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Submission + - Diamond particles discovered in candle flames (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BBC News says on 17 Aug 2011:

Candle flames contain millions of tiny diamond particles, a university professor has discovered. Dr Wuzong Zhou, of St Andrews University, found about 1.5 million diamond nanoparticles are created in a candle flame every second it burns. The diamond particles are burned away in the process.

Is this even possible, energy-wise? I mean I thought extreme temperature and pressure was required to form the diamond lattice... If a candle flame produces nano-diamonds, wouldn't several other sources of hydrocarbons produce and burn it too, during combustion? Does anyone have a reference to an article about this from the actual scientist? or is this just another hoax?
Android

Submission + - Android Tricorder killed by CBS (google.com) 4

Submitted by josn
josn writes: Today I found out that Moonlight's Tricorder app, which I always install on Android devices, is gone. Google received a DMCA letter from CBS. I think it is a shame that CBS thinks it needs to kill a free and open source project giving a add-less app. I for one sent a message to CBS explaining that this fan-supported app is not bad, but good for them, and asked them to reconsider. I hope, especially for the author who must have spent a lot of time in this app, that they do.

Submission + - Will Google Ever Die? (thewebshowroom.com.au)

Submitted by
stephen1983
stephen1983 writes: "It seems a little sensationalist to question the livelihood of a company valued at almost $200bn and one that holds around 80% market share of worldwide search. But just over ten short years ago, prior to the Google revolution and the dot-com bubble of 2000, AltaVista like Google today, was the dominant player in search."
Security

Submission + - Mobile Scanners Not "Certified People Scanners" (epic.org)

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE
OverTheGeicoE writes: The Electronic Privacy Information Center received more FOIA documents from the US Department of Homeland Security regarding mobile x-ray scanners (a.k.a. Z Backscatter Vans). We've discussed these devices before. Perhaps the most interesting part is slide #11 ("Disclaimer About Scanning People") on page 6 of this PDF explaining that the radiation output of these devices is too high to comply with ANSI N43.17. In other words, they output too much radiation even by TSA's questionable standards for airport body scanners. Regardless, the slide ends with the author stating that the ANSI standard "is not applicable to covert operations". What might that assertion have meant to the presentation's intended audience?
Science

Submission + - Evangelical Scientists Debate Creation Story 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe humanity descend from Adam and Eve but NPR reports that evangelical scientists are now saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account and that it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans. "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years so not likely at all" says biologist Dennis Venema, a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence." Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century and say it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence. "There's nothing to be scared of here," adds Venema. "There is nothing to be alarmed about. It's actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world — and from a Christian perspective, that's an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence.""
Printer

Submission + - Researchers invent inkjet that prints out skin (geek.com)

Submitted by shougyin
shougyin writes: If you’ve ever seen the lesser-known Sam Raimi movie Darkman, you probably remember that the plot involved the main character, Dr. Westlake, trying to figure out a way to “print” liquid skin to help burn victims. Westlake never did figure out how to keep the synthetic skin from destabilizing past the 98 minute mark, but luckily, Wake Forest Instititute for Regenerative Medicine researchers seem to have mastered it, showing off their amazing skin printer that uses living cells instead of ink.
Books

Submission + - How Google is Solving its Book Problem (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic that Google's famous PageRank algorithm can't be deployed to search through the 15 million books that Google has already scanned because books don't link to each other in the way that webpages do. Instead Google's new book search algorithm called "Rich Results" looks at word frequency, how closely your query matches the title of a book, web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, how often an older book has been reprinted, and 100 other signals. "There is less data about books than web pages, but there is more structure to it, and there's less spam to contend with," writes Madrigal. Yet the focus on optimizing an experience from vast amounts of data remains. "You want it to have the standard Google quality as much as possible," says Matthew Gray, lead software engineer for Google Books. "[You want it to be] a merger of relevance and utility based on all these things.""

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