, says Krynak. "Amphibians are declining so rapidly that scientists are oftentimes describing new species from museum specimens because the animals have already gone extinct in the wild, and very recently."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Suggested Beginning Windows Programming resources

Submitted by BootNinja
BootNinja writes: Hello, Slashdot; I took a couple of intro c++ classes in college back around 2000 and 2001. Since then I have picked up a bit of HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Perl. I've not done any coding in a couple of years, but I am interested in getting back in the saddle. However, everything I've ever done in past was simple text based web/console type stuff, and I'm looking to develop some skills in gui programming, preferably in C++. What books and/or websites would you recommend as a refresher for basic C++ sytax and data structures, as well as for basic windows and/or gnome programming? Also, what development tools do you find most helpful; i.e. compilers and/or IDE's?

Comment Never happened. (Score 1) 54

Never did - here's the Wikipedia about the Indiana Pi Bill. The crackpot proposed a bill that would acknowledge his collection of R33lY k3wl mathematical discoveries and let Indiana schools teach them free (in return for royalties from other user, if I'm reading it right), it snuck past the Indiana House, and a Professor Waldo told the Indiana Senate how bogus it was. It was close to passing there anyway, but one senator pointed out that it's not the Senate's job to establish mathematical truth. And now you know Where Waldo Was.

Comment Whistleblowing about the local mayor (Score 1) 54

Back in the 60s, my father-in-law ran a weekly paper in his small town. It eventually got shut down by the police on some bogus excuse; the actual reason was that he wasn't just writing that the mayor was taking bribes, but had the bad taste to say who they were from and what for. Corruption does also exist in the US, and so does censorship. (I didn't see much censorship when I lived in New Jersey, though - just corruption.)

Comment Re:Countries without nuclear weapons get invaded (Score 4, Informative) 228

by billstewart (#49338009) Attached to: How Nuclear Weapon Modernization Undercuts Disarmament

The Iraqis got their chemical weapons from the US for use against Iran. The US still hasn't destroyed their own CBW program products (though they do occasionally retire old unstable chemical weapons, as they've done recently.)

And both the US and Russians still have their hoards of smallpox, pretending they need to keep them to develop vaccines in case the other side uses theirs to attack, even though cowpox ("vaccinia") is good enough for a vaccine and not good enough for a weapon.

Comment Pakistan, Israel (Score 1) 228

by billstewart (#49337975) Attached to: How Nuclear Weapon Modernization Undercuts Disarmament

Pakistan has nuclear weapons (and India has the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Bombs as well), but aside from their border conflicts around Kashmir (for which the nukes make war less likely but more risky), their big invasion problem is non-governmental forces like Taliban, for whom nukes are really no use at all.

And Israel, of course, has the bomb (probably also the hydrogen bomb), but you're not allowed to say that in discussions about whether Iran can make one also. Wouldn't be a total surprise if the Saudis had it too.

Comment Re:The App Store stuff is more interesting (Score 1) 269

by fermion (#49337723) Attached to: Developers and the Fear of Apple
A couple points here, and note that I do not completely understand the complaints here. Apple has typically sold expensive software. That means that the end user pays more and the developer tends to make more. On upshot of this was that Apple products sold less because it was generally considered as a fact that one not only had to pay more for the Apple brand but also to run the machine. This meant that most developer went for MS Windows, assuming that though writing for MS was a race to the bottom, and knowing that MS could put you out of business any time they wanted, the number of users meant that you would make money. Writing for Apple could also be more difficult. I,myself, have written very few Apple specific programs. I have not really taken the time to learn the library. I appreciate the fact that Apple has taken the time to standardize much of the work so that once the library is learned, writing an application is easier, as long as one is willing to live within the Apple UI. So, as I understand the complaints, Apple has created a new mobile market and new software marketing method that has created million of new customers for developers to sell to,and has actually made writing the applications easier, and developers are complaining about it. Yes, dealing with a UI that is dictating from above is difficult, but that is not different for MS, recall the Ribbon? Yes, dealing with Apple and the App store is probably very expensive. OTOH, I am sure many are like me. I have spent more on applications over the past couple years than I did in the past 10. OOS, no cash cost software, does most of what I want.

Submission + - Comcast's incompetence, lack of broadband competition force homeowner to sell 1

Submitted by BUL2294
BUL2294 writes: Consumerist has an article about a homeowner in Kitsap County, Washington who is unable to get broadband service. Due to inaccurate broadband availability websites, Comcast's corporate incompetence, CenturyLink's refusal to add new customers in his area, and Washington state's restrictions on municipal broadband, the owner may be left with no option but to sell his house 2 months after he bought it, since he works from home as a software developer.

To add insult to injury, BroadbandMaps.gov says he has 10 broadband options in his zip code, some of which are not applicable to his address, have exorbitant costs (e.g. wireless), or are for municipal providers that are prevented from doing business with him by state law. Yet, Comcast insists in filings that “the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever,” which appear to be very carefully chosen words...

Submission + - How nuclear weapon modernization makes it more likely that nukes will be used (foreignpolicy.com) 2

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: John Mecklin has an astonishingly good piece detailing exactly how nuclear weapons modernization is kick-starting a new arms race, and how modernizing these weapons to make them more accurate and stealthy puts the world at even greater risk of nuclear war: 'Their very accuracy increases the temptation to use them.' The issue is not getting very much attention, but the patience of the non-nuclear states is wearing thin, and a breakthrough in public awareness may be on the horizon: 'The disarmament debate is likely to make this spring’s NPT conference a contentious one and just might be loud enough to make the public aware that a new type of nuclear arms race is unfolding around the world.' If you read nothing else on nuclear weapons, read this.

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