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Science

Submission + - Yale Physicists Measure 'Persistent Current' (yale.edu)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Current processors rely on wires mere nanometers wide and Yale physicists have successfully measured a theoretical 'persistent current' that flows through them when they are formed into rings. They also predict that this will help us understand how electrons behave in metals — more specifically the quantum mechanical effect that influences how these electrons move through metals. Hopefully this work will shed new light on what dangers (or uses) quantum effects could have on classical processors as the inner workings shrink in size. The breakthrough was rethinking how to measure this theoretical effect as they previously relied on superconducting quantum interference devices to measure the magnetic field such a current would create — complicated devices that gave incorrect and inconsistent measurements. Instead, they turned to nothing but mechanical devices known as cantilevers ('little floppy diving boards with the nanometer rings sitting on top') that yielded them a shocking full magnitude of precision in their measurements."

Comment Ins't this obvious? (Score 3, Informative) 232

by emeitner (#28493989) Attached to: The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists
On with the tinfoil hats...and the cynical socks...

The power of technology from a government's perspective is to have the subjects of your suspicion(citizenry) freely and enthusiastically enter all their beliefs( micro/macro blogging), the topology of their personal relations(social networking sites), and their personal communications(gmail) into the databases of private corporations for the easy mining of the data by the keepers of all the keys(NSA, MI5, and others). Then is is a simple matter to assemble an n-dimentional database of relationships into a large net. Then they need only to pull a single knot(a person) of this net and see all others strings and knots which are pulled also. With this tool the government can intercept and neutralize any waxing movement, meme, or influential person.

...off with the tinfoil hat and back to my coffee.
Power

Submission + - What to do with 700 used 9V batteries

Submitted by
Dunkirk
Dunkirk writes: "At our medium-sized church, we have 7 Shure wireless microphones. Five are newer, SLX-based models, which use 2 AA batteries. Two are older, UC-based models, which use a single 9V. The SLX's are very easy on their batteries. They can go several weeks before needing to be replaced. The UC's only last one week before losing enough voltage that they'll start dropping signal. Now, I don't want to just throw the 9V's in the trash, for fear that their contacts will touch, the batteries will heat up, and they'll cause a fire, so I've collect many hundreds of batteries, all connected in a chain, 2 batteries wide, with all of their opposing contacts connected. (I got my hands across one of those chains once. I'm always cautious around them now...) I thought about recycling them, but the only place I could find wants to charge me about $60/pound for the "privilege." It's been suggested that we could recharge these things with newer, alkaline rechargers, but that idea has a bad reputation from my youth. Have times changed? Can we recharge them, knowing that we need the _voltage_ to drive the signal? (It has to get them back to their 1.5V+ level.) Or is this a waste of time, and someone can point me to a place that actually recycles this stuff, gets some value out of it, and doesn't charge me for that service?"
Space

Girl Who Named Pluto, At 11, Dies At 90 158

Posted by kdawson from the no-phair dept.
notthepainter notes the passing of the woman who, as an 11-year-old girl, named Pluto. "Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth. On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected 'trans-Neptunian body' had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. ... More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. 'It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,' she told the BBC. 'So, one is vindicated.' " Venetia's great-uncle Henry, who was a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos.
Security

Man Arrested For Taking Photo of Open ATM 1232

Posted by kdawson from the i-will-tackle-you dept.
net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."
Medicine

Submission + - Scientists Hack Cellphone to Detect Diseases (wired.com)

Submitted by
Dave Bullock (eecue)
Dave Bullock (eecue) writes: "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria and other illnesses.

Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."
Programming

Submission + - Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive (magheap.com)

Submitted by Sportsqs
Sportsqs writes: Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always.
Consider the average programmer salary here in the US:
You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team.
The Courts

Submission + - Warrantlessly wiretapped? Prove it!

Submitted by Hmmm2000
Hmmm2000 writes: With the recent FISA legislation passing the Senate, the vast majority of the lawsuits against telcos will be thrown out of court. However there is a fasinating and mind-boggling tale of a case still winding its way through the court system. The lawyers received proof that their clients were being spied on via the secret warrantless wiretapping program Bush put into place after 9/11: the DOJ accidentally included a top-secret document among some non-classified documents during the discovery phase. When the DOJ realized its mistake, it required all all copy of the document destroyed, or returned to the DOJ. Now the lawyers have to prove their case without using the document, to establish legal standing, before they can re-gain access to it.
Music

Submission + - First Recorded Song Found on 1860 Phonautogram

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Thomas Edison has long been considered the father of recorded sound but researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott , that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historian and made playable by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. "This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound," said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, Scott's device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Scott's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back."
Linux Business

Submission + - Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: In this new interview, Linus Torvalds is excited about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualisation despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

From the article: "To get some perspective on what lies ahead in 2008, we caught up with Linus Torvalds via email. His responses touched on the Linux development process, upcoming features, and whether he's concerned about potential patent litigation."

Torvalds on Linux biggest strength: "When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.
Censorship

Submission + - NASA Contractors Censoring Saturn V Info 1

Submitted by cybrpnk2
cybrpnk2 writes: Get ready to surrender your data sheets, study reports and blueprints of the Saturn V to stay in compliance with ITAR. Armed guards are reportedly enforcing a takedown and shredding of old Saturn V posters from KSC office walls that show rough internal layouts of the vehicle, and a website that is a source for various digitized blueprints has been put on notice it may well be next. No word yet if the assignment of a Karl Rove protege to oversee NASA has any connection...

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