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Medicine

This Chip Can Tell If You've Been Poisoned 36

sciencehabit writes "When you are dealing with a deadly poison that can be found in food and is a potential terrorist weapon, you want the best detection tools you can get. Now, researchers in France have demonstrated an improved method to detect the most deadly variant of the botulinum neurotoxin, which causes botulism. Their test — essentially, a lab on a tiny chip (abstract) — provides results faster than the standard method and accurately detects even low concentrations of the toxin."

Comment Re:Don't worry about that (Score 2) 166

I'm with you guys. I lived overseas when I signed up for Grand Central, which became Google Voice, so I could get a US number for my mom to call me on, that I would route to a skype number (it's harder to keep the same skype dial-in number if you're as forgetful as me at keeping a balance on it).

Now I have Google Voice going to an app on an old iPhone with no cell service, and use WiFi for 99% of my calls, occasionally sending the traffic to any number of 'burner' phones if I won't be near WiFi.

The funny thing is I had never noticed the MMS issue.

When I'm at the computer, I use the Hangouts plugin for chrome to make and receive calls and it works well, where before I had to be logged into the right Gmail account and have the page open for it to ring. If you use Chrome, I highly recommend it.

Comment Re:Middle Initial (Score 3, Funny) 227

Jerry: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck...
Alice: What about them?
Jerry: Serial killers. Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman...
Alice: John Hinckley. He shot Reagan. He only has two names.
Jerry: Yeah, but he only just shot Reagan. Reagan didn't die. If Reagan had died, I'm pretty sure we probably would all know what John Hinckley's middle name was.

Comment Re:Until you experience the speed ... (Score 1) 338

I had gigabit in Japan in 2007 or do, as did my girlfriend across town.
I could mount a disk at her place using AFP and a little port forwarding and play movies from her disk as well as if they were on my desktop.

Seriously sweet, especially considering that in around 1999 or 2000, the best you could get was 56K ISDN and evening rates where you didn't pay by the minute.

Comment Pity (Score 5, Interesting) 51

It was a very simple, very clear service that I could actually use with non-technical clients for project management.

Good thing is, you could probably duplicate the functionality in Ruby on Rails in a weekend

Comment Re:New thing same as the old thing (Score 1) 80

3D scanning is really important. Whenever we figure out how to do it faster/cheaper/easier, that's important. 3D scanning is useful for all kinds of future activities, from the maker movement (3D printer + 3D scanner = 3D copier), to gaming (eg. Kinect), to driving (eg. DARPA Grand Challenge), to mobile devices (eg. Google Glasses).

Comment Re:of course... (Score 5, Insightful) 280

whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors? Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

If non-metallic guns were truly viable, they would have been used 20 years ago to sneak past metal detectors and kill judges and politicians and airplane pilots. Plastic manufacturing has been around for a long time, the only thing 3D printers do is reduce the cost. There are well-funded spy agencies and a few individuals who would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single gun. And yet none has materialized: [1] [2] [3]

Comment Re:liability (Score 1) 68

I can only speak to how my local hackerspace handles it, I don't know how others do.

At this one, most power tools are owned by individual members. If someone gets hurt and wants to sue someone, the only person they can sue is the individual owner. On one hand, this sucks because it puts all the burden on individuals' shoulders. On the other hand, it decreases the chance that someone tries to pay legal fees from prospective damage awards, because damages are likely to be very small, so it reduces the chance someone will lawyer up.

Our hackerspace hasn't had any incidents yet, so I don't know how well this plays out in practice.

Communications

Google Drops XMPP Support 416

Cbs228 writes "During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users. Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype." Interesting, because Google Wave was based on XMPP and Google was integral to the creation of the Jingle extension that enabled video chatting over XMPP. Note that no end date has been set for Talk yet, but the end must surely be nigh given Google's recent history of axing products like Reader and CalDAV support from their calendar app without much notice.

Comment x86 Assembly Language (Score 1) 185

I would recommend teaching her x86 Assembly Language.
The instructions are simple little things like MOV, PUSH, POP, CALL, and INT. She can and should comment heavily and that can be in any language.
The mnemonics come from English, but are abstracted enough that they shouldn't turn her off for language's sake.
The concepts are basic as well. What she learns now will always be relevant. Consider this:
[...] a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a processing unit consisting of an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers, a control unit containing an instruction register and program counter, a memory to store both data and instructions, external mass storage, and input and output mechanisms.
Von Neumann wrote that in 1945 and it all still applies today.

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