Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Digital On Internet 324

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the but-free-information-is-dangerous dept.
mernil writes to mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls are headed for the internet. The Israel Antiquities Authority, custodians of the scrolls, plan on digitizing the 900 fragments to make them available to the public via the internet. Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Education

Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers 1114

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-dragging-us-down dept.
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
United States

35 Articles of Impeachment Introduced Against Bush 1657

Posted by kdawson from the high-crimes-and-misdemeanors dept.
vsync64 writes "Last night, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) spent 4 hours reading into the Congressional Record 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. Interestingly, those articles (63-page PDF via Coral CDN) include not just complaints about signing statements and the war in Iraq, but also charges that the President "Sp[ied] on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment,' 'Direct[ed] Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens,' and 'Tamper[ed] with Free and Fair Elections.' These are issues near and dear to the hearts of many here, so it's worth discussing. What little mainstream media coverage there is tends to be brief (USA Today, CBS News, UPI, AP, Reuters)." The (Democratic) House leadership has said that the idea of impeachment is "off the table." The Judiciary Committee has not acted on articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney introduced by Kucinich a year ago.

Comment Kids grow- so should the workbench (Score 1) 291

by immel (#23625505) Attached to: A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?
If you're going to make a workbench designed for kids, a neat design feature would be to make it possible to grow with the kids. Maybe some nesting tubes for legs would allow it to change in height over time.

Apart from that, look at the surface of the bench. Whether you want to use wood, laminated particle board, or lego base plates, making the surface extendable can help small arms reach the back, then expand horizontally as they need more bench space.
Power

Antineutrino Device Tackles Nuclear Proliferation 70

Posted by kdawson from the tamper-proof-it dept.
KentuckyFC writes "One of the biggest problems in nuclear proliferation is verifying that countries are not secretly transferring fissile material by taking it out of reactors and selling it. Now a group of US scientists say they've developed a machine that can remotely detect whether a reactor has been switched on and off by detecting the antineutrinos produced by nuclear reactions. The detector is about the size of a car engine and is designed to be left near a reactor to record data. The group has been testing a prototype at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California and says it works well (abstract). Now it's up to the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna to decide whether to deploy the new machine."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

The Physics of Football 163

Posted by Soulskill from the mass-times-acceleration-equals-pain dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "There will be a program on applied physics and real time strategy that you might want to watch on television today. Conservation of momentum during elastic and inelastic collisions is one aspect on which to focus as players tackle their opponents. It is of critical importance that the Patriots bring down New York's huge and powerful running back, 6-foot-4, 265-pound Brandon Jacobs. An average-size NFL defensive back's mass combined with his speed — on average, 4.56 seconds for the 40-yard dash — can produce up to 1600 pounds of tackling force. A tackle with half a ton of force may sound like a crippling blow, but the body can handle twice that amount because the player's equipment spreads out the incoming energy, lessening its severity." Nanotech specialists from Cornell have developed their own take on the "physics" of the Super Bowl by creating the world's smallest trophy, which will be awarded today to a contestant who best explains an aspect of football physics. Just some food for thought while you watch the game on your brand new HD television, though you'd better not be watching it in a church.
Power

Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel 289

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-with-hydrocarbons dept.
An anonymous reader brings us this article from Wired about a new method to produce fuel with the help of concentrated sunlight and carbon dioxide. The process "reverses" combustion, breaking down the CO2 into carbon monoxide, which is then used as a building block for hydrocarbons. Quoting: "The Sandia team envisions a day when CR5s are installed in large numbers at coal-fired power plants. Each of them could reclaim 45 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air daily and produce enough carbon monoxide to make 2.5 gallons of fuel. Coupling the CR5 with CO2 reclamation and sequestration technology, which several scientists already are pursuing, could make liquid hydrocarbons a renewable fuel."
Biotech

Two Companies Now Offering Personal Gene Sequencing 146

Posted by Zonk from the sequencing-for-fun-and-profit dept.
corded writes "Yesterday, deCODE genetics announced the launch of their $985 personal genotyping product, deCODEme (video), beating their competitors to market. Perhaps not coincidentally, 23andMe's website is suddenly much more informative today, and the New York Times features a preview of 23andMe's $999 offering. deCODEme and 23andMe will scan about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome, respectively and assess your risk for common diseases, along with providing information about ancestry, physical traits, and the ability to compare genes with friends and family."
NASA

