Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Weaknesses (Score 1) 20

by wombatmobile (#41214037) Attached to: Researchers Engineer Light-Activated Skeletal Muscle

What is the point? Why do we need a copy of a human

They aren't trying to duplicate humans. They are trying to distill and reproduce essential aspects of biomotion e.g. skeletal muscle contraction. TFA is about a way to control the twitching of skeletal muscles without requiring a biological nervous system.

Submission + - New technique sequences ancient DNA 99.9%

Submitted by wombatmobile
wombatmobile writes: Ancient DNA has proven difficult to sequence or clone, because it is fragmentary, and most of it breaks down into single strands after it is extracted from bone.

However, a new technique developed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequences single stranded DNA. Scientists just announced they used the technique to fully sequence Denisovan DNA from a bone fragment found in a cave in Siberia. They're going to go back to sequence their library of hundreds of Neanderthal DNA specimens.

How long before they make Dolly Denisovan?

Comment New technique makes it all possible now (Score 5, Informative) 299

by wombatmobile (#41187333) Attached to: If Extinct Species Can Be Brought Back... Should We?

Ancient DNA has proven difficult to sequence or clone, because it is fragmentary, and most of it breaks down into single strands after it is extracted from bone.

However, a new technique developed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequences single stranded DNA. Scientists just announced they used the technique to fully sequence Denisovan DNA from a bone fragment found in a cave in Siberia. They're going to go back to sequence their library of hundreds of Neandertal DNA specimens.

How long before they make Dolly Denisovan?

Medicine

Submission + - University of Cape Town announces cure for Malaria (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: Researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have developed a pill that can wipe out malaria with a single dose. It's a development that could save millions of lives in Africa alone, not to mention the rest of the world. But there's a teensy weensy little hurdle that must first be overcome: human testing.
Patents

Submission + - BBC Interviews Apple vs Samsung Jury Foreman (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by MrSteveSD
MrSteveSD writes: The BBC has published a long interview with Velvin Hogan, the jury foreman in the Apple vs Samsung case. He still seems to be sticking to a rather confused definition of what constitutes prior art.

I showed the jurors that the two methods in software were not the same, nor could they be interchangeable because the hardware that was involved between the old processor and the new processor — you couldn't load the new software methodology in the old system and expect that it was going to work.
Australia

Submission + - Bank Resists Refunding $12K To Skimming Victim (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Louay El-sayah is an Australian and a victim of a skimming attack — that is, the details of his ATM card were scanned and used to create a new card — and, over the course of six days, $12,000 was drained from his account with Commonwealth Bank via ATM withdrawls. Commonwealth was, shall we say, less than helpful in responding to the problem. They never alerted him to the series of withdrawls. They told him not to file a police report, then used the fact that he hadn't as a factor in denying his fraud claim. They told him he was a victim of skimming, then turned around claimed that it was impossible to tell from CCTV footage whether he was the one withrdrawing the money. It was only after he went public and the IDG News Service called the bank that Commonwealth agreed to refund his money."
Science

Submission + - Genome of Human Ancestor Mapped, There Might Be Other Undiscovered Ancestors Yet (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have managed to map an entire genome of a human ancestor and also suspect that there are more species that existed in the past that we have not yet found, particularly in Asia.
Researchers have managed to map an entire genome of a human ancestor. The ancestor is a member of the Denisovan group, a cousin of the Neanderthals. Researchers are hesitant to label them as a different species, choosing to call them instead a different group of humans. They also suspect that there are more species that existed in the past that we have not yet found, particularly in Asia.
Science

Submission + - Biodiesel From Sewage Sludge (acs.org) 1

Submitted by
MTorrice
MTorrice writes: "Scientists have developed a way to convert lipids from sewage sludge into biodiesel. The low cost and high yield of the sludge process may make it economically feasible as a source of biofuel, the researchers say. Today, biofuel producers use lipids in vegetable oils to derive biodiesel, a mixture of fatty-acid-like molecules. Biodiesel is compatible with existing diesel engines, burns with less pollution than petroleum-derived diesel does, and comes from renewable resources. But current biodiesel feedstocks are expensive, limiting the fuel’s widespread use. The researchers from South Korea found that sewage sludge, the semisolid material left over from wastewater treatment, can yield 2,200 times more lipids than soybeans and costs 96% less to process. To turn the sludge lipids into biodiesel, the researchers heated them with methanol."

Comment Cartography (Score 1) 365

Those are good questions, antdude. I would like to learn more about the cartographic practices that resulted in the map they carried.

I wonder what Earhart and Noonan knew or presumed about the chart's accuracy with respect to islands when they were leaving New Guinea?

I wonder what they made of what happened when they were talking about it afterwards on Gardner island?

Comment Junk Mail is intrusive (Score 2) 219

by wombatmobile (#38435100) Attached to: IBM's Five Predictions For the Next Five Years

Duh... the reason Junk Mail is not valued by the recipient is because it is INTRUSIVE. Intrusiveness cannot be overcome by personalisation. More like enhanced. The more personalized the junk, the creepier the intrusion.

I wonder why that person from IBM predicts such a creepy future?

Why does IBM pay someone to publish creepy stuff like that?

Comment Open Web Standards (Score 0, Flamebait) 644

by wombatmobile (#38268764) Attached to: Will Firefox Lose Google Funding?

I thought FireFox was such a positive force for open standards, in the days when IE was a monopoly.

But something happened. FireFox got to 20% market share, and they got a bunch of money (from Google) and fame. Then, Mozilla ceased to become an organization that was dedicated to an open web. It became, instead, an organization that knew better than the open web. It wasn't about implementing standards any more. It was about God's chosen web engineers determining what was best for the web.

The problem with Mozilla refusing to implement open standards that other browsers implement, is the same problem we had back when IE had disproportionate market share.

Chrome and Opera and Webkit don't suffer from this narcissism. They just get on with it and implement open standards.

Hooray for open standards!

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close