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Comment Not an original idea (Score 2) 170

by braindrainbahrain (#46032059) Attached to: Voynich Manuscript May Have Originated In the New World

I'm pretty sure that at least one plant was previously identified as American , and that would be the sunflower. These botanists have taken the idea a lot further though. Their paper is well researched, but I will leave it to the peer review process to ultimately determine its veracity. The identification of Nahuatl words in the script seems a bit of a stretch IMHO.

Submission + - Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jobs last year (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year. The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation. There are 300,000 people working as electrical engineers, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. In 2002, there were 385,000 electrical engineers in the U.S. Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, called the electrical engineering employment trend "truly disturbing," and said, "just like America's manufacturing has been hollowed out by offshoring and globalization, it appears that electrical and electronics engineering is heading that way."

Submission + - Mars One studying how to maintain communications with Mars 24/7 (satellitetoday.com)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: Mars One, the low credibility effort to colonize Mars, is at least funding some interesting concept studies for their alleged plan to colonize the red planet. One of the most interesting is the effort to maintain uninterrupted communications with Mars. This is not as trivial as it may sound, as any satellite in Martian orbit will still have to deal with occultations between Mars and Earth due to the Sun. Surrey Satellite Technology will be performing the study.

Submission + - Sculpture on the Moon! (slate.com)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: Slate magazine has written the story about the only work of art placed on the Moon , the Fallen Astronaut sculpture, placed on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission to commemorate both American and Soviet deceased astronauts. The little statue, rather than bringing fame and fortune ended up being nearly forgotten and got both Apollo astronaut David Scott and Belgian sculptor Van Hoeydonck in hot water with the US government.

Submission + - U.S. can still beat China back to moon (usatoday.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: The Chang'e-3 mission that landed a rover called Yutu on the Bay of Rainbows on the lunar surface proves China's space exploration program has one thing that America's does not — a clear direction. Its piloted space program has featured missions of increasing complexity, with the latest being two visits to the Tiangong-1 space module, a predecessor of a planned Chinese space station.

In the meantime America's space exploration is fraught with confusion, controversy and a conspicuous lack of funding and direction. Ever since President Obama cancelled President George W. Bush's Constellation program that would have returned Americans to the moon, NASA has been headed for an asteroid in the near term. Which asteroid and how Americans will get there are still open questions.

After China's successful series of robotic landings on the moon, many space experts agree the Chinese will probably execute a moon walk sometime in the 2020s. If and when that happens and if Americans are not on the moon to greet them, China becomes the world's space exploration leader and all that implies.

Submission + - GNU Octave Gets a GUI (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: GNU Octave — the open source numerical computation suite compatible with MATLAB — is doing very well. The new 3.8 release is a big change, as it brings a graphical user interface, a feature which has long been requested by users. It is peppered with OpenGL acceleration and uses the super fast FLTK toolkit for widgets. The CLI interface still remains available and GNUplot is used as a fallback in cases where OpenGL or FLTK support is not available. Other changes to Octave 3.8 are support for nested functions with scoping rules, limited support for named exceptions, new regular expressions, a TeX parser for the FLTK toolkit, overhauls to many of the m-files, function rewrites, and numerous other changes and bug fixes.

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