According to an article by Louis LaPointe posted the Open Source Energy Network on Pure Energy Systems News, as little as 0.0003% acetone in your gasoline can increase your gas-mileage by as much as 35%! That's a pretty hefty claim, but the article is riddled with warnings about acetone and its use, as well as often encouraging the reader not to take his word for

According to a NASA newsletter, the Spitzer Space Telescope has found a lot more quasars than previously was observable. It turns out that while a quasar outshines any other object, dust and gas can shield us from their radiation, both visible and Xray. Spitzer has been instructed to look in the infrared end of the spe

Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called "Saturn kilometric radiation") that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths' Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the

Sun Microsystems has bought StorageTek for $4.1B. The question is - will this save Sun, or doom StorageTek too?

While listening to NPR this morning, I heard about the ridiculous 1675 law that orders the arrest of all American Indians entering Boston, and just now, 330 years later, is ready to be repealed. My question is - there are a LOT of really outdated and/or inappropriate laws out there; would an 'open' Wiki-style approach to law-making (with appropriate supervision, of course) be able to catch more o

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has taken pictures of whirling dust clouds. Spirit began seeing dust devils in isolated images in March 2005. At first, the rover team relied on luck. It might catch a dust devil in an image or it might miss by a few minutes. Using the new detection strategy, the rover takes a series of 21 image

Professor Marcello Ferrada-Noli of The National Institute of Public Health in Sweden says that there's no such thing as burnout (depression from exhaustion) - it's all made up (Swedish only) by people who do not like their work environment. People tend to

Per PhysNews update 724, scientists have for the first time been able to detect extrasolar planets directly. That is, previously the only way to detect these orbiting bodies was to either detect the minute redshift in the companion star due to orbit wobble in the gravitational tug-of-war, or to detect the drop in light intensity when the planet passes betwe

Volvo has a sweepstake that makes you think you're going to space. You're basically competing for a seat on the suborbital Virgin Galactic. They will even give you $100,000 to help pay the federal and state taxes on the Grand Prize, which is estimated at a value of $350,000. Of course, the disclaimer/official rules are 7 miles long.

SANS has reported a possible MySQL Bot. Apparently it's TCP port 3306 that is being scanned. From the SANS page: "You should not expose any MySQL servers to unsolicited connections. If you run MySQL, make sure you block port 3306."

As a Sysadmin (UNIX, NT/2k and OpenVMS) I see an immense potential value in a USB jumpdrive. Aside from PuTTY, WinSCP and other such tools - what do you sysadmins put on your 256M jumpdrives, and what would you put on there, had it been larger? What are the essntials?

Wired has a story where Sharman Networks, the Australian company behind the P2P file sharing software Kazaa, has donated money to the International Red Cross. The Australian Recording Industry Association has asked the Red Cross to freeze their funds, stating that the money belongs to them. Michael Speck of Australia's Music Industry Piracy Investigations says "It would be incredibly disappo

I run a very small bulletin board with just under 700 members. I recently had to make an uncomfortable decision, and received negative response from a certain faction of the members, crying foul. I explained that this board is a dictatorship, running on my hardware, on my inetnet connection, and has no other financial dependencies. My question is - you out there running boards, are you running Dictatorships or Democracies, and would you like to change - if so why?

The SCO site seems to have been p0wned. As of 6:35am CST, a big banner stating "WE OWN ALL YOUR CODE" and "pay us all your money" was clearly visible on the site. Of course, this will not really help the case of The Worls vs. SCO, and they're bound to make the OSS/FSF crowd into grafitti painting, skateboarding hooligans.

...for he may be subtle, and quick to anger. Or so it seems, at least for this guy, who seems to have a mean-spirited web builder after him. Let this be a lesson - pay your web developer. On time.