Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - The placebo effect not just on drugs

Submitted by dvdme
dvdme writes: It seams like the placebo effect isn't just valid on drugs. It's also a fact on elevators, offices and traffic lights. An article by Greg Ross on http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/11/04/placebo-buttons/ says, and I quote:
"In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the “close door” button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003.

Similarly, many office thermostats are dummies, designed to give workers the illusion of control. “You just get tired of dealing with them and you screw in a cheap thermostat,” said Illinois HVAC specialist Richard Dawson. “Guess what? They quit calling you.”

In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 “walk” buttons in New York intersections do nothing. “The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on.”
United Kingdom

All Your Stonehenge Photos Are Belong To England 347

Posted by samzenpus from the we'll-take-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "English Heritage, the organization that runs and manages various historical sites in the UK, such as Stonehenge, has apparently sent letters to various photo sharing and stock photo sites claiming that any photo of Stonehenge that is being sold violates its rights, and only English Heritage can get commercial benefit from such photos. In fact, they're asking for all money made from such photos, stating: 'all commercial interest to sell images must be directed to English Heritage.' As one recipient noted, this seems odd, given that English Heritage has only managed Stonehenge 'for 27 of the monument's 4,500 year old history.'"
Hardware Hacking

Building a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials 238

Posted by samzenpus from the from-scratch dept.
MMBK writes "It's the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, building a telegraph out of things found in the woods. From the article: 'During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Facebook, Microsoft Team Up Against Google (sfgate.com) 3

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in a move that could be the biggest threat to Google's search standing yet Microsoft and Facebook announced that they're teaming up so that when someone uses Bing's search engine to look for a new car or a book, she can see which ones her friends liked. While industry watchers say this is an interesting move for search, what's most notable is that Facebook turned to Microsoft for this deal and not to the market leader, Google. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there is a specific reason he wants to go with Bing. "They really are the underdog here," say Zuckerberg. "They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things." The real importance of this week's announcement is that it highlights the growing strategic conflict between Facebook and Google says analyst Ray Valdes. "There is a battle for the future of the Web, and it is not about search engines, but about the social Web.""
Biotech

Submission + - Life serves viruses (bytesizebio.net)

Submitted by IronToe
IronToe writes: Two recent studies show how much viruses are embedded in life. The first is about 19 million year old viruses found in the genome of birds. The researchers dated these genome-embedded viruses using molecular techniques, and discovered that this type of viruses, which includes the Hepatitis B Virus, was around for much longer than we thought. The second study is about viruses which infect marine bacteria. Researchers have found that it only takes one night for viruses to infect almost 50% of their marine bacterial culture. These viruses called gene transfer agents move DNA between bacteria species, which means that a lot of bacterial DNA gets scrambled in the ocean, making species barriers rather superfluous.
Science

Submission + - Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares (arxiv.org)

Submitted by wen1454
wen1454 writes: Juergen Schmidhuber "analyze[s] the evolution of cumulative national shares of Nobel Prizes since 1901, properly taking into account that most prizes were divided among several laureates." Basically he finds that Germany lead from 1901 to 1956, and the US has lead since 1976. Between 1956 and 1976 the leader depends on the criteria used (science prizes vs. all prizes and citizenship at birth vs. citizenship at time of award).
Medicine

Submission + - The end of human clonning ethical issues?

Submitted by Turbio
Turbio writes: In the near future, in order to get a matching organ for a transplant, you will only need to take a small biopsy. And then grow the organ inside the animal of chice!
No more organ traffic or hard ethical issues regarding human cloning or embrio usage.
In 2006, Yamanaka and Takahashi induced Pluripotent Stem Cells from adult mouse fibroblasts. In 2007, Takahashi et al. did it with human adult fibroblasts. There are still some "minor" inconveniences, like for instance, not developing cancer in the new organ. But that will be solved with a new technique.
This month, Kobayashi et al. created a mouse with a rat pancreas, showing that you can grow organs of one species of mammals inside another's.
(Plant grafting is as old as farming, but animals are much more difficult to keep alive!).

Submission + - String Quartets on the Web

Submitted by rueger
rueger writes: Lots of people love iTunes. I'm partial to emusic.com. Ubuntu comes pre-equipped for Jamendo and Magnatune. These are great for those of us hunting popular music, but where do lovers of "classical" music go to find new artists and albums, download music, and generally keep informed, up to date, and satisfied? Or as my girlfriend put it "I used to go the the big classical record store downtown, but they're gone. Where do people go to find the newest Ligeti String Quartet recording?
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone data leads to rape charges being dropped (theage.com.au) 1

Submitted by one eyed kangaroo
one eyed kangaroo writes: The Age reports that a Sydney man has used deleted iPhone messages to have serious charges against him dropped.
"In what may be the first time an iPhone's elephantine memory has saved someone accused of a serious crime, deleted data retrieved by a leading surveillance expert appears to have led to the dropping of five rape charges against a Sydney man." His lawyer said, "'Without the ability of Coulthart to drag the content out, a man's life may have been ruined'.'
Science

Possible Room Temperature Superconductor Achieved 264

Posted by kdawson from the beware-of-puppeteer-breeding-experiments dept.
TechkNighT_1337 sends news that surfaced on the Next Big Future blog, concerning research out of the University of Bengal, in India. The report is of a possible superconducting effect at ambient room temperatures. Here is the paper on the ArXiv. (Note that this research has not been peer-reviewed or published yet.) "We report the observation of an exceptionally large room-temperature electrical conductivity in silver and aluminum layers deposited on a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) substrate. The surface resistance of the silver-coated samples also shows a sharp change near 313 K. The results are strongly suggestive of a superconductive interfacial layer, and have been interpreted in the framework of Bose-Einstein condensation of bipolarons as the suggested mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. ... The fact that the results described above have been obtained from very simply-fabricated systems, without the use of any sophisticated set-up and any special attention being given to crystal purity, atomic perfection, lattice matching, etc. suggests that the physical process is a universal one, involving only an interface between a metal and an insulator with a large low-frequency dielectric constant. We note in passing that PZT and the cuprates have similar (perovskite or perovskite-based) crystal structures. This resemblance may provide an added insight into the basic mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity."

Slashdot Top Deals

May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual!

Close