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Medicine

Alzheimer's Disease Possibly Linked To Sleep Deprivation 164

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the justification-for-more-sleep dept.
sonnejw0 writes "NewScientist is reporting a link between sleep deprivation and Alzheimer's Disease via an increased amyloid-beta plaque load thought responsible for a large part of the symptoms of the disease, in mice. Medication to abrogate insomnia reduced the plaque load. Also discussed is a recently discovered sleep cycle of amyloid-beta deposition in the brain, in which levels decrease while asleep. 'Holtzman also tried sending the mice to sleep with a drug that is being trialled for insomnia, called Almorexant. This reduced the amount of plaque-forming protein. He suggests that sleeping for longer could limit the formation of plaques, and perhaps block it altogether.'"
PC Games (Games)

Journal Journal: I fear nothing, save my mailbox

Journal by Nemus

It has gotten to the point where everyday I wake up and wonder what bad news I'll get today. This weekend, I had a series of charges hit my bank account, some over two weeks old. Not a one of them was over a few dollars, but my bank charges a $37 overdraft fee; suddenly, my $18 in overage turned into ~$400. Never mind that in a couple of cases it was a 3700% interest rate, never mind that I didn't ask for the service, and never even mind that legislation essentially outlawing these charges
Education

Journal Journal: Save money on toilet paper; use your diploma 1

Journal by Nemus

My professors used to tell me there were two phrases that you never heard: unemployed statistician, and broke statistician. So while my degrees are in philosophy and neuroscience, I was confident that my strong statistics background (useful for any scientist) would land me a job while I waited to start med school. Then, the semester before I graduated, the financial sector imploded, and all of a sudden, the phrases unemployed statistician and broke statistician became a lot more common.

Comment Re:Spectroscopic MRI will obsolete fMRI (Score 1) 287

by Nemus (#29485243) Attached to: Dead Salmon's "Brain Activity" Cautions fMRI Researchers
Firstly, numerous universities bundle neuroscience and related fields of engineering into their psychology department, so it seems pretty apparent that this wasn't a bunch of cognitive psych "Let' s build a graph/model!" junk. Also, its pretty common for psychologists to hold degrees in a "hard" science as well, so your bias is probably rooted in ignorance. Secondly, it seems to me like that their point wasn't that the fMRI wasn't sensitive enough, or particular enough. Instead the problem seems to be a problem of statistically expected random noise. Their point seems to be that users of an fMRI should bear in mind that their marvelous magical machine can generate "real" errors, and that basic, common-sense multiple comparison habits should be developed, instead of a take a picture, slap a stat against it approach. Apparently you did not, in fact, read the pdf.
Security

Submission + - Offshore Drilling Rigs Vulnerable to Hackers

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Foreign Policy magazine reports that a research team from the SINTEF Group, an independent Norwegian think tank, has warned oil companies worldwide that offshore oil rigs are highly vulnerable to hacking as they shift to unmanned robot platforms where vital operations — everything from data transmission to drilling to sophisticated navigation systems that maintain the platform's position over the wellhead — are controlled via wireless links to onshore facilities. "The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a hacker will break in and take over control of the whole platform," says Martin Gilje Jaatun adding that it hasn't happened yet, but computer viruses have caused personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms. Although the newest oil rigs, which cost upward of $1 billion apiece, might be loaded with cutting-edge robotics technology, the software that controls a rig's basic functions is based on decades-old supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, written in an era when the "open source" tag was more important than security. The list of potential cyberattackers includes ecowarriors aiming to jack up an oil firms' production costs, extortionists drawn to oil firms' deep pockets, and foreign governments engaging in a strategic contest for ever more scarce global oil reserves says Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the U.S. Interior Department. "It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are," says Vale. "It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail.""
Security

Submission + - Victorias not quite so Secret

Submitted by
Brian Fullar
Brian Fullar writes: "So I just got some account information from Victoria Secrets about fraud on my account, only to have them also send me someone else name, address and FULL Social security number. when asking about it they said it was a problem with their security system. They didn't even bat an eye at this breach of personal information

This is what causes peoples ID's to be stolen and in these troubled times you think they would have the decency to not pass this information around. So what should i do? open a class action lawsuit? Or just spread the word? They still deny my account is fraudulent and are telling me to write up my significant other as a prime suspect thus destroying any relationship prospects even though I don't believe it was her (i got papers from them with her signature that has the wrong style G's plus other anomalies she doesn't do in her handwriting)

When will companies take care of your personal information and stop sending it out without care?"
Transportation

Submission + - New Small Quiet Concorde plans

Submitted by MrKaos
MrKaos writes: Designed by Skunkworks and dubbed the QSST by Supersonic Aerospace International a new super sonic passenger liner appear to have made it past the design phase and into the development phase. It's certainly an attractive aircraft with an interesting design said to be 100 times quieter than Concorde and able to fly at speeds of around Mach 1.8 whilst producing less emissions.

