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Earth

Study Hints Ambient Radio Waves May Affect Plant Growth 298

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
dwguenther writes "A Lyons (Colorado) area woman with no academic pedigree has published a scientific paper in the International Journal of Forestry Research about the adverse effects of radio waves on aspen seedlings. Katie Haggerty, who lives north of Steamboat Mountain, found in a preliminary experiment done near her house that aspens shielded from electromagnetic radiation were healthier than those that were not. 'I found that the shielded seedlings produced more growth, longer shoots, bigger leaves, and more total leaf area. The shielded group produced 60 percent more leaf area and 74 percent more shoot length than a mock-shielded group,' she said." This was not a definitive study, as its author readily admits — it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area — but it was refereed.
Power

Obama Budget To Triple Nuclear Power Loan Guarantees 373

Posted by Soulskill from the sky's-the-limit dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build 'a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,' it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause. Now the NY Times reports that administration officials have confirmed their 2011 federal budget request next week will raise potential loan guarantees for nuclear projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion, and a new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it. The Energy Department appears to be getting close to offering its first nuclear loan guarantee. Earlier this week, Southern Co. Chief Executive David Ratcliffe said the company expects to finalize an application for a loan guarantee 'within the next couple months,' while Scana Corp., which has also applied, is 'a couple months behind Southern' and is hopeful of receiving a conditional award 'sometime in the next months.'"
Music

Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57

Posted by kdawson from the music-of-the-exploding-spheres dept.
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"

Comment Tiny budgets, considering... (Score 1) 157

by Dodger73 (#30741298) Attached to: Average Budget For Major, Multi-Platform Games Is $18-28 Million
Think about it. 10-20 hours of gameplay content, a few square miles' worth of environmental models and effects, dozens of characters and animations, matching voiceover and audio content, and the engine, AI and gameplay code to drive it all. Add to that between 20 minutes and an hour's worth of CG movies. Now consider that we're doing this with teams 1/5th the size of what they are for 2-hour movies, at 1/8th of the budget in half the time (exceptions notwithstanding). $50M for the most expensive games doesn't sound too bad compared to $500 for the most expensive movies...
Earth

Climate, Habitat Threaten Wild Coffee Species 274

Posted by timothy from the ok-panic dept.
An anonymous reader writes "BBC reports that Dr. Aaron Davis of the Royal Botanical Gardens claims 'almost three-quarters of the world's wild coffee species are threatened, as a result of habitat loss and climate change. "Conserving the genetic diversity within this genus has implications for the sustainability of our daily cup, particularly as coffee plantations are highly susceptible to climate change.'"
Television

"Loud Commercial" Legislation Proposed In US Congress 636

Posted by Soulskill from the you-have-my-grandmother's-vote dept.
Hackajar writes "Have you ever caught yourself running for the volume control when a TV commercial comes on? Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) has, and is submitting legislation that would require TV commercials in the US to stay at volume levels similar to the programming they are associated with. From the article: 'Right now, the government doesn't have much say in the volume of TV ads. It's been getting complaints ever since televisions began proliferating in the 1950s. But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'"
Mozilla

French Military Contributes To Thunderbird 3 379

Posted by kdawson from the mais-oui-l'oiseau dept.
fredboboss sends news about Mozilla's email client Thunderbird 3, whose release we noted last week. "Thunderbird 3 contains code from the French military, which decided the open source product was more secure than Microsoft's rival Outlook. The French government is beginning to move to other open source software, including Linux instead of Windows and OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Thunderbird 3 used some of the code from TrustedBird, a generalized and co-branded version of Thunderbird with security extensions built by the French military."
Biotech

Engineered Bacteria Glows To Reveal Land Mines 248

Posted by kdawson from the lamp-unto-your-feet dept.
MikeChino writes "Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air-dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present."
Earth

EPA To Reuse Toxic Sites For Renewable Energy 183

Posted by kdawson from the brown-to-green dept.
Hugh Pickens writes:"The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines — 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. 'We don't want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that's pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Included are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts — more than the country's total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data."
Graphics

NVidia Cripples PhysX "Open" API 393

Posted by timothy from the semi-open dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In a foot-meet-bullet type move, NVidia is going to disable PhysX engine if you are using a display adapter other than one that came from their company. This despite the fact that you may have an NVidia card on your system specifically to do this type of processing. 'For a variety of reasons some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs.' Time to say hello to Microsoft dx physics or Intel's Havok engine."
OS X

How Snow Leopard Cut ObjC Launch Time In Half 158

Posted by Soulskill from the paring-down dept.
MBCook writes "Greg Parker has an excellent technical article on his blog about the changes to the dynamic linker (dyld) for Objective-C that Snow Leopard uses to cut launch time in half and cut about 1/2 MB of memory per application. 'In theory, a shared library could be different every time your program is run. In practice, you get the same version of the shared libraries almost every time you run, and so does every other process on the system. The system takes advantage of this by building the dyld shared cache. The shared cache contains a copy of many system libraries, with most of dyld's linking and loading work done in advance. Every process can then share that shared cache, saving memory and launch time.' He also has a post on the new thread-local garbage collection that Snow Leopard uses for Objective-C."
Power

US Navy Tries To Turn Seawater Into Jet Fuel 402

Posted by samzenpus from the ocean-in-the-tank dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that, faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US Navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater by processing seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen — obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity — to make a hydrocarbon fuel, a variant of a chemical reaction called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is used commercially to produce a gasoline-like hydrocarbon fuel from syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen often derived from coal. The Navy team have been experimenting to find out how to steer the CO2-producing process away from producing unwanted methane by finding a different catalyst than the usual one based on cobalt. 'The idea of using CO2 as a carbon source is appealing,' says Philip Jessop, a chemist at Queen's University adding that to make a jet fuel that is properly 'green,' the energy-intensive electrolysis that produces the hydrogen will need to use a carbon-neutral energy source; and the complex multi-step process will always consume significantly more energy than the fuel it produces could yield. 'It's a lot more complicated than it at first looks.'"
Power

NASA Developing Nuclear Reactor For Moon and Mars 424

Posted by CmdrTaco from the react-to-the-reactor dept.
Al writes "NASA recently finished testing a miniature nuclear reactor that would provide power for an astronaut base on the Moon or Mars. The reactor combines a small fission system with a Stirling engine to make a 'safe, reliable, and efficient' way to produce electricity. The system being tested at NASA's Glenn Research Center can produce 2.3 kilowatts and could be ready for launch by 2020, NASA officials say. The reactor ought to provide much more power than solar panels but could prove controversial with the public concerned about launching a nuclear power source and placing it on the Moon or another planet."
Patents

Microsoft Patents XML Word Processing Documents 357

Posted by timothy from the no-problems-there-nothing-to-worry-about dept.
theodp writes "Embrace. Extend. Patent. On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted US Patent No. 7,571,169 for its 'invention' of the Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML. Presumably developers are protected by Microsoft's 'covenant not to sue,' so the biggest question raised by this patent is: How in the world was it granted in light of the 40-year history of document markup languages? Next thing you know, the USPTO will give Microsoft a patent for Providing Emergency Data in XML format. Oops, too late."

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