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Comment Undesired Side-Effects (Score 0) 559

Normally, I would agree, but I must disagree in this case. The vast majority of people in the U.S. are science-illiterate and easily swayed by sensational headlines (For example, last week slashdot posted a story on how the background radiation in Fukushima is less than that of Denver, yet people panic over radiation exposure in Japan, but not Colorado.). I worry that a similar backlash against GM crops could negatively affect the world's food supply.

While we can disparage crops that have been crafted to withstand copious amounts of insecticide, please keep in mind that there are 7 billion people on the planet, and all of them need to be fed. Much of the world depends upon the United States' agricultural output. GM helps boost this output. While the American consumer can withstand a few cents increase in cost due to decreased food supply, the same increase can trigger food riots in less fortunate countries. If the United States' agricultural output is enhanced by GM, then I'm all for it. I worry that shunning GM food in the US could hurt further investment/development.

Science

The Link Between Genius and Insanity 402

An anonymous reader writes in a story about the link between certain mental illnesses and high intelligence. "Genius and insanity may actually go together, according to scientists who found that mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are often found in highly creative and intelligent people. The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder. Bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies confirms the idea of the 'tortured genius' or 'mad scientist.'"

Comment Whoa there. You're plainly wrong. (Score 1) 158

CUDA was released, supported by NVIDIA GPUs, in early 2007. The first OpenCL specification was not released until late 2008 (OpenCL has not been around for 4 years, as you claim). As for which is more popular, I'm afraid that you have this backwards too. The dominant market force for GPU computing is supercomputing. How many of the top 5 supercomputers used AMD GPUs? Zero. How many use NVIDIA GPUs? Three. And they're all using CUDA because it's more feature rich---it can do fancy things like direct memory copies between infiniband interconnects and GPU memory.

FYI: OpenCL on NVIDIA is implemented on top of CUDA, so you're still using CUDA if you're using OpenCL on NVIDIA.

Comment Poor software, not poor GPUs (Score 1) 158

Surprise, surprise, I have the feeling that most of you haven't actually read the article. The article is not arguing that GPUs are inherently flawed. Also, the article is not an NVIDIA-vs-AMD competition. Rather, the author tests software on each platform. It's the software that is bad, not the GPUs themselves. For instance, the NVIDIA GPU does quite well with Arcsoft and Xilisoft; this wouldn't be possible if GPUs were somehow broken for transcoding. After all, as others have pointed out here, floating point support is actually quite good on modern GPUs.

Still, poor software shouldn't come too much as a surprise. While CUDA and OpenCL certainly make GPU-based computing easier, it is still a relatively new technology that only a few programmers know how to use efficiently. I'm also not sure that the market pressure is there yet from consumers for efficient GPU-based applications (how many of them actually know what a GPU is?).

Science

Study Aims To Read Dogs' Thoughts 154

jjp9999 writes "A new study at Emory University is trying to figure out what dogs think. The study uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the dogs' brains while they're shown different stimuli. Results from the first study will be published by the Public Library of Science, where the dogs were shown hand signals from their owners. 'We hope this opens up a whole new door for understanding canine cognition and inter-species communication. We want to understand the dog-human relationship, from the dog's perspective,' said Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project."
Technology

Video The Chevy Segway Keeps On Rolling (Video) 210

Back in 2009 G.M. and Segway talked about the P.U.M.A., or Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility vehicle. Now it's the EN-V, which stands for Electric Network Vehicle. G.M. (along with partner Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation) debuted the thing in Shanghai in 2010, then displayed it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in 2011, and now they're showing it off at auto shows, no doubt hoping to get a lot of buzz going for this two-wheeled wonder, which is supposed to be so loaded with navigation and collision avoidance electronics that you can sleep in it on your way to work. (Please wake us up when we get there, okay?)
NASA

What Silicon-Based Life Might Be Like 92

Nancy_A writes "While the world as we know it runs on carbon, science fiction's long flirtation with silicon-based life has spawned a familiar catchphrase: 'It's life, but not as we know it.' Although non-carbon based life is a very long shot, this Q&A with one of the U.S.'s top astrochemists — Max Bernstein, the Research Lead of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington,D.C. — discusses what silicon life might be like."

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