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Submission + - Farewell, Slashdot

Submitted by g051051
g051051 writes: The latest round of changes is just too much. The obvious ads inserted as news, the video junk, the constant posting of non-tech stories, overposting by a few contributors (I'm looking at you, Hugh Pickens)... I just don't enjoy reading Slashdot anymore. Worse, I started dreading loading up the page. I'm especially upset since I'm a paying subscriber so I can eliminate ads, but the news "ads as stories" apparently overrides that.

There were quite a few good years there, but it's over now. Farewell Slashdot, I wish you best of luck in your new life as a light political news/ads site. I'll really miss the News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters.
News

Submission + - Next Great Depression? MIT researchers predict 'global economic collapse' by2030 (yahoo.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester's institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from "global economic collapse" and "precipitous population decline" if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace(http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/next-great-depression-mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-190352944.html). The study's researchers created a computing model to forecast different scenarios based on the current models of population growth and global resource consumption, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection efforts. Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030. But without "drastic measures for environmental protection," the scenarios predict the likelihood of a population and economic crash.

Submission + - LHC at 4TeV (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists from CERN announced a new world record in the energy beam.The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine’s discovery potential considerably. Although the increase in collision energy is relatively modest, it translates to an increased discovery potential that can be several times higher for certain hypothetical particles. Though it is suspected supersymmetry may not be a fortunate approach, operation at 4 TeV will likely rule out or confirm the existence of Higgs boson.
Apple

Submission + - Apple Releases Patch for Trojan that Affects 600,000 Macs (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by
tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: "Apple released an update to Java bringing the version on Mac to 1.6.0_31 for Mac’s running OS X. This patch actually closes multiple vulnerabilities that were found in the previous Java version being 1.6.0_29. The most serious exploit that it patched was the allowance of malicious code to be executed by visiting a compromised website."
Mars

Submission + - Curiosity, NASA's Latest Rover, is Halfway To Mars (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "The Mars Science Laboratory mission, with a rover affectionately named Curiosity, reached a milestone this past Sunday, April 1, as it hurtled across the halfway point at over 10,000 miles per hour on its 254 day-long journey to the red planet. Scheduled to land on August 6, the rover will spend close to two years analyzing Martian soil around its landing site near the Gale Crater to determine whether conditions are favorable for microbial life to thrive on the planet. But its back on Earth where the real threat to the Mars mission looms as President Obama’s proposed budget includes a 20% reduction in NASA’s funds for planetary science"
Government

Submission + - White House's New Attack On IT Spending Waste (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Last week, the White House announced new requirements for agencies to consolidate and centralize IT services, telling them to "look into the darkest corners" to eliminate redundant and inefficient technology.

"The stove-piped and complex nature of the federal enterprise has led over the years to a proliferation of duplicative and low-priority investments in information technology... agencies too often seek to develop homegrown, proprietary solutions first, before assessing existing options for shared services or components.""
Image

Beaver Dam Visible From Space Screenshot-sm 286

Posted by samzenpus from the dam-big-job dept.
ygslash writes "The Hoover Dam no longer holds the title of the world's widest dam. Satellite photos of northern Alberta, Canada, show that several families of beavers have apparently joined forces to build a dam 850 meters wide, more than twice as wide as the Hoover Dam."
Earth

Life's Building Blocks Found On Asteroid 24 Themis 135

Posted by timothy from the pinning-down-origins dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that scientists analyzing infrared light reflected by 24 Themis, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system, have discovered evidence of water ice as well as organic compounds — findings that bolster a leading theory for the origins of life on Earth that the essential building blocks of life came from asteroids. 'Up until now there was no sign that asteroids had any abundant organics or ice on them,' says Joshua P. Emery, a planetary astronomer at the University of Tennessee. Typically, ice on the surface of an object such as 24 Themis would quickly vaporize and vanish, says planetary scientist Richard Binzel. 'Seeing freshly exposed ice on the surface, now that's a surprise. It has to be replenished from below, somehow.' The possibility that water could have come from asteroids adds weight to the theory that water and organic molecules may not have originated on Earth because the Earth did not become conducive to water or organic molecules until relatively recently."
The Internet

All of Gopherspace Available For Download 200

Posted by timothy from the gopherspace-is-negative-space dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow tells us that '[i]n 2007, John Goerzen scraped every gopher site he could find (gopher was a menu-driven text-only precursor to the Web; I got my first online gig programming gopher sites). He saved 780,000 documents, totalling 40GB. Today, most of this is offline, so he's making the entire archive available as a .torrent file; the compressed data is only 15GB. Wanna host the entire history of a medium? Here's your chance!' Get yourself a piece of pre-Internet history (torrent)." Update: 04/30 00:16 GMT by T: As several readers have pointed out below, our anonymous friend probably meant to say "pre-Web," rather than "pre-Internet."
Space

Hubble Builds 3D Dark Matter Map 177

Posted by timothy from the turn-left-go-fast dept.
astroengine writes "Dark matter can't be spotted directly because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation (i.e. it doesn't emit any radiation and reflects no light). However, its gravitational influence on space-time can bend light from its otherwise straight path (a phenomenon known as 'lensing'). Using a sophisticated algorithm to scan a comprehensive Hubble Space Telescope survey of the cosmos, astronomers have plotted a map of 'weak lensing' events. Combining this with red shift measurements from ground-based observatories, they've produced a strikingly colorful 3D map of the structure of dark matter."
Networking

Researchers Beam 230Mb/sec Wireless Internet WIth LEDs 218

Posted by timothy from the binded-by-the-light dept.
MikeChino writes "A group of scientists from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute have devised a way to encode a visible-frequency wireless signal in light emitted by plain old desklamps and other light fixtures. The team was able to achieve a record-setting data download rate of 230 megabits per second, and they expect to be able to double that speed in the near future. While the regular radio-frequency Wi-Fi most of us use currently is perfectly fine, it does have its flaws — it has a limited bandwidth that confines it to a certain spectrum and if you've ever had someone leech off of your connection, you know that it also leaks through walls. LED wireless signals would theoretically have none of these downsides."

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