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Biotech

Submission + - Bioluminescent Bacteria Used to Combat Pollution (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many animals use bioluminescence to find food, attract mates, and defend against predators. Now a marine biologist is harnessing bioluminescent bacteria to save one of Florida'(TM)s most precious and threatened ecosystems — theIndian River Lagoon. By mixing bioluminescent bacteria with sediment from the 156-mile estuary, renowned scientist Dr. Edith Widder is able to determine how many toxic chemicals are present in the water.
Science

Submission + - A new kind of metal theorized to be in the earth's (ciw.edu)

Submitted by slew
slew writes: This article talks about a study accepted to Physical Review Letters that theorizes that Iron oxide goes through an insulator/metal phase change with high temperature and pressure. Originally it was thought to be a crystalline structure change, but now apparently it is theorized to be a new type of metallic state. This discovery might offer new insight on how the earth's magnetic field operates.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Assembling a desktop environment 1

Submitted by paxcoder
paxcoder writes: Gnome Shell... is different. Very much so. The fallback was inadequate. I suspect that many people, like me, turned to the alternatives. My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use. Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use? Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces? Anything cool we might not know about?

Comment Re:Slow (Score 2, Informative) 105

by Kumba (#23843603) Attached to: Replacement For Aging Doppler Radar Being Tested

5 seconds? We had a tornado here in Omaha a couple weeks ago, and the sirens provided no warning because it hit during the 5 minute blind spot in the radar. On one pass it was a severe thunderstorm, on the next pass it was a tornado on the ground.

If they can't make the radar rotate faster, they should add more dishes to the same radar so it's looking in 2 or 3 directions at once.
The Radar, even if it lacked the blind spot, can't determine if there's a tornado on the ground or not. It can only detect if there's a significant amount of rotation that makes conditions favourable for tornado formation, and then issue a TVS, or Tornado Vortex Signature. The forecaster reviewing the data has to then decide if the radar's predictions are worth issuing a warning. They have to consider data not only from the radar, but current weather conditions and perhaps from the most important source, people on the ground who spot storms and report them in.

This is why the NWS runs the National Skywarn program to help educate everyday people like yourself on how to look for certain signs of damaging storms, including severe and tornadic storms, and report them in so that the forecasters have solid data on conditions on the ground (which the radar can't see!).

http://www.skywarn.org/
Biotech

Suppressed Report Shows Cancer Link to GM Potatoes 325

Posted by Zonk from the politics-and-potatoes-and-science-mix-poorly dept.
Doc Ruby writes "After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year."
Data Storage

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability 267

Posted by Zonk from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.
oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"
Mozilla

Submission + - EverQuest II embeds Mozilla browser

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: EverQuest II's next release will include an embedding of the Mozilla browser. It's currently live on the test server and has a few issues that will hopefully be resolved before release.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?st art=15&topic_id=347230

Some interesting uses of the browser such as automatically searching for quest hints are being discussed on the interface board:

http://www.eq2interface.com/forums/showthread.php? t=7846
Power

Creating Power From Wasted Heat 186

Posted by Zonk from the that's-borg-technology dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy."
Space

Asteroid Highlighted as Impact Threat 297

Posted by Zonk from the please-bring-your-seatbacks-and-traytables dept.
Maggie McKee writes "The asteroid Apophis has been traversing the void of space for untold years; in just a few decades time it will make a very close pass to Earth, and could make an unwelcome stop on our planet's surface. Even still, it's nothing to get too worked up about. The 20-million-tonne object has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting the Pacific Ocean in early April of 2036. If it did hit, it could trigger a tsunami that would do an untold amount of damage to the California coastline and many other places on Earth. Despite the low level of the threat, it's still a real enough danger to prompt the United Nations to develop a protocol about the scenario. We'll get a closeup look at the object in 2029, and at that point we should have a better idea of what 2036 will bring us."
The Internet

Submission + - Non-Proft Web Site Uses Pyramid Scheme for Good

Submitted by
jsburke
jsburke writes: "The Darfur Wall is a web site that raises money for Darfur, Sudan, where 400,000 people have been killed and over 2 million displaced since 2003. The site recently introduced a referral program called 'Advocates,' which it describes as a 'pyramid scheme for good.' From their blog: 'The program works by providing a participant — an Advocate — with a personalized web-link. An Advocate shares this link with friends and asks them to click on it, visit darfurwall.org, and donate. The Darfur Wall recognizes the link and awards points to the Advocate ... Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the program creates a network effect. But Advocates is no Amway. One hundred percent of the money it generates supports peace in Darfur.'"
Networking

5 Things the Boss Should Know About Spam Fighting 168

Posted by Zonk from the never-give-up-never-surrender dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Sysadmins and email administrators were asked to identify the one thing they wish the CIO understood about their efforts to fight spam. The CIO website is now running their five most important tips, in an effort to educate the corporate brass. Recommendations are mostly along the lines of informing corporate management; letting bosses know that there is no 'silver bullet', and that the battle will never really end. There's also a suggestion to educate on technical matters, bringing executives into the loop on terms like SMTP and POP. Their first recommendation, though, is to make sure no mail is lost. 'This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream.'"
Security

Chinese Hack Attacks on DoD Networks Coordinated 295

Posted by Zonk from the man-your-battlestations dept.
An anonymous reader writes " The Naval Network Warfare Command says that Chinese hackers are relentlessly targeting Defense Department networks with cyber attacks. The 'volume, proficiency and sophistication' of the attacks supports the theory that the attacks are government supported. The motives of the attacks emanating from China include technology theft, intelligence gathering, exfiltration, research on DOD operations and the creation of dormant presences in DOD network for future action. Onlookers warn that current US defenses against these attacks are 'dysfunctional', and that more aggressive measures should be taken to ensure government network safety."

Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes 320

Posted by Zonk from the down-with-woes dept.
rbgrn writes "A123 Systems claims to have invented a Lithium Ion battery that not only can discharge at very high rates of current but can be recharged very quickly without damage to the cells or overheating. From their website: 'A unique feature of A123Systems' M1 cells is their ability to charge to high capacity in 5 minutes or less. That's a significant improvement over traditional Li Ion, which typically requires more than 90 minutes to reach a similar level of charge.' Using this technology, General Motors has announced a plug-in hybrid SUV and Venture Vehicles is developing a fully electric 3 wheel vehicle. Politics aside, the main technological hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars has been a fuel station replacement when driving distances beyond a single charge worth of range. Will we finally be seeing high current recharge stations in the next decade?"
Businesses

Comparison of Working at the 3 Big Search Giants 179

Posted by Zonk from the searching-for-some-free-sushi dept.
castironwok writes "Finally, everything you've ever wanted to know about being an employee at Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Tastyresearch describes his (or her) past few years interning and working at the three companies. Things I didn't know from before: Bill Gates wears old shoes, Google's internal security watches you like a hawk, the office styles of each company, and how to fill your suitcase with Google T-shirts. He calls the few select companies the 'prestigious internship circle', noting 'once you have worked at one, it's a lot easier to get into another'."

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