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NASA

NASA Says Asteroid Will Buzz Earth Closer Than Many Satellites 225

Posted by samzenpus from the skin-of-your-teeth dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15 closer than many man-made satellites. NASA added that while the asteroid, designated 2012 DA14, has no chance of striking Earth. Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet."
Science

Walk or Run: Are We Built To Be Lazy? 189

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-it-easy dept.
sciencehabit writes "A quick visit to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks shows just how many ways humans (or at least British comedians) can think of to travel from point A to point B. So why don't we high kick our way to the bus stop or skip to the grocery store? New research suggests that there may be a deep biomechanical reason governing the gaits we choose in different situations. In short, people consistently choose to walk when they need to travel slower than 2 m/s to reach their goal in the given time; when they needed to move about 3 m/s or faster, they ran. But in between—in 'the twilight zone between walking and running'—people tended to mix the two gaits, minimizing their energy expenditure. The findings could help scientists design better prosthetic limbs and even build more human-like robots"

Comment Readadability (Score 1) 102

by fotoguzzi (#42737567) Attached to: NZ Copyright Tribunal Fines First File-Sharer
original: NZ Copyright Tribunal Fines First File-Sharer
readable: NZ Copyright-Tribunal Fines First File-Sharer
still readable: NZ Copyright-Tribunal Fines First File Sharer

Copyright could be a noun, adjective, or verb. Fines could be a noun or verb. My first impression was that New Zealand was copyrighting something. I'm not sure why headlines have to have each word capitalized--I'm not even going to read the summary.

Comment Re:Wait, what? (Score 1) 379

by fotoguzzi (#42725845) Attached to: Perl's Glory Days Are Behind It, But It Isn't Going Anywhere
The Learning Perl book always showed more than one way to do it but usually advised that the boss might not go for some of the clever examples and that readable code was a laudable objective. I understand that with Python there is often only one way to do something. How about Ruby? Is it somewhere in the middle? And would forum regulars eventually try to rewrite your code to nothing or would they tell you how to improve what you had which almost worked?
The Military

Submission + - DARPA investigating self-destructing electronics (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Modern electronics are cheap, tough and can operate for years without a hitch. That’s great for building advanced military gear, but what happens if this gear is in danger of falling into enemy hands? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program is investigating the development of special electronics designed to self-destruct on command so as to prevent classified technology being leaked.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Valve quietly releases Half-Life for Linux, Mac (playerattack.com)

Submitted by dotarray
dotarray writes: Just when you thought nothing in gaming could be done quietly, it seems that Valve has done away with the fanfares and the fireworks, releasing beta versions of Half-Life for both Linux and Mac OSX without actually telling anyone.
News

Submission + - Machine gun fire from military helicopters flying over downtown Miami (miamiherald.com) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Multiple police agencies and the military are currently (Monday night) conducting training exercises over Miami and elsewhere in the county. The exercise includes military helicopters firing machine-gun blanks while flying over highways and buildings.

This YouTube video shows helicopters strafing highways with blank rounds near the Adrian Arts center.

There are reports of similar actions in Houston

From the Houston article: "if you see the helicopters or hear gunfire, it's only a drill."

Not to be alarmist or anything, but, um... WTF?

Submission + - UK defense contractor hacked, confidential documents leaked (cyberwarnews.info)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Britam, a UK defense contractor company was hacked and a collection of confidential documents were released. The documents include a passports, incident reports, contracts and also a very controversial e-mail in which Britam reveal an "approved by Washington" plan to stage a chemical weapons attack in Syria and blame the Assad regime for it.
Government

Submission + - DARPA wants electronics that can dissolve or burst apart after use (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "he Mission: Impossible TV show famously started most episodes with a tape recorded mission message that ended with: "This tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds, good luck Jim." Then it melted down in a burst of smoke and flame.
DARPA researchers seem to want to take that sort of destructive notion quite a few steps further by designing electronics — particularly smart phones and other devices — that can melt or at least partially dissolve to the point that they would be useless to anyone else who came across them."

Submission + - Scientists Unravel Mysteries to Spider Silk Strength Using Lasers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: They may be creepy and crawly, but spiders produce some of the world's strongest material: silk. Weight for weight, spider silk is five times as strong as piano wire. Now, scientists at Arizona Statue University have announced that they have found a way to obtain a wide variety of elastic properties of the silk of several intact spiders' webs using a sophisticated laser light scattering technique.
Linux

Submission + - Accessible Computing Foundation Creating Fully Accessible GNU/Linux Distro

Submitted by
elwin_windleaf
elwin_windleaf writes: "The Accessible Computing Foundation's Jonathan Nadeau has started an IndieGoGo campaign to create a GNU/Linux distribution that's focused on accessibility. With 360 million blind and low vision people around the world, and most accessibility software being proprietary and prohibitively expensive, this distro could make a world of difference.

Jonathan is a blind GNU/Linux user himself who, in addition to starting the Accessible Computing Foundation, also organizes the annual Northeast GNU/Linuxfest."
Earth

Submission + - George P. Shultz: A Cold Warrior on a Warming Planet (sagepub.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Great interview in this article at the Bulletin's subscription journal (this article is free). From the abstract: "In this interview, he talks about two missions: reducing nuclear weapons and reducing carbon emissions. Shultz defends the Reagan administration’s strategy for nuclear weapons reduction, including Reagan’s unwillingness to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative...He recommends a revenue-neutral carbon tax for combating climate change, arguing that such a tax can level the energy playing field by forcing energy producers to bear a cost for polluting the air.
Government

Submission + - Unseen, All-Out Cyber War On The U.S. Has Begun (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Security pros and government officials warn of a possible cyber 9/11 involving banks, utilities, other companies, or the Internet, InfoWorld reports. 'A cyber war has been brewing for at least the past year, and although you might view this battle as governments going head to head in a shadow fight, security experts say the battleground is shifting from government entities to the private sector, to civilian targets that provide many essential services to U.S. citizens. The cyber war has seen various attacks around the world, with incidents such as Stuxnet, Flame, and Red October garnering attention. Some attacks have been against government systems, but increasingly likely to attack civilian entities. U.S. banks and utilities have already been hit.'"

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