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Submission + - Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: DON'T mind the gap. A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Submission + - DNA reveals history of vanished "Paleo-Eskimos"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for over 4,000 years before vanishing around 700 years ago, new analysis shows. The study also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. "A single founding population settled, and endured the harsh environmental conditions of the Arctic, for almost 5,000 years — during which time the culture and lifestyle changed enough to be represented as distinct cultural units," explained Dr Maanasa Raghavan, first author of the new paper.

Submission + - It's Dumb to Tell Kids They're Smart 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at Khan Academy, Salman Khan explains Why I'm Cautious About Telling My Son He's Smart. "Recently," writes Khan, "I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach." According to Dr. Carol Dweck, who Khan cites, the secret to raising smart kids is not telling kids that they are. A focus on effort — not on intelligence or ability — says Dweck, is key to success in school and in life

Submission + - 'MythBusters' drop Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci 1

Submitted by rbrandis
rbrandis writes: In a video announcement Thursday on Discovery Channel, "MythBusters" hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman revealed that longtime co-hosts and fan favorites Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci are no longer on the show.

"This next season we're going back to our origins with just Adam and me," Hyneman said in the video, which explained that the change took hold as of the season's last episode on August 21.

Submission + - Minecraft Creator Markus 'Notch' Persson "Officially Over Being Upset About Face (roadtovr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite backing the Oculus Rift Kickstarter for $10,000 and subsequently being one of the first people to get his hands on the Oculus Rift DK1, the creator of the wildly popular Minecraft (2011), Markus "Notch" Persson, quickly spoke out against the Facebook purchase of Oculus VR, saying that the social media giant “creeps me out.” Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey responded shortly thereafter. “He had the Rift for a year and had not even tried the Minecraft mod (which is really good), much less done any exploration work. I think Notch is a super cool guy, but it is really easy to “cancel” a project that was never started as an out,” he wrote in a Facebook comment. Nearly six months later, the dust has firmly settled and Persson says he’s over it.

Submission + - Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic, and Blockly

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As teachers excitedly tweet about completing their summer CS Professional Development at Google and Microsoft, and kids get ready to go back to school, Code.org is inviting educators to check out their K-5 Computer Science Curriculum (beta), which is slated to launch in September (more course details). The content, Code.org notes, is a blend of online activities ("engineers from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter helped create this tutorial," footnotes explain) and 'unplugged' activities, lessons in which students can learn computing concepts with or without a computer. It's unclear if he's reviewed the material himself, but Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is grateful for the CS effort ("Thank you for teaching our students these critical skills"). By the way, if you missed Lollapalooza, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) will partner with Google next week to offer the two-day CPS Googlepalooza Conference.

Submission + - Figuring Out Where To Live Using Math (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dave Munson was thinking about moving, and had a couple broad requirements for a new home: it must be affordable, and its neighborhood must be walkable. Price is easy to chart, but how do you compare the walkability of hundreds of cities? Simple: use math. A website called Walk Score provides rough walkability ratings, but doesn't tell you much about affordability. Munson downloaded the data that went into a city's Walk Score, weighted the relevant variables, and mapped the top results. Then he looked for overlap with the map of areas in his price range. He says, "Capitol Hill, Seattle led the pack. To be honest, I was expecting something a smaller, affordable Midwest town or something, but it the highest scoring areas were usually just outside of major downtowns. Other top areas included Cambridge and Somerville outside of Boston, and the South End in Boston; Columbia Heights, Washington, DC; The Mission District, Lower Haight, and Russian Hill, San Francisco; Midtown, Atlanta; Greenwood, Dyker Heights, Kensington, and Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn; Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, where we used to live; Lake View, Chicago; and Five Points, Denver."

Submission + - IRS lost Lois Lerner's emails in tea party probe (cbsnews.com) 1

Submitted by ABEND
ABEND writes: The IRS claims it cannot access Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division Lois Lerner's email prior to 2011 due to a crash of Ms. Lerner's PC during that year. These emails are considered to be important for the investigation into IRS targeting of specific organizations based on their political affiliations. The specifics of the "crash" have not yet been revealed but, anecdotally, my PC has crashed many times without the loss of any email. What could have caused Ms. Lerner's emails to have been lost?

Submission + - Dell Exec Calls HP's New 'Machine' Architecture 'Laughable' (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: HP's revelation that it's working on a radical new computing architecture that it's dubbed 'The Machine' was met with excitement among tech observers this week, but one of HP's biggest competitors remains extremely unimpressed. John Swanson, the head of Dell's software business, said that 'The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it.' And Jai Memnon, Dell's research head, said that phase-change memory is the memory type in the pipeline mostly like to change the computing scene soon, not the memristors that HP is working on.

Submission + - How Florida cops went door to door with fake cell device to find one man (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the early morning hours of September 13, 2008, a woman notified the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD) that she had been raped and that her purse, containing her mobile phone, had been stolen. Within 24 hours, the Florida capital’s police had contacted Verizon and obtained real-time ping information, which gave the police a “general area” where they might find the phone and thus, hopefully, the perpetrator of the crime. But that general area still covered plenty of ground—where exactly was the phone? ... After learning the phone's general location, Tallahassee cops deployed a vehicle-mounted stingray and cruised the streets. Verizon had already provided them with the phone's unique IMSI identifier, which told the stingray exactly which handset to track. (“Stingray” is a trademarked product manufactured by Florida-based Harris Corporation, though it has since come to be used as a generic term, like Xerox or Kleenex.) ...

Eventually, Corbitt and his colleagues detected the phone inside apartment 251, the residence of a woman who was also hosting her boyfriend, the suspect James Thomas. Officers knocked on the door; when it opened, one inserted his foot in the opening to keep it from being closed again. Police then conducted a "protective sweep" of the apartment and waited while a search warrant was obtained. ...

This newly released transcript (PDF) provides what is likely the first-ever verbatim account of how stingrays are used in actual police operations. And it shows that stingrays are so accurate, they can pinpoint the very room in which a phone is located.

Submission + - Daniel Ellsberg criticizes Kerry for calling Snowden a coward and traitor (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defence Department staff who leaked the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers to the New York Times has some harsh criticism of Kerry's recent call for Snowden to come back to USA and "man up".

"Nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterisations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," he concludes.

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