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Scientists Record Signal of Distant Black Hole Consuming Star 42

Posted by Soulskill from the om-nom-nom dept.
ananyo writes "Astronomers think they have seen the flare of a dying star being eviscerated by a black hole. The signal, spotted by three different satellites, could shed light on the relationship between the smaller black holes seen in our own galaxy and the supermassive ones in distant reaches of the Universe. The stellar victim was first seen in 2011 by Swift, a NASA satellite designed to spot bursts of high-energy photons known as gamma-rays. For more than a month, Swift watched a signal from a distant galaxy, which eventually faded from view. Subsequent analysis showed that the gamma-rays probably came from a star being ripped to pieces by a previously unknown black hole (abstract)."

Comment Re:How do I test my setup/ISP for IPv6-ness? (Score 1) 290

by Yggdrasil42 (#34954164) Attached to: Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users

...or try to use them but fail and fallback to IPv4 a millisecond later.

Almost right. If the browser thinks it has IPv6 connectivity it will try, and it will fallback to IPv4. The fallback to IPv4 will take something like 30-60 seconds though!

That's exactly the problem Yahoo faces. People with broken IPv6 connectivity will experience serious delays when visiting their site. This has withheld other large sites, such as Google, from running dual-stack before. A test done by the large German website Heise.de shows the reality is not that rough. During one day they enabled dual-stack access for their website. Among the approximately one million visitors, only five experienced problems due to broken IPv6. After this experiment they decided to simply keep IPv4 + IPv6 enabled. See http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/IPv6-Tag-bei-heise-de-Erste-Ergebnisse-1081201.html

Of course this percentage will vary according to the demographic of a site so, as Heise has shown, the best way is to test it. On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour "test drive". See http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/

Sci-Fi

Submission + - Don't Panic, it's Towel Day! 3

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Today, as every May 25th, geeks all over the world celebrate Towel Day and carry a towel in honor of Douglas Adams. The popular author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy died in 2001 at the age of 49, but his work lives on. According to the book, a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Hence its symbolic role in this celebration. This year, for the first time as far as we know, Towel Day is being supported by the British publisher of Adams' books, who organizes a photo competition.
Microsoft

Submission + - Mac users' Internet experience to remain seamless 2

Submitted by thefickler
thefickler writes: Mac users will continue to see the Internet as it was intended, thanks to the renewal of a font licensing agreement between Microsoft and Apple. At TypeCon2007 Microsoft and Apple announced they have renewed their font licensing agreement, giving Apple users ongoing use of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows core fonts.

Back in 1996 Microsoft started the "Core fonts for the Web" initiative. The idea of this initiative was to create a a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all or most computers, allowing web pages to be displayed consistently on different computers. While the project was terminated in 2002, some of the fonts defined as core fonts for the web have gone on to become known as "web safe fonts", and are therefore widely used by Internet developers.

Feed Fat Fish Put Obesity On The Hook (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Everyone knows that eating lean fish helps slim waistlines, but researchers have found a new way fish can help eliminate obesity. Researchers now describe the first genetic model of obesity in a fish. Having this model should greatly accelerate the development of new drugs to help people lose weight and keep it off.

How to Prevent Form Spam Without Captchas 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the can't-beat-the-curte-power-of-kittenauth dept.
UnderAttack writes "Spam submitted to web contact forms and forums continues to be a huge problem. The standard way out is the use of captchas. However, captchas can be hard to read even for humans. And if implemented wrong, they will be read by the bots. The SANS Internet Storm Center covers a nice set of alternatives to captchas. For example, the use of style sheets to hide certain form fields from humans, but make them 'attractive' to bots. The idea of these methods is to increase the work a spammer has to do to spam the form without inconveniencing regular users."

Fear of Snakes May Have Driven Pre-Human Evolution 553

Posted by Hemos from the snakes-on-a-plane dept.
Krishna Dagli writes "An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests. The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand. Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions — traits that are important for detecting threats at close range. Humans are descended from those same primates. "

Nine Things You Should Know About Nautilus 257

Posted by Hemos from the use-your-system-better dept.
lessthan0 writes "The Nautilus program in GNOME is not only the default file manager, it creates and manages the desktop. While it looks simple on the surface, there is a lot of hidden power under the shell. The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5. article covers a few non-obvious things about how Nautilus works."

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