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Education

Submission + - Australian Aboriginal Rock Art May Depict Giant Bi (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: An Australian Aboriginal rock art may depict a giant bird that is thought to have become extinct some 40,000 years ago, thereby making it the oldest rock painting on the island continent. The red ochre drawing was first discovered two years ago, but archaeologists were only able to confirm the finding two weeks ago, when they first visited the remote site on the Arnhem Land plateau in north Australia.
Science

Submission + - First-ever neutrino "appearance" seen by OPERA (edgeofphysics.com)

Submitted by edgeofphysics
edgeofphysics writes: That neutrinos change from one form to another has been well-known for some time now. But the evidence for this has always come from the "disappearance" of neutrinos. For the first time ever, the OPERA experiment in Italy has evidence of neutrino oscillations via the "appearance" of neutrinos. This is a big deal in the search for new physics
Idle

Submission + - New Hungarian government OMG's all gov sites

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages to a "disclaimer" webpage in several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is OMG which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites "lack any kind of uniform structure" and this is "unworty of Hungary".

Example: http://fvm.gov.hu/index_en.html

Today is the takeover day in most ministries for the new administration.
NASA

Submission + - Where to Park the Space Shuttle (nytimes.com)

Submitted by NicknamesAreStupid
NicknamesAreStupid writes: As Atlantis roars off on its final 'official' mission to the space station, there is talk that it "could be parked" at the space station as an emergency vehicle by a small crew who could be returned on Soyuz. Since upon return they are going to prep Atlantis as an emergency vehicle for the Discovery mission, then the cost of 'parking' it will be less than a full mission and perhaps not a whole lot more than scuttling it The shuttle could also be used as a "save haven" in case the station suffered a failure, and it could be used to raise the station into a higher orbit.

I am sure that some congressperson would prefer to have it parked in his/her favorite donor's driveway, but politics aside (LOL) whatdayathink? It this the ultimate practical thing to do, nerd-wise, or just the "farthest out" abandoning of a vehicle since the last moon walk?
Science

Submission + - Sea Serpent Caught In Waters Of Sweden (komonews.com)

Submitted by The Installer
The Installer writes: First he thought it was a piece of plastic floating near the shoreline. When he got closer, 73-year-old Kurt Ove Eriksson realized the 12-foot (3.65-meter) serpent-like object was a rare creature from the depths of the ocean.

Marine biologists later determined Eriksson had found a Giant Oarfish — the world's largest bony fish — last seen in Swedish waters about 130 years ago.

"It was very long and shiny," Eriksson told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "It also had whiskers, even though it looked like they had been broken off. And a strange light-pink dorsal fin."

A retired engineer and avid fisherman, Eriksson made the unusual discovery Saturday on his way to his boathouse in Bovallstrand, on Sweden's west coast.

"I've been fishing around here since 1957 and I've never seen anything like it," he said. "But I've seen enough fish to know that it was a deep-water fish."

Eriksson handed over the dead fish to The House of the Sea, an aquarium in the nearby town of Lysekil, where marine expert Roger Jansson said it's being kept pending a decision on what to do with it.

Jansson said the Giant Oarfish can grow up to 36 feet (11 meters), and is believed to live in deep waters. He said the last recorded discovery in Sweden was in 1879.

Sightings of the fish are believed to have inspired tales of sea serpents.
Security

Submission + - Deceiving Users with the Facebook Like Button (arnab.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Facebook just launched a super-easy widget called "The Facebook Like Button". Website owners can add a simple iframe snippet to their html, enabling a nice "Like" button with a count of other people's "Likes" and a list of faces of people if any of them are your friends. The advantage of this new tool is that you don't need any fancy coding. Just fill up a simple wizard , and paste the embed code in, just like you do with Youtube, etc. However, this simplicity has a cost: Users can be tricked into "Like"ing pages they're not at."

Submission + - Easy way to roll your Kiosk operating system (flatcoder.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nice summary of how to setup a secure kiosk/restricted Internet access point in a public environment. The approach is client-server with each being a custom distribution of Linux built using SuSE Studio (http://www.susestudio.com). The article is written with the application being a touchscreen hospital information point, but the same approach could easily be used for securing Internet stations in a cafe or library.
Science

Submission + - The fruit fly, "Drosophila", gets a new name (nature.com)

Submitted by G3ckoG33k
G3ckoG33k writes: The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the "type species" (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing inumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remembering the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset. What is more important here, scientific accuracy in the naming or the practical aspects of learning a new name?

Submission + - Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebr (makeahistory.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals.
Space

Submission + - 90% of the Universe found hiding in plain view (discovermagazine.com) 2

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "As much as 90% of previously hidden galaxies in the distant Universe have been found by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Previous surveys had looked for distant (10 billion light years away) galaxies by searching in a wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen atoms — distant young galaxies should be blasting out this light, but very few were detected. The problem is that the ultraviolet light never gets out of the galaxies, so we never see them. In this new study, astronomers searched a different wavelength emitted by hydrogen, and voila, ten times as many galaxies could be seen, meaning 90% of them had been missed before."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Live Writer 2010 review (einsthemes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I’ve currently using Windows Live Writer 2010 beta for writing blogs and it’s really awesome.

Now we will see what are the new features that comes with this latest 2010 version of Windows Live Writer.
Government

Submission + - Europe calls for ACTA treaty to be made public (techworld.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: The European Commission has promised to propose a motion calling for the opening up of the secretive anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) at the next meeting mid-April in New Zealand, an official said during a conference.
Eva Lichtenberger, a Green Party member of the European Parliament who attended the conference, said that if the effort to open up the ACTA process to public scrutiny fails, then Europe should walk out.

Submission + - A Recorded Case of Airport Body Scanner Abuse

Submitted by lourd_baltimore
lourd_baltimore writes: A British Airports Authority (BAA) employee has been issued a warning for harassment in what may be the first recorded instance of airport body scanner abuse. The incident occurred at London Heathrow Airport and involved a male BAA employee who allegedly scanned images of a female colleague when she inadvertently passed through the scanner. The female employee is reported as being traumatized by the event. While it is apparent that there is a process in place for BAA personnel to report scanner misuse, it is not immediately clear what recourse passengers have other than telling the Pope. This event, coupled with the earlier revelation that scanners could possibly store and transmit images will not do much to assuage the rising privacy concerns by human rights advocates.
Security

Submission + - How Pattern Recognition Unraveled an Assassination

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Seattle Times reports that a team of 20 investigators pored over 648 hours of surveillance videos using facial recognition software to sketch out a picture of 27 suspects involved in the murder of a 50-year-old Hamas commander wanted by Israel in the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers. In the end, a mixture of high-tech razzle-dazzle and old-fashioned investigative work cracked the case. "Dubai police are very good at piecing together crimes," says Theodore Karasik, a security analyst at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Affairs. "I've seen it before when you had robberies or murders occur and you'll forget about the story and then six months later the guys are arrested via Interpol brought back here and then they disappear into the system." The case has generated what most analysts consider unwelcome fallout for Israel, which many suspect of being behind the attack but if Mossad agents were involved, the operation blew the identities of 27 agents and may have exposed Israel's operational intelligence methods or at least presented them openly for scrutiny. "Now we know their tradecraft," says Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center,. "We know how they operate.""

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