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Submission + - Getting Inside the Mind of Islam

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Albert Einstein once said that science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher is one of the first to explore the link between these two realms in the Muslim world. Clinical psychologist Dr. Hisham Abu-Raiya of Tel Aviv University's Bob Shapell School of Social Work is investigating how various Islamic beliefs and practices impact the psychological well-being of its adherents. Among American Muslims, he's attempting to scientifically quantify how the after-effects of the 9/11 attacks have affected mental well-being and what therapeutic role Islam plays, hoping to identify a clinical path for recovery. It is the first study of its kind and has findings applicable to other religions, the researcher says.

Submission + - Physicist Finds Key to the City (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Geoffrey West, a physicist who aimed to unfurl the secrets to urban life discovered a formula that exposes not what makes cities unique, but rather what makes them all the same. Geoffrey West explains, "Look, we all know that every city is unique. That's all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We've found the what"
Security

Submission + - Banknotes go electronic to outwit counterfeiters (newscientist.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Modern banknotes contain up to 50 anti-counterfeiting features, but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, and would also help to simplify banknote tracking.

A team of German and Japanese researchers created arrays of thin-film transistors (TFTs) by carefully depositing gold, aluminium oxide and organic molecules directly onto the notes through a patterned mask, building up the TFTs layer by layer. The result is an undamaged banknote containing around 100 organic TFTs, each of which is less than 250 nanometres thick and can be operated with voltages of just 3V. Such small voltages could be transmitted wirelessly by an external reader, such as the kind that communicates with the RFID tags found on many products

NewScientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827915.200-banknotes-go-electric-to-outwit-counterfeiters.html
Microsoft

Submission + - Kinect is officially coming to PC (gamepron.com)

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: The company explains that there are currently “many” developers applying to Microsoft for the ability to use the system, so Divine Souls won’t be the only one – it seems the hardware will be supported “like joy pad mode”.
Networking

Submission + - Star Trek? US sets out to build photon-based nets (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Raytheon BBN Technologies, $2.1 million to begin building two experimental photon-based optical network technologies that could deliver huge amounts of data and images in lightning fast time on Earth and in space. The research is part of DARPA's Information in a Photon program which is looking to discover and take advantage of the basic information content carrying capabilities of a photon and exploit this information capacity for imaging/sensing and communications applications, the agency stated.
Google

Submission + - Is Apple mimicking Google by planning to expand vo (dbune.com)

Submitted by dbune
dbune writes: Speculation is rife that Apple is planning to expand the voice-based actions on their devices. As of now, iPhone has very limited voice-based actions, which are very basic to say the least. And on the other hand, Android users have a range of voice-based actions at their disposal. Google has steadfastly been expanding their capability of Voice Search and Voice Actions. Voice commands can be used for...

Submission + - Opera 11 release keeps browser relevant, innovativ (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Roberto123
Roberto123 writes: Opera Software today introduced Opera 11, the latest upgrade of its "little browser that could." While it doesn't have the market share of Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, Opera has 150 million users worldwide. The CTO of Opera, though, gives Microsoft credit for finally adopting industry standards like HTML, CSS and Javascript in IE 8 and IE 9.
Science

Submission + - Stanford Researchers Use Wireless To Track The Flu (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: With the help of wireless sensors, Stanford researchers confirmed what most of us suspected. When it comes to infectious viruses, human beings are toast. The researchers outfitted an entire high school population with IEEE 802.15.4 sensors for one day to model what they call a "human contact network." The devices tracked how often people came within the infection-spreading range of other individuals during a typical height-of-flu-season January day. The devices logged more than 760,000 incidents when two people were within 10 feet of each other, roughly the maximum distance that a disease can be transmitted through a cough or sneeze, according to a Stanford report on the project. The researchers ran thousands of simulations of a flu outbreak trying to determine infection rates under various circumstances.
Television

Internet Usage Catches Up With Television In US 119

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-better-lolcats dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Brustein writes that, according to a survey by Forrester Research, the amount of time people spend on the Internet has increased 121 percent over the last five years with Americans now spending as much time using the Internet as they are watching television. And while people younger than 30 years old have spent more time with the Internet than television for several years, Forrester's survey shows that this is the first year that people in older age groups are doing so as well. Forrester's survey also shows a significant increase in the number of people using the Internet to watch streaming video with 33 percent of adults surveyed this year saying they use the Internet to watch video, up from 18 percent in 2007. However the rise of the Internet is not necessarily leading to a drop in television consumption because the Internet, and particularly the mobile Internet, simply creates more opportunities for people to consume media, says analyst Jacqueline Anderson with younger viewers increasingly comfortable with the Internet as the place to watch their television. 'For the younger population, the TV is still important, but where they're getting that content from is changing,' says Anderson. 'For the generations that are coming up, that's where we're going to see the cut.'"
Idle

Submission + - Scientists Identify Head of France's King Henry IV (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by JThaddeus
JThaddeus writes: The Associated Press reports that "After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV". Henry was assassinated in 1610, and his head has been missing his body was dug up and decapitated during the French Revolution. Researchers found features similar to those in royal portraits, and radiocarbon dating confirms that the head dates to the 17th Century. Interestingly, "Perfumers on the team used their professionally trained noses to identify specific embalming substances in the mouth used to hide nasty odors." The results have been published an online medical journal.
The Internet

Michael Moore Posts Julian Assange's Bail 987

Posted by CmdrTaco from the right-is-right dept.
digitaldc quotes Michael Moore in a story running on the Huffington Post where he says "Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail. Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars."
NASA

Voyager 1 Beyond Solar Wind 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the merging-with-the-infinite dept.
healeyb noted that Voyager 1 has now reached a distance from the sun where it is no longer able to detect solar wind. Launched in 1977 to get up close and personal with our solar system's gas giants, scientists estimate that in another 4 years it will cross the heliosphere.
Apache

Submission + - Apache loses vote on Oracle's Java 7 plan (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by gearystwatcher
gearystwatcher writes: The JCP's approved Oracle's Java 7&8 roadmap, with just Apache and Google voting against. This paves the way for ASF's exit from the JCP. Things didn't entirely go Oracle's way, though: while JCPers voted "yes" for the technology, they objected to field of use and licensing restrictions Oracle's imposed on Apache & Project Harmony
Privacy

Submission + - German court rejects claim against P2P user (heise.de) 1

Submitted by
doppelfish
doppelfish writes: "A german court (AG Offenburg) has rejected the desire of the public prosecution office to learn the identity of users from the IPs of computers that were allegedly sharing copyrighted material. A german lawyer firm had filed complaints against the users in the hope of learning the identity of the users so that they could file civil charges against them. The court decided that the ISPs could not be queried for the identities of the users under restriction of commensurability. The court argued that the desire of the public prosecuters ran "against the laws of logic" since the lawyer firm could not prove significant damage besides a single download that they had initiated themselves. The court also denied the complaint about lost sales, arguing that demand would increase artificially when goods, i. e. music files, were availlable for free, leading to an increased number of downloads by people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the music. To back up this decision, the court cited a 2004 Harvard study which shows that the damage to the music industry by P2P sharing networks tends towards zero. The court also denied the charge of intentional sharing, arguing that five common P2P clients "insist" on uploading data without their users knowledge. The court also recognized the strategy of private law firms to file "up to 10'000 criminal complaints" with the only intent of learning the identity of the users for the purpose of filing "exagerated claims against those users". A public prosecutor who asked for his name to be withheld said that public prosecutor offices will strive to obtain more court verdicts in this spirit to relieve their offices from the mass of criminal charges which keep them from prosecuting much more important crimes."

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