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Biotech

Submission + - SPAM: 100% pregnant women have pesticide in the placenta

Submitted by
FiReaNGeL
FiReaNGeL writes: "A doctoral thesis published recently analyzes the presence of organochlorine pesticides — normally used as pesticides — in the organisms of pregnant women. The results are alarming: 100% of these pregnant women had at least one pesticide in their placenta, but the average rate amounts to eight different kinds of chemical substances! According to the researchers, "we do not really know the consequences of exposure to disruptive pesticides in children, but we can predict that they may have serious effects, since this placenta exposure occurs at key moments of the embryo's development"."
Graphics

Submission + - What Happened to XGI Technology?

Submitted by Talthor
Talthor writes: It was first in 2003 that XGI Technology had made their appearance with a Volari Duo V8 Ultra and then their manufacturing and design had continued with a V3XT and other low end graphics cards. While XGI never really gained much market share, in 2005 they had released their 2D driver code. But where is XGI Technology today? According to Phoronix: "XGI Technology once presented a glimmer of hope to desktop users wishing to find a cheap yet reliable discrete graphics card with official open-source drivers. Thanks in part to IBM, the XGI open-source driver is becoming a reality, but with XGI having refocused their business operations on the embedded and server markets, the days of XGI on the desktop are no more."
Space

Submission + - Hubble finds ghost ring of dark matter

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "Astronomers announced today that they have found a giant ring of dark matter surrounding a cluster of galaxies 5 billion light years away. The ring was probably formed when one cluster collided with another, and we're seeing it right down the line-of-sight. There was a lot of speculation on /. about this, but this article should clear it all up."
Software

Submission + - So Ya Wanna Make A Game?

Submitted by
Riley Munoz
Riley Munoz writes: "Hey Slashdot, Game Almighty rounds up a selection of software for all you gamers dying to brew your own FPS legend or RPG saga; without having to break the piggy bank or hack The Matrix. Sample paragraph: "...create 2D RPG's in the classic Japanese style... Extremely easy to use and very robust, you'll find the act of creating your game world deceptively simple, thanks to the interface's use of a tile system. This allows you to simply drag-and-drop graphics on to the map, unleashing your creativity along the way..." http://www.gamealmighty.com/story-individual/story /So_Ya_Wanna_Make_A_Game-1/ Thanks for any links! Riley Munoz -Community Manager riley@gamealmighty.com www.GameAlmighty.com"
Patents

Submission + - Crisis Pending for Business Process Patents?

Submitted by phoey
phoey writes: It appears that patents on business processes have finally struck a chord with lawyers, specifically tax lawyers. There is currently a court case (Wealth Transfer Group v. Rowe No. 3:2006cv00024) that will decide (if not settled) whether business processes apply to tax law strategies. It will be interesting to see if the ruling is in favor of carving out an exception for tax law strategies, overturning the ruling from State Street making business processes unpatentable, or neither. State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. Jul. 23, 1998).

With little real world experience in law (currently in my second year of law school concentrating in Intellectual Property), I was surprised by the analogy drawn by the patent attorney in the article. He mentions that doctor's have learned to deal with patents on the medical devices they use, so lawyers will have to learn to deal with patents on business processes. The better analogy would be if Doctor's could not perform a particular surgery or surgical technique because it had a business patent. This would most certainly cause outrage in the medical community. As a software engineer, I have seen first hand how patents on business processes (especially obvious ones) can limit innovation in the software development field. It will be interesting to see how the "self-regulating" field of law will resolve this question of patentability of business processes.
Software

Submission + - Burrito FTP to POP3 translator

Submitted by sanimalp
sanimalp writes: With Burrito you can read and manage your e-mails with any FTP client. It acts as a POP3/FTP protocol translator — it's actually an FTP server that translates FTP commands to POP3 commands and serves your e-mail messages as individual files. You can view, delete and copy your e-mail messages as if they were files on an FTP server. It's a pretty interesting solution to a problem no one knew existed.
Security

Submission + - Privatization's effect on access to information

Submitted by
Knutsi
Knutsi writes: "The Federation of American Scientists' blog Secrecy News has an interesting entry on how privatization can affect access to research materiall.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will no longer permit historians and other researchers to have access to its archival records because Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the private contractor that now operates the Lab, says it has "no policy in place" that would allow such access.
The blog tells how a Harvard researcher failed to get access that would have been grated in the past. Follow ups, here and here."
The Internet

Submission + - Broadband Congestion (Slow Speeds)

Submitted by
Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson writes: "That damned movie trailer, you clicked the website link to start playing it over ten minutes ago and it's barely managed to buffer 30% of video. Fair enough, it's 40MB in size, but five minutes!? It should start within seconds and no matter which download server you choose it's the same, but that's not all. Websites are no longer as snappy as they use to be, file downloads take longer and even collecting e-mail has become an increasingly time consuming process.

Where did it all go wrong? Things use to be fine, you might have even upgraded your connection to something faster and yet now the opposite is true. Sadly if this story bares even a slight resemblance to your current level of service then you too could be suffering as a result of broadband congestion.. http://www.ispreview.co.uk/articles/cong ."
Security

Submission + - Duped by Vidoop: New Authentication Scheme Broken

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A new authentication scheme for banks, Vidoop, was unveiled recently that is supposedly invulnerable to "all prevalent forms of hacking" (according to their TV commercial on YouTube). Harvard and CommerceNet researchers announced that they broke the scheme in a few hours, and they posted a video of the attack. The attack is similar to the attack on Bank of America's Sitekey that was demoed by the boarding pass guy and related to the Harvard study on SiteKey that shows how easily users get phished.
Intel

Submission + - Video: Intel's CPU architects talk Penryn, Nehalem

Submitted by Kez
Kez writes: HEXUS.tv has a video interview from IDF 2007 providing an opportunity to get the low-down on Intel's forthcoming Penryn and Nehalem processors straight from two of the guys who designed them — Stephen Fischer and Mark Buxton. From the interview: "We are going to continue to see performance scaling in terms of frequency. Moore's law is not ending on Penryn. The density that we get with this 45nm technology also allows us to add significant capability [to] the die."
Data Storage

Submission + - Data storage at the atomic level

Submitted by
Twyko64
Twyko64 writes: "Science researchers have demonstrated single bit storage at the nanoscale level using a cobalt wire a very few atoms wide. The effect — ballistic anisotropic magnetoresistance — should work with a wire just one atom wide. It's reported in Techworld here:- Researchers claim atomic-level storage — More electron spin? http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?ne wsID=8438&pagtype=samechan Twyko64"
AMD

Submission + - MSI K9AGM2-FIH

Submitted by
John
John writes: "Ever since AMD bought ATI, we've been waiting to see what could be achieved by combining the minds of these two juggernauts. The first offering comes in the form of a new chipset: the 690. This comes in two flavours — the cut-down 690V and the more exciting 690G — and this is one of the first motherboards to feature the 690G. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?revie wid=759"

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