If this smaller version can be flown for longer at supersonic speeds over populated areas it may be able to overcome the biggest problems Concorde had, the sonic booms it produced that restricted it's supersonic flight.
Businesses

Submission + - Global warming to be put on trial (latimes.com)

Submitted by Mr_Blank
Mr_Blank writes: The L.A. Times reports: The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
Power

Submission + - US Navy Tries to Turn Seawater into Jet Fuel

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientists reports that faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US Navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater by processing seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen — obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity — to make a hydrocarbon fuel, a variant of a chemical reaction called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is used commercially to produce a gasoline-like hydrocarbon fuel from syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen often derived from coal. The navy team have been experimenting to find out how to steer the CO2-producing process away from producing unwanted methane by finding a different catalyst than the usual cobalt-based catalyst. "The idea of using CO2 as a carbon source is appealing," says Philip Jessop, a chemist at Queen's University adding that to make a jet fuel that is properly "green", the energy-intensive electrolysis that produces the hydrogen will need to use a carbon-neutral energy source; and the complex multi-step process will always consume significantly more energy than the fuel it produces could yield. "It's a lot more complicated than it at first looks.""
NASA

Submission + - What Movies do Astronauts Watch on the ISS?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Guardian has an amusing story about the 150-odd movie titles astronauts can choose from on the ISS including Wedding Crashers, The Princess Bride, and Blazing Saddles. The full list of movies and books (PDF), issued by Johnson Space Center details "books, movies, television shows, and music maintained on the International Space Station (ISS) for recreational/off-duty consumption" and was acquired last year by the website governmentattic.org, using the US's freedom of information act. In May, James Mullighan, creative director for an independent film-making collective, wrote to Nasa, arguing that "Caddyshack, Cheaper By the Dozen and Beverly Hills Cop might weaken the critical faculties of those on board, possibly even putting their lives and ours in danger" and offered a selection of the alternatives proposed on the group's website: "Our members would like to see Harold and Maude rather than Harold and Kumar, and Man on Wire replace Man on Fire." Nasa Associate Administrator William H Gerstenmaier wrote back informing Mullighan that "Nasa shares your interest in assuring that a broad selection of entertainment is available for crew members' selection" and told the group that its suggestions "have been forwarded to the crew office for further consideration" (PDF). But Gerstenmaier also made clear that the titles were largely the result of crew members' personal preferences and that astronauts had either requested these films or brought them on board themselves. "In other words," writes the Guardian. "If the astronauts on the International Space Station want to watch Pearl Harbor, Shanghai Knights or, for that matter, Apollo 13, that's what they're going to watch.""
Space

Submission + - Relativistic Navigation Needed for Solar Sails (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "Last year, physicists calculated that a solar sail about a kilometre across with a mass of 300 kg (including 150 kg of payload) would have a peak acceleration of about 0.6g if released about 0.1AU from the Sun, where the radiation pressure is highest. That kind of acceleration could take it to the heliopause, the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space, in only 2.5 years; a distance of 200 AU. In 30 years, it could travel 2500AU, far enough to explore the Oort Cloud. But the team has discovered a problem. Ordinary Newtonian physics just doesn't cut it for the kind of navigational calculations needed for this journey. Because the sail has to be released so close to the Sun, it becomes subject to the effects of general relativity. And although the errors these introduce are small, they become magnified over the course of a long journey, sending the sail roughly 1 million kilometres off course by the time it reaches the Oort Cloud. What these guys are saying is that if ever such a sail is launched (and the earliest estimate is 2040), the navigators will have to be proficient in a new discipline of relativistic navigation."
Earth

Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago 777

Posted by Soulskill from the come-from-behind-victory dept.
Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups. Quoting: "'This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history,' said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence. 'Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.'"
Programming

Are C and C++ Losing Ground? 961

Posted by Soulskill from the lots-of-ground-to-lose dept.
Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"

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