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Graphics

Company Seeks To Boost Linux Game Development With 3D Engine Giveaway 140

Posted by Soulskill from the for-services-rendered dept.
binstream writes "To support Linux game development, Unigine Corp. announced a competition: it will give a free license for its Unigine engine to a seasoned team willing to work on a native Linux game. The company has been Linux-friendly from the very start; it released advanced GPU benchmarks (Heaven, Tropics, Sanctuary) for Linux before and is working on the OilRush strategy game that supports Linux as well."
Security

Submission + - Fedex Misplaces Radioactive Rods (foxnews.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Fox News reports that a shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment has vanished while being sent by Fedex from North Dakota to Tennessee. Based on tracking information, FedEx is focusing its search in the Tennessee area but as a normal precaution the company alerted all of its stations "in the event that it got waylaid and went to another station by accident." Dr. Marc Siegel says if someone opens the container it could pose some serious health risks. "I don't believe it has the degree of radiation that, if it were opened, your skin would suddenly slop off. But the concern would be, if this got opened inadvertently and someone didn't know what it was and then was repeatedly exposed to it over several days, it could cause a problem with radiation poisoning," say Siegel. "The people that use this equipment in a hospital use protective shielding with it." The lesson is that active medical material must always be transported in a way that ensures that the general public cannot get access to it. "Medical devices should not be FedEx'ed. They should be sent under a special service," adds Siegel."
Space

Submission + - Extra-Galactic Planet Discovered in Milky Way (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Between six to nine billion years ago, the Milky Way collided with another galaxy. As you'd expect, this caused quite a mess; stars dust and gas being ripped from the intergalactic interloper. In fact, to this day, the dust hasn't quite settled and astronomers have spotted an odd-looking exoplanet orbiting a metal poor star 2,000 light-years from Earth. Through a careful process of elimination, the extrasolar planet (known as HIP 13044b) actually works out to be an extragalactic planet, a surviving relic of the massive collision eons ago."
Science

Submission + - LHC Scientists Create and Capture Antimatter (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have created antimatter in the form of antihydrogen, demonstrating how it's possible to capture and release it. The development could help researchers devise laboratory experiments to learn more about this strange substance, which mostly disappeared from the universe shortly after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.Trapping any form of antimatter is difficult, because as soon as it meets normal matter – the stuff Earth and everything on it is made out of – the two annihilate each other in powerful explosions. "We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen," said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics, and LBNL faculty scientist. "Since no one has been able to make these types of measurements on antimatter atoms at all, it's a good start."

Submission + - 'Space-time cloak' could conceal events (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by DeadBugs
DeadBugs writes: New materials with the ability to manipulate the speed of light could enable the creation of a "space-time cloak" capable of masking events or even creating an illusion of "Star Trek"-style transportation, according to scientists in London.
Earth

Submission + - The Story Of My As Yet Unverified Impact Crater. 3

Submitted by tetrahedrassface
tetrahedrassface writes: When I was very young my dad took me on a trip to his parents farm. He wanted to show me 'The Crater'. We walked a long way through second generation hardwoods and finally stood on the rim of a hole that has no equal in this area. As I grew up I became more interested in 'The Crater", and would always tell friends about it. It is roughly 1,200 feet across, and 120 feet deep, and has a strange vibe about it. When you walk up to it, you feel like something really big happened here. Either the mother of all caves is down there, or a large object smashed into this place a long, long time ago. I bought aerial photo's when I was twelve and later send images from GIS to a geologist at a local university and he pretty much laughed me out of his office, saying that it was a sinkhole. He did wish me luck however. It may be sinkhole. Who knows?

