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Submission + - Naps Nurture Growing Brains (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Few features of child-rearing occupy as much parental brain space as sleep, and with it the timeless question: Is my child getting enough? Despite the craving among many parents for more sleep in their offspring (and, by extension, themselves), the purpose that sleep serves in young kids remains something of a mystery—especially when it comes to daytime naps. Do they help children retain information, as overnight sleep has been found to do in adults? A new study provides the first evidence that daytime sleep is in fact critical for effective learning in young children.

Submission + - Nirvanix Shuts Down Cloud Storage Service, After $70M in Funding

Submitted by cagraham
cagraham writes: Cloud storage provider Nirvanix, whose clients include IBM, Symantec, Fox Network, and National Geographic, has told its customers they're shutting down. They reportedly called large customers last week, telling them to move their data off Nirvanix's servers by the end of the month, with no further explanation. They've now extended that deadline to Oct. 15, but have yet to issue an official statement explaining what went wrong. Even their partner company Aorta Cloud doesn't seem to know what happened. This comes after they raised over $70M in funding since their 2007 launch, $25M of which came in May.

Submission + - Medical records given to pharmacies are not constitutionally protected, says DEA (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Like emails and documents stored in the cloud, your prescription medical records may have a tenuous right to privacy. In response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the privacy of certain medical records, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is arguing that citizens whose medical records are handed over to a pharmacy — or any other third-party — have "no expectation of privacy" for that information.

Submission + - Ocean Eddies Mathematically Similar To Black Holes - Climate Change Influence? (redorbit.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Red Orbit reports, "Scientists at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and University of Miami found that some of the largest ocean eddies on Earth are quite similar to the mysterious black holes of space. ... Our climate has influenced huge ocean eddies over 90-miles in diameter that rotate and drift across the ocean. The number of eddies in the Southern Ocean are on the rise, increasing the northward transport of warm and salty water. Scientists have been unable to quantify the impact of ocean eddies so far because the exact boundaries of these swirling bodies have remained undetectable. However, researchers writing in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics say they have developed a new mathematical technique to find water-transporting eddies with coherent boundaries. ... The rotating and drifting fluid motion appears chaotic to the observer, but the team was able to restore order to this chaos by isolating coherent water islands from a sequence of satellite observations. They found that these coherent eddies turned out to be mathematically equivalent to black holes." — More at Science Daily and MIT Technology Review. The academic paper.

Submission + - Climate,Ffood, and Biomass Energy (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Many experts have concluded that, if greenhouse gas concentrations are to be limited while the world's energy demands are nonetheless met, biomass energy will be an indispensable resource. At the same time, climate change is expected to affect agricultural productivity adversely—and 15 percent of people in developing countries, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, already suffer from extreme food insecurity. This roundtable at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explores the question of whether the climate-mitigating effects of biomass energy can be achieve without further wrecking agriculture and food security, worldwide?

Submission + - Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? (datamation.com) 2

Submitted by jammag
jammag writes: "When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu," opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?

Submission + - Car Dealers Stand In Line, Complain to DMV About Tesla's Website (greencarreports.com) 2

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Ok maybe they don't actually stand in line, but still, talk about complaining into ether. State and national car dealer groups have been battling Tesla Motors for years, trying to stop them from selling its electric cars directly to buyers. Most of the time, the dealers work behind the scenes to change state laws and and force Tesla to conduct its sales through "independently-owned third parties" which are aka, well, car dealers. But in California, Tesla's operations are legal, so that tactic won't work. So dealers there are taking an interesting new tack — complaining to the DMV about Tesla's website.

Submission + - Seeing Stars: Sex in Space (omnireboot.com) 1

Submitted by OMNI Reboot
OMNI Reboot writes: Anthropologist Dr. Cameron M. Smith examines how human sexuality will evolve with long-term interstellar travel. If we ever undertake the grand project of space colonization, we’ll have more than just engineering problems to contend with. We’ll have to figure out how sex looks—and feels—when you’re living in a closed ship in the middle of the cosmos:

"How will sexuality play out in space? Take your pick, so long as it doesn’t interfere with maintaining a healthy population, or exceeding the limits of the space ark. Wherever we go, humanity will be characterized by change; for millions of years, our behavior has been decoupled from our biology by powerful cognitive processes and tool use. This adaptive ace up the sleeve gives us tremendous behavioral variation, allowing us to proactively adapt to new conditions by mind rather than reactively, by body. For humans settling a new planet, cultural variables related to sex and sexuality will all shift, differing from that of their ancestors long left back on Earth and from that of the generations that crossed the gulfs of interstellar space. Sex will continue—it will have to—and the solution to questions of sexuality will be to to have many solutions, as it does on Earth."

Submission + - Did Today's Pakistan Earthquake Create a New Island? (zerohedge.com) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Pakistani's The News reports, an entire island emerged off the country's Gwadar coast in the aftermath of the quake. "According to DIG Gwadar Moazzam Jah, the island's altitude is 20 to 40 feet and width around 100 feet. Talking to Geo news, the DIG said that the island emerged at a distance of 350 feet in the sea from the Gwadar coast."

How long until US military claims this new rock as a new naval base which just happens to be in close proximity to Iran's eastern maritime border?

Submission + - Kobe Bryant Postgame Interview About Torn Achilles (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Lakers are paying Bryant $27.8 million this year, but there's nothing they could do about his destructive desire to pile every minute of every game onto a 34-year-old body that was weakening with every possession.

Will this be the end of his career?

Listen to the man speak for himself.

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