5695939
submission
netczar writes:
According to a report by Patrik Fältström, Sweden's regulatory body, PTS, has notified the country's top-level domain registry .SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) to blacklist sequence of characters 'b', 'a', 'n', and 'k' in all domain name registrations under the .se domain. Patrick writes: 'This is, as people know (except PTS obviously), is not how domain name registration works. Instead, one is strengthening the dispute resolution process so that it is more well known what will happen if some infringement is happening. Next step is of course to have more terms than 'bank' be added to this black list. Like registered trademarks in the world, and other terms. For example everything in Wikipedia!'
5695025
submission
one_neuron_two_neuron writes:
Researchers at Harvard have taken a new look at how electricity can make neurons in the brain fire.
The scientists found some surprising things: if you stick an electrode in the brain and apply current, you don't just make a small group of neurons fire — many neurons fire a long way away from the electrode. That's probably because instead of activating the cell bodies of the neurons, what happens instead is that their axons fire. Those axons are the wiring of the brain. Your cerebral cortex is something like a big pile of unwound yoyos — if you stick an electrode into the cortex you're much more likely to hit the strings (the axons), and the yoyo connected to the string can be really far away.
So now how will you ever hook up a computer to your brain? This data shows that we need to rethink how to do that with electrical current. Stick an electrode in one place, and neurons in a totally different place will fire. New optogenetic methods (e.g. using viral delivery of proteins) might work. Or possibly we will figure out how to make the brain learn to interpret these sparse, widespread electrical patterns.
New optical techniques have made a dramatic impact on neuroscience recently, and this study uses pulsed-laser-scanning microscopy (two-photon microscopy) to take pictures of neurons deep inside the living brain. There are some pretty pictures from the journal (Neuron). And the paper is free on the authors' site.
5693927
submission
eldavojohn writes:
A new paper by Lorenzo Maccone now published in the Physical Review Letters suggests a solution to a well known paradox concerning the second law of thermodynamics. This paradox — known as Loschmidt's Paradox — is solved if we assume that quantum mechanics holds true on all scales. The paper shows that entropy can both increase and decrease. The catch being that if the event leaves information behind, it can only increase. Essentially, time reversible phenomena can exist, they just cannot be observed since they do not leave information behind. So while this means you're not going to be able to reverse a glass falling to the floor and shattering, it does solve the conundrum of physics being time-invariant. The summary of the paper states, 'All phenomena where the entropy decreases must not leave any information of their having happened. This situation is completely indistinguishable from their not having happened at all. In the light of
this observation, the second law of thermodynamics is reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study those processes where entropy has decreased, even if they were commonplace.' So things could be happening backwards, we just can't study them.
5693795
submission
Talinom writes:
AnandTech has a writeup on how ClearQAM appears to be headed for an early death. From the article — "At this point there's no reason to believe that cable companies won't deploy Privacy Mode across their networks, so it's a matter of "when", not "if" this will happen. It goes without saying that if you're currently enjoying the use of a ClearQAM tuner to receive EB tier channels, you'll want to enjoy what time you have left, and look in to other solutions for the long-haul. At this pace, it looks like cable TV and computers will soon be divorcing."
