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Science

Multicellular Life Evolves In Months, In a Lab 285

ananyo writes "The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth's history, could have occurred with surprising speed, U.S. researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labor, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce. Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study. The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells."

Comment Unity... it unites everyone in not liking it. (Score 1) 798

I use Ubuntu because out of the box, it has the best looking console. I like the excellent readability of font it uses, and i like the how the color scheme works really we ll with vi's syntax highlighting. To me the console is genius. I don't really like unity, it changes things up, yet offers no new innovations, or no new features, or anything compelling from the user experience point of view. Theres nothing in unity that has grown on me. There is nothing i really like, or hate for that matter. Mr. Shuttleworth says its a forward looking change that in the future the desktop won't exist and unity will be running on whatever replaces it. It seems there is currently no shortage of OS options in the sub desktop category, and Ubuntu will be the late entry to this market which is already pretty cut throat. His argument seems pretty absurd. To have a chance be significant in that market it would need to have some significant innovation, but its just a coat of paint over some stale features that aren't even new to the desktop. Unity is pretentious and I'm embarrass to use it. It just feels dirty.

Comment flywheels at a consumer level (Score 1) 325

When i was in engineering school a classmate did a presentation on using flywheels at a consumer level. You buy it and put in in your house and it soaks up at offpeak times and delivers during peak times. Using flywheels at the consumer level also has the advantage of using the resource of lines during peak times, as only so much electricity can saftely travel through a line. The biggest challenge to this method is that detail of the power consumption/generation would have to be exposed to the consumer so that these device would understand when to best consume or release energy.

Comment mobile providers are like junkies (Score 2) 182

They keep raising prices on a service that gets cheaper every year. They use fraudulent billing practices. They don't compete in prices. They have convinced everyone on the planet they need a cellphone and every child over the age of 4 needs one for their safety. I look at my cellphone bill, and wonder how could they be so desperate for more money they have to resort to this level of depravity? They exhibit the same pattern as coke/crack heads. They will never have enough money, and they will resort to shadier and shadier practices to keep the coke flowing.
PlayStation (Games)

USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s 163

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create what the organization is calling the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department. The Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS), according to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell."

Comment Re:Install Ubuntu (Score 2, Interesting) 823

OTOH, installing XP was easy, everything on the laptop works, she has OFFICE (which all her friends have, and makes it VERY easy. Instead of hearing "lucy does it this way, why doesn't my computer work that way", I now hear "This is great. I have the same thing as Lucy, and when I had a problem last night, I could call her instead of you!!!".

I call shenanigans on this. I know my grandmother doesn't use an office productivity suite. I doubt many others do, as the Microsoft office cost $$$$, and it would only confuse them. What are they doing, sending bingo announcements in PPT. Anyways, just give them a gmail account. It will let them view office docs as html. Problem solved.

Earth

Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming 492

SUNSTOP writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Maryland scientist has proposed a public patent that he claims could combat global warming. The proposed plan would require massive amounts of water to be sprayed into the air in an effort to bolster the earth's existing air conditioning system. "First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation. Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University whose computer simulation of Ace's invention suggests it would significantly cool the planet. The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said."
Education

Why the Widening Gender Gap In Computer Science? 1563

ruheling writes "From yesterday's New York Times: ' What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?' In many US universities, over the past decade, there has been deliberate effort to integrate and encourage women and girls to get more involved in the 'hard' sciences, engineering, and math. However, instead of the proportion of women to men increasing, in Computer Science the opposite is actually true. Specifically, in 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. Now many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. What's going on here, folks?"
United States

Discuss the US Presidential Election & Health Care 1270

Yesterday we discussed the war and how foreign policy will matter in your decision next Tuesday. Today our series of election discussion pieces continues with Health Care. With an obesity epidemic, a failing economy, and ballooning health care costs, which candidate has the best answers to making sure that Americans are able to stay healthy without America being bankrupted in the process?
Privacy

Maryland Police Put Activists' Names On Terror List 426

aaandre writes with word of a Washington Post story which begins: "The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. The police also entered the activists' names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a 'primary crime' of 'terrorism-anti-government' and a 'secondary crime' of 'terrorism-anti-war protesters.'" According to the article, "Both [former state police superintendent Thomas] Hutchins and [Maryland Police Superintendent Terrence] Sheridan said the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries." Reader kcurtis adds "The State Police say they are purging the data, but this is one more example (on top of yesterday's news that datamining for terrorists is not feasible due to false positives) of just how badly the use of these lists can be abused."
Education

Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161

An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
Government

Commerce Department Pushing For New "Copyright Czar" 294

TechDirt is reporting that those all-too-familiar "stats" surrounding the cost of piracy are being trotted out in an attempt to push through a new "Copyright Czar" position. "In urging President Bush to sign into law the ProIP bill, which would give him a copyright czar (something the Justice Department had said it doesn't want), the US Chamber of Commerce is claiming that 750,000 American jobs have been lost to piracy. Yet, it doesn't cite where that number comes from."

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