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Medicine

Daily Sex Helps Improve Fertility 174

Posted by samzenpus from the use-it-or-lose-it dept.
mmmscience writes "While fertility studies lately seem to have been exclusively focused on in vitro fertilization [IVF], new data coming out of Australia may help with unaided successful conceptions. The study has found that men who have ejaculate daily produce sperm with less damaged DNA. While such actions decrease sperm concentration, it does increase motility, meaning healthier sperm have a better chance of making it all the way to the egg. Good news, as another report has found severe chromosome abnormalities in over 90% of IVF eggs, meaning artificial insemination is just now discovering a whole new field of problems."

Comment Re:In a bind (Score 5, Insightful) 865

by halsver (#28547817) Attached to: Staying In Shape vs. a Busy IT Job Schedule?

At the bare minimum, you need to move closer to where you work. Your commute is costing you your health and is eating your paycheck. Looking at the money you are making versus the costs, you might be better off working at the 7-11 down the street.

Where does your social life fit in to this? I know when I work a 60+ hour week I need the weekend just to unwind, let alone see friends or do things I enjoy.

My solution, get an apartment within 5 miles of your work and then ride a bicycle there.
Privacy

Ranchers Have Beef With USDA Program To ID Cattle 376

Posted by kdawson from the chipping-in dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities. The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database. 'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS. One group has issued a bumper sticker that reads, 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' 'They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,' says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. 'This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.'"
Communications

Submission + - Verizon Sells Phone Lines in 14 States (wsj.com)

Submitted by gmagill
gmagill writes: Quoted from article: "Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to sell local phone businesses in 14 states to Frontier Communications Corp. in a deal valued at $8.6 billion, the latest move by Verizon to focus on markets that are better tailored to its fiber-optic services."
The Courts

Submission + - Judge in Pirate Bay case formally scrutinized 2

Submitted by metacell
metacell writes: The judge in the Pirate Bay case, who was accused of being partial due to being a member of pro-IP organizations and having several connections to the prosecution's lawyers, will be formally scrutinized. The appeals court has selected Anders Eka to perform the scrutiny. Anders Eka is himself a member of a research team at Stockholm University, together with the prosecution's two lawyers, Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky.
Article in Swedish, sorry!
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/musik/the-pirate-bay-nya-turer-i-javsfragan-1.870677
The Courts

Submission + - Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Cyberlaw Record

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Thomas O'Toole writes that President Obama's choice for Associate Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, authored several cyberlaw opinions regarding online contracting law, domain names, and computer privacy while on the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor wrote the court's 2002 opinion in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., an important online contracting case. In Specht, the Second Circuit declined to enforce contract terms that were available behind a hyperlink that could only be seen by scrolling down on a Web page (pdf). "We are not persuaded that a reasonably prudent offeree in these circumstances would have known of the existence of license terms," wrote Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor wrote an opinion in a domain name case, Storey v. Cello Holdings LLC in 2003 that held that an adverse outcome in an administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy did not preclude a later-initiated federal suit (pdf) brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In Leventhal v. Knapek, a privacy case, Judge Sotomayor wrote for the Second Circuit that New York state agency officials and investigators did not violate a state employee's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched the contents of his office computer for evidence of unauthorized use of state equipment. While none of these cases may mean much as far as what Judge Sotomayor will do as an Associate Supreme Court Justice "if confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court," writes O'Toole."
The Military

Submission + - Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage CyberWars 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that the Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials say, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare. Obama is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks. The main dispute has been over whether the Pentagon or the National Security Agency should take the lead in preparing for and fighting cyberbattles. Under one proposal still being debated, parts of the NSA would be integrated into the military command so they could operate jointly. Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields. "We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.""
Businesses

Customer Resource Management For Non-Profits? 186

Posted by timothy from the hey-I'm-a-non-profit dept.
NoTerminal writes "My 60-person non-profit organization is looking for a tool or set of tools to keep track of our donors and contacts. A perfect solution will either replace or gracefully synchronize with Outlook's contacts module, as well as provide a powerful back-end that can handle donation tracking, grant reporting, and interaction tracking. What contact management system or customer relations management package is your non-profit using? How do you like it?"
Graphics

A History of 3D Cards From Voodoo To GeForce 320

Posted by kdawson from the long-and-winding-road dept.
Ant sends us to Maximum PC for an account of the history and current state of 3D video cards (single print page). "Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today... Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgic ride you don't want to miss!"
Biotech

Florida Lab Gets Pregnant 149

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the also-no-one-has-heard-from-them-in-days dept.
Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. "AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks -- as opposed to the usual four -- there's little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do,' said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front."
Sci-Fi

Half-Life Short Film Grabs Attention 72

Posted by Soulskill from the also-grabs-a-crowbar dept.
switchfeet writes "For any of you Half-Life fans out there, this new short film based on the game by The Purchase Brothers is really garnering some attention on pretty much every gaming site out there. 'It's a mixture of live action and game footage, and makes smart use of in-game sound effects, and some really fantastic location hunting. ... The Purchase Bros describe the production as 'guerilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500.'"
Social Networks

A Quantitative Study of How Memes Spread 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the please-no-more-25-things dept.
rememberclifford writes "A survey of about 3,000 people who were tagged in a '25 Random Things About Me' note on Facebook found that memes spread through social networks in a remarkably similar way as diseases do. A biologist who looked at the data says that '"25 Things" authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease,' with a propagation factor of 0.27 in this case. But like an infection, the whole thing died out as quickly as it exploded once the number of 'victims' — people who were willing to write 25 things about themselves — was depleted." The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu.
Medicine

Athletes' Brains Reveal Concussion Damage 328

Posted by kdawson from the chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy dept.
jamie found a story on research about what concussions do to athletes, with the insights coming mostly from the study of the donated brains of dead athletes. The NFL has the biggest profile in the piece, but other sports make an appearance too. Turns out that repeated concussions can result in depression, insomnia, and the beginnings of something that looks a lot like Alzheimer's. "The idea that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine is gone," said [retired wrestler] Nowinski. "We know we can't do that anymore. This causes long-term damage."

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