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Science

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Protein ... and Now Fat 210

Posted by timothy from the visit-the-chiba-clinic-for-an-upgrade dept.
ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."
Handhelds

Apple Removes Wi-Fi Finders From App Store 461

Posted by timothy from the you've-been-very-very-naughty dept.
jasonbrown writes "Apple on Thursday began removing another category of apps from its iPhone App Store. This time, it's not porn, it's Wi-Fi. Apple removed several Wi-Fi apps commonly referred to as stumblers, or apps that seek out available Wi-Fi networks near your location. According to a story on Cult of Mac, apps removed by Apple include WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum, and yFy Network Finder."
Image

Scientists Discover Booze That Won't Give You a Hangover 334

Posted by samzenpus from the go-ahead-and-have-another dept.
Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University have discovered that drinking alcohol with oxygen bubbles added leads to fewer hangovers and a shorter sobering up time. People drinking the bubbly booze sobered up 20-30 minutes faster and had less severe and fewer hangovers than people who drank the non-fizzy stuff. Kwon said: "The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does. This could provide both clinical and real-life significance. The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects of acetaldehyde without a significant difference in alcohol's effects. Furthermore, the reduced time to a lower BAC may reduce alcohol-related accidents."
Earth

Researchers Pooh-Pooh Algae-Based Biofuel 238

Posted by timothy from the feed-it-pooh-pooh-undies dept.
Julie188 writes "Researchers from the University of Virginia have found that current algae biofuel production methods consume more energy, have higher greenhouse gas emissions and use more water than other biofuel sources, such as switchgrass, canola and corn. The researchers suggest these problems can be overcome by situating algae production ponds behind wastewater treatment facilities to capture phosphorous and nitrogen — essential algae nutrients that otherwise need to come from petroleum."
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
The Internet

Submission + - UK Government Prepares FREE Broadband and Laptops (ispreview.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: The UK government has confirmed plans for a 2011 rollout of its £300m 'Broadband for All' scheme, which was first revealed in September 2008. The project will give a grant of 500GBP to children from 270,000 low income families (earning less than 16,040GBP per year), allowing them to select an approved computer. This will also include a free 12 month broadband Internet access subscription. The scheme will initially be offered to children aged between 7 and 13.
Image

Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269

Posted by samzenpus from the living-in-the-hive dept.
afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”
Image

The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282

Posted by samzenpus from the equal-distribution-of-the-pie dept.
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."

Comment Re:What next? Cameras? (Score 1) 550

by wasabu (#30020656) Attached to: Visually Impaired Gamer Sues Sony
The dilemma sprouts from the fact that we are in transit from being purely animal to purely spiritual (matter to meta-physical). Wherein, the animal is constituent of it's physical and survival characteristics, and the metap-physical is the transcendant consciousness to which we seem to be heading. As for this guy, he sounds like a complete fucking twat and I'd happy to strangle him for animal reasons!
Entertainment

Marge Simpson Poses For Playboy 413

Posted by samzenpus from the drawn-to-please dept.
caffiend666 writes "'Marge Simpson is posing for Playboy . The magazine is giving the star of The Simpsons the star treatment, complete with a data sheet, an interview and a 2-page centerfold. 'We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd,' said Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey. Playboy even convinced 7-Eleven to carry the magazine in its 1,200 corporate-owned stores, something the company has only done once before in more than 20 years." Worst issue ever!

Comment Re:Someone has to build the vehicles (Score 2, Insightful) 136

by wasabu (#29028029) Attached to: NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis

The best kind of stimulus is the kind of stimulus that puts people in jobs.

Load of nonsense. Bleeding the money from private enterprise (ie taxes) to 'stimulate' parts of the economy only takes money away from other parts. This is called misallocation of capital because the power of the market is stifled, and always leads to LOSS of jobs, because the 'economy' of money is put in the hands of idiots. The desires and needs of millions of people are at the root of a truely free market. A handful of useless beurocrats by definition cannot best allocate capital. "Stimulus" is just a new word for the same old trick of stealing public money to line the pockets of your friends. Every dollar of capital misallocation will prolong Depression 2.0. If there is a market for space travel (between paycheques), private enterprise will find it and do it efficiently, for far less.

Comment Re:Sounds self-contradictory (Score 1) 251

by wasabu (#28602167) Attached to: If You Live By Free, You Will Die By Free
There is no such thing as free. Even someone who has absolutely no interest in money at all is not working for free. They're doing it for certain gratification. It's harder to translate such feelings into denominations of currency 'value', but all the same it is a tangible gain. Now when you say that Research isn't profitable, you make a grave mistake. The dynamic you miss is time. Even selling a potato is not 'profitable' for a period of time (ie until you spend the gain on something tangible). The profitability of Research is hard to doubt, except for the short sighted.

Comment Re:The machines charge 30% MORE than trading price (Score 1) 472

by wasabu (#28368455) Attached to: Gold Sold From Vending Machines In Germany
The key concept to understand is 'value'. The question has to be asked, "value in terms of doing what?". The most obvious answer is "to buy stuff". Gold historically maintains it's purchasing power in relation to paper currencies. What you see is when the Dollar drops, gold goes up. What's really happening is not that gold is worth more, it's in fact just maintaining it's purchasing power, whereas the dollar is losing it's purchasing power.

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