Whose Laws Apply On the ISS? 344

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-mine-do-of-course dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Whose laws apply if astronauts from different countries get into a fight, make a patentable discovery, or damage equipment belonging to another country while on the International Space Station? According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 98 nations, states have legal jurisdiction within spacecraft registered to them. When the space station was assembled from modules supplied by the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency (ESA), partners rejected an initial proposal that US law should prevail throughout the space station. "It was agreed that each state registers its own separate elements, which means that you now have a piece of the US annexed to a piece of Europe annexed to a piece of Japan in outer space, legally speaking," said Dr Frans von der Dunk of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at the University of Leiden. So what happens if a crime is committed in space? "If somebody performs an activity which may be considered criminal, it is in the first instance his own country which is able to exercise jurisdiction," Dr. von der Dunk added."
Space

Monster Black Hole Busts Theory 248

Posted by samzenpus from the old-bob-and-vincent dept.
Genocaust writes "A stellar black hole much more massive than theory predicts is possible has astronomers puzzled. Stellar black holes form when stars with masses around 20 times that of the sun collapse under the weight of their own gravity at the ends of their lives. Most stellar black holes weigh in at around 10 solar masses when the smoke blows away, and computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this. The newly weighed black hole is 16 solar masses. It orbits a companion star in the spiral galaxy Messier 33, located 2.7 million light-years from Earth. Together they make up the system known as M33 X-7."
Handhelds

The Handheld Calculator Turns 40 158

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the great-discoveries-through-spare-time-development dept.
Ian Lamont writes "The handheld calculator turns 40 years old this year, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has officially added to its collection examples of the first two programmable calculators, the TI-58 and TI-59. The museum already has the original 1967 'Cal-Tech' prototype, which weighs three pounds. At a ceremony at the Smithsonian yesterday, Jerry Merryman, one of the members of the TI team which developed the calculator, said that the project was started without a set budget and was something that 'we did in our spare time.' Antique calculators have a devoted following; news of a contest celebrating the 35th anniversary of the HP-35 slide rule calculator brought hundreds of fans out of the woodwork to reminisce about the pros and cons of various 70s' era calculators. There are a lot of Web resources devoted to these devices, including the Old Calculators Web Museum, where you can see pictures of everything from the Bohn Contex Model 10 Mechanical Calculator ('apparently the design of the machine caught the attention of the Soviets') to TI's first scientific calculator, the SR-20 ('keyboards were prone to bounce even when new')."
The Courts

Legal Summits to Tackle Linux 107

Posted by CowboyNeal from the open-to-suggestions dept.
An anonymous reader writes "BuilderAU has the story that the Linux Foundation, custodians of the Linux trademark, have announced that they will host two summits to deal with legal issues surrounding Linux and open-source software. Attendance at the first summit will be restricted to members of the Linux Foundation and their legal counsel. The second summit — an open meeting — will be held in Autumn 2008 where legal experts from any background will be able to attend."
Power

Electric Motorcycle Inventor Crashes at Wired Conference 337

Posted by CowboyNeal from the egg-on-face dept.
not5150 writes "The inventor of the electric 'KillaCycle" motorcycle was taken to the hospital for x-rays after demonstrating the vehicle to reporters. Bill Dube, a government scientist during the day and bike builder at night, attempted a burnout in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center during the Wired NextFest fair. Fueled by the "most powerful" lithium-ion batteries in the world, the bike accelerated uncontrollably into another car. There's a video interview (thankfully before the crash) and footage of Dube crashing."
Technology

Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb 632

Posted by samzenpus from the big-boom dept.
mahesh_gharat writes "Russia has tested the "Father of all bombs," a conventional air-delivered explosive that experts say can only be compared with a nuclear weapon in terms of its destructive power.The device is a fuel-air explosive, commonly known as a vacuum bomb, that spreads a high incendiary vapour cloud over a wide area and then ignites it, creating an ultra-sonic shock wave and searing fireball that destroys everything in its wake."
Security

Indictment Highlights File-Sharing Risks 86

Posted by CowboyNeal from the careful-what-you-share dept.
Bomarc writes "Via the KOMO-TV website, an article from the Associated Press about how Gregory Thomas Kopiloff used Limewire, Soulseek and other peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to troll other computers for financial information, which he used to open credit cards for an online shopping spree, according to a four-count indictment unsealed in US District Court on Thursday. The news article isn't big on details, but it does outline the risks with peer-to-peer file-sharing programs."

Slashdot Top Deals

"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close