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Biotech

Chemical Cocktail Can Keep a Heart Viable 10 Days, Outside the Body 97

Posted by timothy from the with-very-few-exceptions-not-a-worm dept.
nj_peeps writes "Harvard professor Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the Sanskrit for 'ambrosia of rejuvenation.' Using Somah, Thatte and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest — far longer than the four-hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab."
Programming

Clojure and Heroku Predict Flight Delays 109

Posted by kdawson from the fully-buzzword-compliant dept.
murphee writes "Flight delayed again? Should have asked FlightCaster, a new site using statistical analysis to predict the delay of your flight in real-time. What's even better, the services is fully buzzword compliant: it's built with Clojure, distributed with Hadoop, served with Rails, and hosted on Heroku. This interview with one of the FlightCaster developers gives the gory details on architecture, Clojure tips, and your boss a reason to let you have all the multimethods and macros you can eat. Seems like now that O'Reilly's publishing a LISP book, the Age of Parenthesus has come..."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Valve Discusses Team Fortress 2's Future 135

Posted by Soulskill from the improving-and-evolving dept.
The Escapist chatted with Valve's Robin Walker about how the Team Fortress 2 team has been listening to feedback and continually updating the game to fix problems and add to the gameplay experience. Walker mentions that ideas for new classes are "floating around," and that a new mode of play will be introduced soon. "'Players have driven our entire approach to designing achievements, the way we tie unlockables to those achievements and the design of those new weapons themselves. The choices we made within the Medic and Heavy updates were very much the result of the ways that players have used that combination of classes within the game. The addition of the payload game mode came from players requesting an old Team Fortress Classic map called Hunted, and describing what they did and didn't like in that map.' ... The Scout is the next class slated for the special treatment, and Walker expects the update will be available early this year. Additionally, the team is juggling a number of side projects at the moment, including finally bringing a year's worth of the downloadable content and upgrades to the Xbox 360 version of the game. A new Payload map is in the works, more community maps are on the way and the team will soon unveil a very different new game mode."
Image

Sniping Could Be the Next Killer iPod App Screenshot-sm 461

Posted by samzenpus from the pull-up-your-kill-list dept.
An anonymous Coward writes "Knights Armament Corp. who supply sniper rifles to the US military have developed a iPod Touch mounting system and software for the US Army M110 sniper rifle system. The use of off the shelf hardware no doubt cut costs and allowed rapid development of this system." If it automatically played a theme song after every head shot, this would be the coolest rifle accessory ever.
United States

National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit 696

Posted by timothy from the but-don't-worry-balanced-budget's-a-crazy-idea dept.
hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the US debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Politics

Map of Web Content By Perspective 79

Posted by timothy from the imperfect-but-neat dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cruxlux has a perspective-based search engine up. It provides a map of results laid out by viewpoint. For example, querying 'Obama' shows a map with liberal blog posts, articles, and video clumped together, conservative stuff nearby, and nonpolitical sources farther away. It works for nonpolitical queries too (sports, etc.). It also lets you limit results to certain types of views — you can focus on hot 'Obama' content from a liberal angle, for instance."
Yahoo!

Security Flaw In Yahoo Mail Exposes Plaintext Authentication Info 66

Posted by Soulskill from the who-needs-encryption-anyway dept.
holdenkarau writes "Yahoo!'s acquisition of open source mail client Zimbra has apparently brought some baggage to the mail team. The new Yahoo! desktop program transmits the authentication information in plain text. The flaw was discovered during a Yahoo 'hacku' Day at the University of Waterloo (the only Canadian school part of the trip). Compared to the recent news about Gmail exposing the names associated with accounts, this seems downright scary. So, if you have friends or relatives who might have installed Yahoo! desktop and value their e-mail accounts, now would be a good time to get them to change the password and switch back to the web interface."

Comment Re:Group punishment? (Score 2, Interesting) 156

by tgacid (#22682348) Attached to: Chicago Links School Cameras To Police
On one hand, it could be seen as a punishment against a group, but how much of a punishment is it to have a security camera installed to monitor your own safety? I know my school installed outward-facing security cameras after some deadly violence not to actively go after any troublemakers on the grounds, but to have the option to reconstruct any scenes/entries of people entering the building in case anything did happen.
Programming

When Should We Ditch Our Platform? 622

Posted by kdawson from the future-shock dept.
odoketa writes "My organization recently had to replace our Web developer. It took us an extremely long time to find someone with the necessary skill set. I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us. It's easy to assume that languages or platforms are popular based on buzz, but the rubber hits the road when you have to hire someone to maintain that code. How are folks out there determining when you've backed the wrong horse, and getting back on track?"
The Internet

Submission + - TV-Links.co.uk Shut Down (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
IanW
IanW writes: "One of the world's most-used pirate film websites has been closed after providing links to illegal versions of major Hollywood hits and TV shows. The arrest and the closure of the site — www.tv-links.co.uk — came during an operation by officers from Gloucestershire County Council trading standards in conjunction with investigators from Fact and Gloucestershire Police."
Programming

Submission + - Speed up your Ajax applications

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To eliminate redundancy and memory leaks and reduce the amount of bandwidth and the number of small HTTP requests, you must plan ahead on creating, testing, and deploying Ajax performance improvement projects. This article will help you resolve these issues and make your job of speeding up Ajax applications easier.
Security

Submission + - Warning of wi-fi Browser Cookie Hijack (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
tgacid
tgacid writes: "Using public wi-fi hotspots has got much riskier as security experts unveil tools that nab login data over the air. Demonstrated at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, these new tools make it far easier to steal account details. Identifying files called cookies are stolen in the attack which let hackers pose as their victim. This gives attackers access to mail messages or the page someone maintains on sites such as MySpace or Facebook."

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