Last week I borrowed a metal detector and went poking around, and have found the strangest shrapnel pieces I have ever seen. They are composed of a metal that reacts strongly to acids. The largest piece so far reacted with tap water and dishwashing detergent. My second trip today yielded lots of strange new pieces of metal, and hopefully one day the truth either way will be known. Backyard science is so much fun and who knows, ff it is indeed a cave maybe Cerberus resides there.
Space

Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave 147

Posted by timothy from the want-a-lift? dept.
angry tapir writes "A production facility that would build the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction on Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port. The facility will be home to The Spaceship Co, or TSC — a joint venture owned by Mojave-based Scaled Composites and British billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic."
Idle

Submission + - 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate

Submitted by SpaghettiPattern
SpaghettiPattern writes: I wouldn't want to wrongside the /. demographic by don't letting them come to the party, so it's time to get all our ducks in a row and sprinkle some BBC magic onto my dear stakeholders. The BBC runs an article that goes forward in 360-degree thinking about the challenge posed by office-speak.
Oh, I can't stand this any longer so I'll move forward.
Science

Submission + - Destroy Earth From the Comfort of Your Computer (purdue.edu)

Submitted by zrbyte
zrbyte writes: There have been numerous discussions on /. regarding the matter of a large asteroid hitting the Earth, its consequences and how to avoid such a catastrophe. Now, researchers from the University of Arizona and Imperial College London have produced a software that lets you have a free swing at the Earth by the impactor of your choice. They have a nice web interface that makes creating doomsday scenarios a snap.

Just type in a few variables such as diameter, density, and velocity and Impact: Earth! will send a comet or asteroid hurtling toward our planet. Lest you be unsatisfied with a simulation of a massive rock barreling down on us, the Web site also provides data on the aftermath, including the size of the crater, the extent of the fireball, and even the height of the tsunami wave, should the object crash into the ocean.

Details on the calculations can be found in a paper published by the researchers.

Submission + - Chip allows blind people to see (medicalnewstoday.com)

Submitted by crabel
crabel writes: 3 blind people got implanted with a retinal chip that allowed them to see shapes and objects within days of the procedure.
"One of the patients surprised researchers by identifying and locating objects on a table; he was also able to walk around a room unaided, approach specific people, tell the time from a clock face, and describe seven different shades of gray in front of him."
Games

Submission + - typewriter hacked to play Zork, responds to typing

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: Typewriters that can type by themselves are one thing. Typewriters that can type by themselves and play Zork are totally different – the stuff that dreams are made of (at least the dreams of little girls who spent hours in front of a Commodore 64 telling the machine to GO NORTH and such).
Music

Submission + - Licensing Music Source?

Submitted by David Greene
David Greene writes: Over the years I have used Lilypond to produce some interesting musical works, mostly fake-book-like sheets and a few original compositions. I would like to share these with a larger community in the same way the GPL encourages software sharing. That is, I want to encourage modification and improvement of the "source code" while ensuring such modifications are available under the same licensing terms. In addition, I would like to have a requirement that performances, recordings, etc. of the music include full access to the "source" used for such productions. My primary motivation here is to encourage learning from such recordings, for example making lead sheets available for improvised performances so students can see the chord progressions and structure of the music. Performances of arranged music should include the "source" to the full arrangement, and so on. Is there any license in existence that would fulfill these requirements? The various Creative Commons licenses don't say anything about this kind of music "source code."
Security

Submission + - China Reverse Engineered Classified NSA OS 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that China has managed to reverse-engineered a Classified NSA operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the US Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. The story begins after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. Hersh writes that crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive—“zeroed it out”—but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s NSA-supplied operating system, but over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done.""

Submission + - Photos: The engineering work behind FTTP broadband (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: UK ISP BT has offered a behind the scenes look at its fibre-to-the-premise trial in Milton Keynes, showing the work required by engineers to get fibre to homes in that city. There’s 600km of cables as well as 4,000 manifolds and 1,000 distribution points to install — all to bring fibre broadband to 11,500 homes. All that cable must be pulled through ducts by hand. After that, fibre is blown through the tubes using pressurised air and spliced together to link up homes to the network. Getting fibre the last several yards from the main network infrastructure to homes takes seven hours per home, BT said.

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