Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Tevatron tightens up the race for the Higgs | Teva (blogspot.com)

Submitted by IronAISS
IronAISS writes: WITH the Large Hadron Collider still in the repair shop, the race to find the Higgs boson has become a lot tighter, thanks to the older and less powerful — but working — Tevatron collider near Chicago.

"The Tevatron definitely has a chance," says Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on one of the LHC's detectors.

With the LHC due to restart only in November at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, the Tevatron has been gaining ground in the search for the Higgs, the particle thought to give mass to other elementary particles. At last week'sLepton Photon conference in Hamburg, Germany, Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011 they will have recorded enough data to allow them to either find or rule out the Higgs as predicted by the standard model.

Submission + - Stem Cell Transplant Cures HIV Infection (current.com) 1

Submitted by rhathar
rhathar writes: A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS.

  "The patient is fine," said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. "Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication."
Privacy

Submission + - Heart Monitors in Middle School Gym Class? 7

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today my son brought home an order form from his middle school. Apparently the 7th (his grade) and 8th graders are asked (required?) to purchase their own straps for the heart monitors they're to wear during gym class. I know nothing, yet, of the device in question, but have left a voice-mail with the asst. principal asking him to call me so I may ask some questions about the program and the device. My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. "I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? NO INSURANCE FOR YOU!" Has anyone heard of this program, or had their child(ren) take part in it? Does the device transmit to the laptop the overweight gym teacher will be sitting in front of instead of running laps with the kids? Perhaps data is downloaded from the device after the class? Or am I just being paranoid? Thanks!
Movies

Submission + - Charles Darwin film too controversial for America (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer. The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia. However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution. The full article can be found here
Space

Submission + - Armadillo Aerospace Claim Level 2 NGLLC Prize (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Dagondanum
Dagondanum writes: "Armadillo Aerospace have officially won the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Level 2, on a rainy day at Caddo Mills, Texas. Reports came in from various locations during the day and spectators posted videos and images using social networking tools such as Twitter. The Space Fellowship earlier reporting that the team were getting ready to fly. Level 2 requires the rocket to fly for 180 seconds before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface constructed with craters and boulders. The minimum flight times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform a real descent from lunar orbit down to the surface of the Moon. First place is a prize of $1 million while second is $500,000."
Games

Submission + - New Record in Pac Man (twingalaxies.com) 2

Submitted by
inKubus
inKubus writes: "40-year-old David Race of Beaver Creek, OH has become the 6th gamer in history to gain a perfect score on the original Pac-Man video arcade game. Even more noteworthy is the fact that he's done it in faster time than any gamer in history, putting him at the top of a short list of gamers who have acheived perfection on the original arcade machine."

Submission + - Ford's new radar technology based on Open Source (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
zakkie
zakkie writes: "Ford is releasing new safety-enhancing radar equipment for its new Taurus sedan. The radar itself is based on F22 fighter radar but interestingly it's claimed that the software is built from open source. What that may mean in the vague waffling context of the article is unclear, but it's interesting simply because they've gone to the effort of stating it in those words. Clearly "open source" is being thought of outside the IT world as a good thing, and that surely is itself a good thing."

Submission + - SPAM: IEEE stamps "approved" on 802.11n Wi-Fi standard

Submitted by
alphadogg
alphadogg writes: "The IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard. Bruce Kraemer, the long-time chairman of the 802.11n Task Group (part of the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees the WLAN standards), has sent out a notification [spam URL stripped] to a listserv for task group members, which includes a wide range of Wi-Fi chip makers, software developers, and equipment vendors."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Hubble releases first (second) image batch after s

Submitted by
Hynee
Hynee writes: "As tweeted, NASA has released 10 new images, all from the new WFC3 instrument [Link broken at publish] and others, including the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

More links

hubblesite.org

HubbleSite.org Video about 10 release images.

Full HubbleSite.org release page with 56 release images.

Images include NGC 6302, Carina Nebula, Stephan's Quintet, Markarian 817, Abell 370, and a few others.

Great looking stuff, the WFC3 has twice the resolution of the WF/PC2, on the CCD at least, if memory serves correctly.

