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Submission + - As Ebola death toll rises, scientists work on nanotech cure

Submitted by rlinke
rlinke writes: Scientists at Northeastern University are using nanotechnology to find an effective treatment for the Ebola virus, which has killed more than 1,200 people and sickened even more.

What makes finding a vaccine or cure such a formidable job is that the virus mutates so quickly. How do you pin down and treat something that is continually changing?

Thomas Webster, professor and chairman of bioengineering and chemical engineering at Northeastern, may have an answer to that — nanotechnology.

Submission + - Do readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper? Not necessarily

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: eBooks are great and wonderful, but as The Guardian reports they might not be as good for readers paper books. Results from a new study shows that test subjects who read a story on a Kindle had trouble recalling the right order of the plot points. Out of 50 test subjects,half read a 28-page story on the Kindle, while half read the same story on paper. The Kindle group scored about the same on comprehension as the control group, but when they were asked to put the plot points in the proper order the Kindle group was about twice as likely to put them in the wrong order.

So is this bad news for ebooks? Have we reached the limits of their usefulness? Not necessarily.

While there is evidence that enhanced ebooks don't enhance education, an older study from 2012 has shown that students who study with an e-textbook on an ebook reader actually scored as well or higher on tests than a control group who did not. While that doesn't prove the newer study wrong, it does suggest that further study is required.

Submission + - Ferguson Police to be Equipped with Vest Cameras After Michael Brown Shooting (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ferguson Police have announced they are considering making all their officers wear cameras on their vests following the recent shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

The move was announced by Ferguson's police department's range of actions as part of the force's "healing" process in the area.

A similar scheme is already in place for officers in Rialto, California, where citizen complaints against officers fell from 24 to three and police use-of-force incidents dropped from 61 to 25 in the first year of officers wearing the cameras.

Submission + - 200GB Blu-ray discs aim to compete with tape in the data centre 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has developed a specification for a new doubled sided disc with a capacity of up to 200GB, called the BD-DSD (Double Sided Disc). The discs store 100GB per side using existing multi-layer technology and are designed for use in cartridges that can hold several. Robots in data centres will swap the discs, giving access to vast amounts of robust, long-life storage media. Unlike tape the discs are random access, so the overall access time for a given file is lower. There is no wear from a read head touching the disc either.

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