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Submission + - Researchers seek the origins of an early Analog Computer (nytimes.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: The Antikythera Mechanism is described as an early analog computer, used to predict the time of eclipses, and for astrological and astronomic instruction. Speculation about its origin has ranged from attributing it to different Greek Mathemeticians and thinkers, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Posidonius, Current research suggests its origin may be much earlier, and its working based on Babylonian arithmetical methods rather than Greek Trigonometry, which did not exist at the time. From the article, "Writing this month in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Carman and Dr. Evans took a different tack. Starting with the ways the device’s eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the “epoch date,” or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism’s calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed."

Submission + - France Wants To Get Rid Of Diesel Fuel

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: France wants to gradually phase out the use of diesel fuel for private passenger transport and will put in place a system to identify the most polluting vehicles, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Friday. Next year, the government will launch a car identification system that will rank vehicles by the amount of pollution they emit, Valls said in a speech. This will make it possible for local authorities to limit city access for the dirtiest cars. "In France, we have long favoured the diesel engine. This was a mistake, and we will progressively undo that, intelligently and pragmatically," Valls said. About 80 percent of French motorists drive diesel-powered cars. Valls said taxation would have to orient citizens towards more ecological choices, notably the 2015 state budget measures to reduce the tax advantage of diesel fuel versus gas.

Submission + - Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering on 2012 Election 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a political party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state’s 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "”If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."

The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"

Submission + - iSight Partners reports Russian Hacker Attack (reuters.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Not sure I should bother posting this, it's redundant. Reuters reports that Russian hackers attacked NATO and European Union computers with infected email attachments to exploit a vulnerability in Windows. From the article, "ISight said it did not know what data had been found by the hackers, though it suspected they were seeking information on the Ukraine crisis, as well as diplomatic, energy and telecom issues, based on the targets and the contents of phishing emails used to infect computers with tainted files."

Submission + - State of Iowa tells Tesla to cancel its Scheduled Test Drives (desmoinesregister.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Conflict between state governments and Tesla continue. From the article, "Iowa joined a growing list of states tussling with Tesla Motors' business model when it told the company to cut short three days of test drives earlier this month in West Des Moines. The Iowa Department of Transportation said the test drives were illegal for two reasons: Tesla isn't licensed as an auto dealer in Iowa and state law prohibits carmakers from selling directly to the public." While the article touches on the legal restrictions on selling cars in Iowa, it seems that Tesla was only providing test drives.

Submission + - Microsoft is reportedly buying 'Minecraft' developer Mojang for $2 billion

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Microsoft is in talks to buy Minecraft's developer, Mojang, according to a few different sources. The Wall Street Journal says that the ever loose-lipped "person familiar with the matter" has noted the deal is valued at over $2 billion, while reps for both Redmond and the Swedish developer remain mum on the subject. The New York Times reports that Microsoft approached Mojang as early as three months ago and the purchase should be finished by the end of this month. Perhaps most interesting though is that should the deal go through, Notch might not stay past six months after the ink has dried. Why? He likely wants to make sure his employees are being well taken care of.

Submission + - Fukushima Thyroid Cancer Data released (asahi.com) 1

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "The number of young people in Fukushima Prefecture who have been diagnosed with definitive or suspected thyroid gland cancer, a disease often caused by radiation exposure, now totals 104, according to prefectural officials. Of these 104, including 68 women, the number of definitive cases is 57, and one has been diagnosed with a benign tumor. The size of the tumors varies from 5 to 41 millimeters and averages 14 mm."

Submission + - Google Chrome 64-bit Stable Arrives For Windows

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Along with the launch of 32-bit Chrome 37, Google today also released the 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows 7 and Windows 8 in the stable channel. Nevertheless, going 64-bit is still an opt-in process: to take advantage you have to hit the new "Windows 64-bit" download link over at google.com/chrome. Google first launched Chrome 64-bit back in June, but only in the browser’s Dev and Canary channels. The beta channel received the same treatment in July, and now it’s finally available in the stable channel.

Submission + - Stanford team creates stable Lithium Anode using Honeycomb Film (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: A team at Stanford has created a stable Lithium anode battery using a carbon honeycomb film. The film is described as a nanosphere layer that allows for the expansion of Lithium during use, and is suitable as a barrier between anode and cathode. Use of a lithium anode improves the coulombic efficiency and could result in longer range batteries for cars.

Submission + - The hacking of NASDAQ (businessweek.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Businessweek has an account of the 2010 hacking of the NASDAQ exchange. From the article, "Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. “We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I’ll put it that way, and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is,” says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. “The bad news of that equation is, I’m not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.”"

Comment Crack team of Scientists (Score 1) 198

The review was reviewed by a crack team of scientists at the University of Halabalaga. The reason for the findings are that Yeti/Bigfoot RNA is made up of horse, bear, porcupine, wolves and dogs, is the Yeti/Bigfoot are a cross between horse, bear, porcupine, wolves and dogs. I'd like to thank the academics and researchers at the University for their cracker jack work, and wish them well in the continued research and pursuit of these elusive creatures.

Submission + - Firefox to support VR/Oculus Rift (cnet.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "Mozilla programmers have begun a project to adapt the Web for virtual-reality interfaces such as the Oculus Rift, starting with test versions of its own Firefox browser. "We are adding native support for VR devices to early experimental builds of Firefox, so that Web developers can start experimenting with adding VR interactivity to their websites and content," said Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla engineering director in charge of gaming and special projects, in a blog post Thursday. "This is only the first of many steps that we'll be taking over the coming weeks and months.""

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