Eta Carina is a fascinating object, and there are at least two releases in this 'Early Release Observations' set."
Government

Submission + - Europe must stop Google Books because it will work (thepublicdomain.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier /. postings referred to James Boyle's article in the FT on the Google Book Search Settlement and the 20th Century Black Hole. This response on his blog goes a little further...... There are good reasons to worry about the Google Book Search Settlement, as I explained at length here. But of all of the reasons to oppose it, this utterly surreal statement is my favourite.

"European officials fear that if the Google project goes ahead in the US, a yawning transatlantic gap will open up in education and research." "Oh my God! The Americans are about to create a private workaround of the enormous mess that we regulators have made of national copyright policy! They will fix the unholy legal screwups that leave most of 20th century culture books unavailable, yet still under copyright! They will gain access to their cultural heritage — giving them a huge competitive advantage in education. This MUST BE STOPPED!! No one can be allowed to fix this for any other country because then we would be left alone stewing in our own intellectual property stupidity! We must forbid their progress in order to protect our ignorance." It gets better after that...
Enlightenment

Submission + - Intelligent software figures out politics! (netbase.com)

Submitted by
mhajicek
mhajicek writes: "There's a company working on software to scan the internet (and other sources) and parse it into useful information, deciphering relations between different concepts and such. As a demo / proof of concept, they've made available for public use a program called HealthBase , which tries to figure out causes, treatments, and complications for various conditions. Just for kicks, I input "Politicians", to see what it would do.

According to HealthBase:
Cons of Politicians include Raise Concern, Loath, and Be Socialist.
Complications of Politicians include Be Socialist, Confusion, Destroy future, and Destroy liberty.
Treatments for Politicians include Argument, Newspaper, Culture, and Citizen.
Food and Plants for Politicians:
Cannabis.

Seems to work okay to me..."
Security

Submission + - Apple store robbed in 31 seconds

Submitted by Braedley
Braedley writes: An Apple store in New Jersey was robbed in 31 seconds early yesterday morning. The thieves stole 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod Touches. I know Apple prides themselves on the aesthetic design of not only their computers and other devices, but also of their stores, but one has to wonder if maybe a little more security could have prevented the theft of tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. Original ABC affiliate story.
Idle

Submission + - Piranha Discovered in UK in Devon River 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "With razor-sharp teeth piranha, native to the Amazon basin, the Orinoco and the rivers of the Guyanas, are generally considered to be the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world with a voracious appetite for meat, able to strip the flesh of large animals within minutes when traveling in a shoal. So when members of the British Environment Agency were conducting a sampling trip in the East Okement tributary of the River Torridge, they were amazed to see a large tail emerge from the undercut bank on the far side of the river. "What we actually discovered was something we would not expect to find in our wildest dreams — we could hardly believe our eyes," says Eddie Stevens. "Our first thought was that a sea trout had become lodged in amongst the rocks and debris collected under the bank, but when it was removed from the river we were speechless to find it was a piranha." Tests carried out on the dead piranha revealed it had been eating sweet corn, which proved it must have been kept as a pet. The Environment Agency said it believes the piranha was alive when it was put in the river, possibly because at 35 cm it had become too big for its tank. "Whilst piranhas can't survive the colder climates of the UK, this latest find highlights a real issue — that releasing unwanted exotic pets or plants into rivers can have serious consequences for native wildlife," says spokesman Paul Gainey. "Rather than dumping things in the wild, we would urge people to seek advice about what to do with exotic species.""
Transportation

Submission + - Solar Roadways geta DOT funding. (autoblog.com) 1

Submitted by mikee805
mikee805 writes: Solar roadways a project to replace the over 25,000 square miles of road in the US with drivable solar panels just received $100K in funding from DOT for the 1st 12ft by 12ft prototype panel. Each panel consists of three layers: a base layer with data and power cabled running through it, an electronics layer with an array of LEDs, solar collectors, and capacitors and finally the glass road surface. With data and power cables the solar roadway was the potential to replace a lot of our aging infrastructure. With just a 15% efficiency this would project 3 time what US uses annually in energy! Also to head off a few problems the building costs are estimated to be competitive with traditional roads and the roads would heat themselves in the winter to keep snow from accumulating. Interview video here.

Slashdot Top Deals

As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Close