Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Progress reported in creating "homo minutus" -- a benchtop human to test drugs (vanderbilt.edu)

Submitted by Science_afficionado
Science_afficionado writes: Vanderbilt University scientists reported significant progress toward creating "homo minutus" — a benchtop human — at the Society of Toxicology meeting on Mar. 26 in Phoenix. The advance is the successful development and analysis of a human liver construct//organ-on-a-chip that responds to exposure to a toxic chemical much like a real liver. The achievement is the first result from a five-year, $19 million multi-institutional effort led by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to develop four interconnected human organ constructs — liver, heart, lung and kidney — that are based on a highly miniaturized platform nicknamed ATHENA (Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer). The project is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Similar programs to create smaller-scale organs-on-chips are underway at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

Submission + - That BBC "100 Books" List is a Giant Hoax (beyond-black-friday.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: “The BBC believes you only read 6 of these books” reads the headline on countless Facebook posts, forum comments, and web pages. But it's a hoax, conflating a 2007 list from Britain's Guardian newspaper (which had simply asked their readers to name which books "they can't live without.") The readers selected The Lord of the Rings trilogy and books from the Harry Potter series — but one reporter notes that the entertaining list is skewed heavily toward British authors. Six of the 100 books were written by Charles Dickens and four by Jane Austen — while not a single book on the list was written by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner.

Submission + - Steve Jobs Smiled After Getting Google Employee Fired For Recruiting Apple Man (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Freshly unsealed court documents show that Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt a smiley face emoticon :) after getting a Google employee instantly fired for attempting to recruit an Apple engineer by email.

Schmidt and Jobs agreed an illegal and secret non-solicitation pact in 2005 which broke US antitrust laws by agreeing not to poach employees from each other. Their agreement eventually spread across the tech recruitment market in Silicon Valley.

Now an enormous class-action lawsuit encompassing 64,000 engineers is underway, brought by five engineers who used to work for the six companies who claim that their former employers conspired to suppress wages to "artificially low levels", and court documents have recently been unsealed containing a series of incriminating emails sent between Schmidt and Jobs.

Submission + - Driverless vehicle already in use in Europe (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: A driverless golf cart-like vehicle has hit the market and is already in use on some college campuses in Europe, including Oxford University. The all-electric Navia looks like a golf cart and, with a maximum speed of 28 miles per hour but a recommended speed of about 12 mph, is typically used as a driverless shuttle service. For those at a location where the shuttles are available, a mobile app allows them to both order a shuttle to pick them up and provide a destination. The Navia reportedly costs $250,000 per unit, which is pretty expensive, especially considering that most organizations that might need it would need to order multiple units.

Submission + - How Ubisoft's first person shooter experts made a fairytale into a game (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The developers of FPS Far Cry 3 are probably the last people you'd expect to trade in the HD, 3D graphics and powerful gaming engines for a hand drawn, 2D roleplaying game starring a young girl as the protagonist, yet that's exactly what they did. In a new interview, the creators of Child of Light talk about their decision to trade in the FPS genre for a game that channels the golden age of illustration instead:

“I was really inspired by the artists of the golden age of illustration: Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, John Bauer and Kay Nielsen,” says creative director Patrick Plourde. “They mostly illustrated children books, especially fairy tales and their artwork is really amazing.”

Submission + - Remote ATM Attack Uses SMS To Dispense Cash (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: A newly discovered malware attack uses a smartphone connected to the computer that manages an ATM, and then sends an SMS message to instruct it to dispense cash. The attack was reported by Symantec, and builds on a previous piece of malware called Backdoor.Ploutus. It is being used in actual attacks, and Symantec has demonstrated it with an ATM in its labs, though it is not revealing the brand of the vulnerable machines.

Submission + - Operation Windigo Botnet Compromised of 25,000 Unix Servers (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: A complex and potent cybercriminal campaign dubbed Operation Windigo has seized control of 25,000 Unix servers attacking half a million computers daily. The botnet is capable of spewing out 35 million spam emails daily and Windigo-affected websites typically serve malware to anyone visiting from a Windows PC while those using Apple's Mac OS X are served ads for dating sites while iPhone users are redirected to pornographic content.

Submission + - IBM Distances itself from the NSA and its Spy Activities (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NSA surveillance has raised concerns among customers globally about the safety of their data from the US government spying. More organizations, companies and countries are looking for ways to distant themselves from the NSA activities to safeguard the information of internet users. IBM is the latest to fall into the category of companies that do not want to be associated with the NSA spy activities

Submission + - Algorithm Reveals Objects Hidden Behind Other Things In Camera Phone Images (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Imaging is undergoing a quiet revolution at the moment thanks to various new techniques for extracting data from images. Now physicists have worked out how to create an image of an object hidden behind a translucent material using little more than an ordinary smartphone and some clever data processing. The team placed objects behind materials that scatter light such as onion skin, frosted glass and chicken breast tissue. They photographed them using a Nokia Lumina 1020 smartphone, with a 41 megapixel sensor. To the naked eye, the resulting images look like random speckle. But by treating the data from each pixel separately and looking for correlations between pixels, the team was able to produce images of the hidden objects. They even photographed light scattered off a white wall and recovered an image of the reflected scene--a technique that effectively looks round corners. The new technique has applications in areas such as surveillance and medical imaging.

Submission + - Gravity Waves (Gravitons) convincingly observed! (nytimes.com)

Submitted by tkjtkj
tkjtkj writes: "Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang" From NY Times (do register!) !

Dr. John M.Kovac (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) confirms theory of 'inflation' first proposed in 1979 by Dr. Alan Guth (now at M.I.T) with '5 sigma' certainty .. "the gold standard in physics"... and consistent with Einstein's predictions.

This is a truly remarkable discovery well-worth noting .. Nobel ?? .. would seem most likely ..

Click the link below :

Submission + - Bitcoin, Meet Darwin: Crypto Currency's Future (informationweek.com)

Submitted by kierny
kierny writes: Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems.

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Close