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Technology

Researchers Getting the Lead Out of Electronics 178

Posted by samzenpus from the space-age-polymers dept.
alphadogg writes "Researchers at the University of Maryland say they have discovered a material to replace lead, a potential environmental hazard, in electronics products. The material, bismuth samarium ferrite (BSFO), was found by researchers in the university's A. James Clark School of Engineering. It can be used in products such as biomedical imaging devices and inkjet printers, and if implemented commercially could keep lead out of landfills and the ecosystem, they say. While manufacturers have developed replacements for lead in many products, until now no commercial replacement existed for lead zirconate titanate (PZT) — the material of choice for transducers, actuators, sensors and microelectromechanical systems used in common electronic devices, the university says."

Comment Sounds like me (Score 5, Interesting) 564

by sisina (#25775267) Attached to: Fun Things To Do With a Math Or Science Degree?

I'm a woman who aced the math ACT but didn't feel like studying math or science. I was into foreign languages. So now I have a bachelor's in Spanish and a master's in French literature, and I'm a web developer. Go figure.

What might have convinced me to study one of the hard sciences is seeing people actually at work using them. If I had met any pharmaceutical researchers or civil engineers or software developers and seen what they do at work every day, I might have found it more interesting. As it was, I had no frame of reference for working with math or science, and therefore no interest.
Math

Fun Things To Do With a Math Or Science Degree? 564

Posted by kdawson from the its-own-sweet-sake dept.
bxwatso writes "My niece just took the ACT and got a perfect score on the math section. 25 years ago, when I took the test, the kids who aced the math section were pretty special. Her score, combined with straight A's so far in high school, suggest to me that she might be able to go to a top university (MIT?) based on her math aptitude. The rub is that she doesn't like math or science, even though she finds them easy. She doesn't want to be an engineer or scientist. I thought the folks here would be a great group to ask: What are some creative, not too nerdy professions that nonetheless require a talent for math, engineering, or science?"
Cellphones

How Mobile Phones Work Behind the Scenes 220

Posted by timothy from the they-all-suck-to-different-degrees dept.
adamengst writes "We seldom think about how our mobile phones actually work, but in this TidBITS article, Rich Mogull pulls back the covers and peels away the jargon to explain why text messages work when voice calls are dropped, why your battery lasts longer in some places than in others, why you're not allowed to use phones on airplanes, why you can be notified of a voicemail message when your phone never rang, and more."
Graphics

OpenGL 3.0 Released, Developers Furious 643

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the community-management-derailed dept.
ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"
Medicine

Submission + - Open Health Tools gets underway with code donation (zdnet.com)

Submitted by ruphus13
ruphus13 writes: Open Health Tools launched earlier this year by the Eclipse founder, Skip McGaughey, is now on its way with a large code donation. Positioned as "an open source community with a vision of enabling a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT professions can collaborate to build interoperable systems that enable patients and their care providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed", the project received the code contributions from the California Healthcare Foundation. From the article, "It's called Open HIE, or Open Health Information Exchange. It consists of modules to link a master record to personal information, and to retrieve records from known locations. The donor is the California Healthcare Foundation, and the donation was midwifed by two important open source companies, CollabNet and Palamida. CollabNet provided its development platform to the project, and Palamida has already done a code review on the donated code base."
Spam

Submission + - Spam hunter falls victim to suicide note attack (swissinfo.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cyber criminals have attacked a Swiss IT expert by circulating a fake suicide note in his name in response to a blog he set up to combat internet viruses and spam. According to the government's cyber crime unit, this is the first example of a "revenge" attack by internet criminals against a Swiss individual. Switzerland is currently the focus of increasing waves of attacks by spammers. Twenty-one-year-old computer specialist Roman Hüssy from Wallisellen, canton Zurich, got the fright of his life last Tuesday when he was woken up by police officers at 2 am checking on his whereabouts. Just one hour earlier hundreds of thousands of computers in Switzerland and abroad had received an email from Hüssy that announced his imminent suicide and threat to kill his girlfriend and a lover. The Zurich police then received hundreds of callers and emails worried about the young Swiss. The message turned out to be a fake — known in the industry as a "joe-job", a spam attack using spoof sender data and aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender. ...
The Internet

DNS Flaw Hits More Than Just the Web 215

Posted by timothy from the gee-dan-thanks-thanks-a-bunch dept.
gringer writes "Dan Kaminsky presented at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and said that the DNS vulnerability he discovered is much more dangerous than most have appreciated. Besides hijacking web browsers, hackers might attack email services and spam filters, FTP, Rsync, BitTorrent, Telnet, SSH, as well as SSL services. Ultimately it's not a question of which systems can be attacked by exploiting the flaw, but rather which ones cannot. Then again, it could just be hype. For more information, see Kaminsky's power point presentation." Update: 08/07 19:48 GMT by T : There's also an animation of the progress of the patch.
Space

Apollo 14 Moonwalker Claims Aliens Exist 1268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the truth-is-out-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"
United States

Journal Journal: Hooray P-I, Boo Times 3

Journal by pudge

John Popper of Blues Traveler was arrested for pot possession. But almost every article out there makes it sound like he was arrested for gun possession, or that the gun possession was somehow legally significant.

Kudos to the Seattle P-I for not putting the guns in the lead or headline, and for clearly stating the charges are only for the drugs and driving.

Timely Book On Bird Flu 174

Posted by kdawson from the take-care-out-there dept.
Lifelongactivist writes, "A new free book about bird flu has been published by Michael Greger, M.D., the US Humane Society's director of public health and animal agriculture. Bird Flu: a Virus of Our Own Hatching (the site contains the entire book text) tells why modern industrialized agricultural methods, including factory farming, antibiotics misuse, and the use of animal refuse as a food source (!) for chickens and other livestock, have led to a staggering increase in the number of 'zoonotic' diseases that can leap from animals to people, and make a bird flu pandemic likely. The book discusses in practical terms what you can do to prevent infection and what to do if you do catch the disease. The book is especially timely given yesterday's news that a new, vaccine-resistant variant of H5N1 has been detected in China."
Update: 10/31 19:44 GMT by KD : Corrected to read "vaccine-resistant."

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov

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