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Space

NASA's New Telescope Finds Exoplanet Atmosphere 124

Posted by timothy from the shhh-they're-sleeping dept.
celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"
Medicine

Medical Papers By Ghostwriters Pushed Hormone Therapy 289

Posted by timothy from the just-keep-a-positive-attitude dept.
krou writes "The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia,' and the apparent 'medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.' The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.'"
Supercomputing

Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip? 598

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-for-one-welcome-our-robotic-overlords dept.
destinyland writes "Can we imprint the circuitry of the human brain onto a silicon chip? It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops — a thousand trillion floating point operations per second — but a team of European scientists has already simulated 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. And their brain-chip is scaleable, with plans to create a superchip mimicking 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. Unfortunately, the human brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence — it can also exceed it."
Graphics

HTML 5 Canvas Experiment Hints At Things To Come 321

Posted by timothy from the faux-phlash dept.
An anonymous reader writes with an interesting and impressive demonstration of modern browsers' HTML 5 capabilities. "From the 9elements blog: 'HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. [...] We've created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML 5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine.' The site warns "(beware: sophisticated browser needed)"; Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine.
OS X

Mac OS X v10.5.8 Ready For Download 152

Posted by timothy from the upgrades-are-for-wimps dept.
mysqlbytes writes "Apple has posted an anticipated v10.5.8 patch for Mac OS X, updating a number of components in the operating system, one of their last updates to Leopard. The update brings improvements to Safari, Airport, Bluetooth, among others and rolls out the latest OS X security fixes." Worth glancing at are some of the security-related notes on the update.
Space

NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth 171

Posted by timothy from the that-was-the-control-group dept.
Matt_dk writes "On Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, the LCROSS spacecraft successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. 'The Earth-look was very successful' said Tony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist. 'The instruments are all healthy and the science teams was able to collect additional data that will help refine our calibrations of the instruments.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."
The Internet

Teen Killed At Chinese Internet Addiction Camp 334

Posted by Soulskill from the symptomatic-overreactions dept.
eldavojohn writes "Sixteen-year-old Deng Senshan was tragically beaten to death by three of his instructors in an internet addiction camp in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China. Reportedly it was for not being able to run fast enough. An article in the Wall Street Journal says that, 'China's netizens have played a key role in drawing nationwide attention to recent cases of deaths in prisons and detention centers, so it should be no surprise that they are up in arms over the fate of one of their own. Many questioned the fairly new diagnosis of "Internet addiction" as a mental disorder.' You may recall electroshock treatment being banned from use on internet addicts in China. According to Xinhua, more than 100 juveniles remain in 'treatment' at the camp, which has stayed open. Perhaps for Senshan it would have been better to let him endure his cruel affliction instead of having his parents pay over $1,000 to have him beaten to death?"

Comment Not a bad idea, but... (Score 1) 1

by amateur6 (#28944569) Attached to: LightLane: Bring Your Own Bike Lane

...but it raises a few issues to my mind:

- "extends up to 10 feet behind" -- that's not really enough to cause much more visibility than lights on the frame; probably less (and yet TFA derides them as insufficient). I can see people driving up really close to try to figure out what's being projected behind the bike.

- Publicity image shows lines projected on BOTH sides of the bike -- I hope they dump the right-hand one. At worst, it will encourage people to ride on the wrong side of the street, whether actually against traffic (where it will be useless anyhow, being BEHIND the cyclist) or on the left side of a one-way street (still a bad habit).

I suspect this will be nothing more than a novelty.
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - A History of Robotron (armchairarcade.com)

Submitted by
blacklily8
blacklily8 writes: "Gamasutra has published our History of Robotron: 2084, Eugene Jarvis' ultimate twitch-game of 1982. Robotron's frantic gameplay, intense difficulty, and elegant control scheme made it a hit in the arcade and a favorite of countless retrogamers. The illustrated article compares the game with Jarvis' earlier hit Defender, describes its gameplay in detail, and traces its roots and impact on later games such as Smash T.V. and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Robotron's gameplay may be intimidating, but never too complex to grasp--with both hands!"
Transportation

Submission + - LightLane: Bring Your Own Bike Lane (altitudeinc.com) 1

Submitted by
Sabre Runner
Sabre Runner writes: "Altitude Inc. — A Product Innovation Firm — will soon be bringing us the LightLane (PDF Article). "[Alex] Tee and Evan Gant, [a mechanical engineer and] an industrial designer at Altitude, have found a new way to keep drivers and cyclists apart. The idea: a bring-your-own bike lane, fashioned by lasers pointed at the asphalt beside your bike that extend up to 10 feet behind you. [...] In the current Altitude concept, the LightLane's red lasers stencil out the familiar lines and symbols denoting a bike path on the ground behind the bike. The illuminated path also comes up on the sides of the bike." [Publicity Image]"

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