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Biotech

Scientists Decipher 3-Billion-Year-Old Genomic Fossils 217

Posted by Soulskill from the long-time-gone dept.
hnkstrprnkstr writes "MIT scientists have created a sort of genomic fossil (abstract) that shows the collective genome of all life underwent an enormous expansion about 3 billion years ago, which they're calling the Archean Expansion. Many of the new genes appearing in the Archean Expansion are oxygen related, and could be the first biological evidence of the Great Oxidation Event, the period in Earth's history when oxygen became so plentiful that many anaerobic life forms may have become extinct."
Canada

Free Radicals May Not Be Cause of Aging 371

Posted by timothy from the with-very-few-exceptions-not-a-human-being dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have uncovered strong new evidence that that wildly-accepted mitochondrial free radical theory of aging (MFRTA) is wrong. MFRTA suggests that free radicals cause oxidative damage, which in turn leads to the aging process. This new evidence shows that high levels of Reactive Oxidative species are rather a biological signal used to combat aging then the process itself. This goes against claims of major health benefits from consuming foods and particularly supplements that contain antioxidants."
Books

Google Books Makes a Word Cloud of Human History 127

Posted by Soulskill from the trends-for-books dept.
An anonymous reader writes "From Ed Yong at the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog: 'Just as petrified fossils tell us about the evolution of life on earth, the words written in books narrate the history of humanity. The words tell a story, not just through the sentences they form, but in how often they occur. Uncovering those tales isn't easy — you'd need to convert books into a digital format so that their text can be analyzed and compared. And you'd need to do that for millions of books. Fortunately, that's exactly what Google have been doing since 2004.' Yong goes on to explain that the astounding record of human culture found in Google Books offers new research paths to social scientists, linguists, and humanities scholars. Some of the early findings (abstract), based on an analysis of 5 million books containing 500 billion words: English is still adding words at a breathtaking pace; grammar is evolving and often becoming more regular; we're forgetting our history more quickly; and celebrities are younger than they used to be. You can also play with the Google Books search tool yourself. For example, here's a neat comparison of how often the words Britannica and Wikipedia have appeared."
Medicine

Browsing the Body 107

Posted by Soulskill from the not-porn dept.
ColdWetDog writes "Google Labs has an interesting new line of business — human anatomy. The Google Body Browser is a 3D representation of the major parts of the human body. Based on the well known and very expensive Zygote 3D artwork, you can zoom in, rotate, view the various organ systems (bone, internal organs, nerves) in various states of transparency. Very much like Google Earth in both execution and concept. Written with HTML5, it requires WebGL to work. The Firefox 4 beta seems to work fine. Google, of course, recommends Chrome."
The Internet

UN Considering Control of the Internet 402

Posted by Soulskill from the if-you-strike-me-down dept.
Dangerous_Minds writes "News has surfaced in the wake of the WikiLeaks story that the United Nations is mulling total inter-government regulation of the internet. The initiative was spearheaded by Brazil and supported by other countries including India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid commented that while the Cablegate story may be bad, attempting to destroy WikiLeaks would only make matters worse for various governments around the world, given what happened when the music industry shut down Napster ten years ago."
Image

Scientists Identify Head of France's King Henry IV 64

Posted by samzenpus from the losing-then-finding-your-head dept.
JThaddeus writes "The Associated Press reports that 'After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV.' Henry was assassinated in 1610, and his head has been missing. His body was dug up and decapitated during the French Revolution. Researchers found features similar to those in royal portraits, and radiocarbon dating confirms that the head dates to the 17th Century. Interestingly, 'Perfumers on the team used their professionally trained noses to identify specific embalming substances in the mouth used to hide nasty odors.' The results have been published an online medical journal."
Linux

Submission + - Arch: A Linux For Fundamentalists (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: We all know that Ubuntu or Mint are good Linux beginners. But if you're more of a "change your own oil" type, but still not a "rebuild an engine" type, then Arch Linux is worth looking at, says Steven Vaughan-Nichols in a review. 'You see, Arch Linux, without requiring you to master kernel compiling 101 gives you an enormous amount of control over how Linux will run for you. That starts from the get-go,' says Vaughan-Nichols. One interesting thing to note: 'Arch's GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB), doesn't automatically detect any other operating systems on your hard drive. Yes, I know Arch is all about "do-it-yourself" Linux, but GRUB is infamous for being a pain to set up properly and there's nothing quite like not being able to boot at all from a hard drive to make you want to tear your hair out.'
NASA

Submission + - NASA launches MMO (gamerlive.tv)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Moonbase Alpha is a single-level demo/prototype of a larger NASA MMO game that will be directed at STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education. The game play takes about 20 minutes or so. Players step into the role of an exploration team member in a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. Their mission is to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a nearby meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support equipment.

The game is free: http://store.steampowered.com/
Firefox

Submission + - Why Mozilla will use a Chrome interface in Firefox (conceivablytech.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is an interesting theory why Mozilla apparently had no choice but to go with a Chrome-like user interface in the next version of Firefox. It seems that Mozilla’s users are not quite as loyal as market share numbers indicate – Firefox may be gaining users from IE, but it may be losing users to Chrome at a similar pace. Now, it appears, Mozilla hopes that a Chrome-like interface will stop bleeding and convince more users to stay with Firefox. If Mozilla can’t stop the migration, it could be drowned by Chrome in the long run.
Graphics

STIX Project Releases v1.0 of Its Scientific Fonts Set 100

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-conservative-versioning dept.
starseeker writes "The Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project has released version 1.0 of its font set. This release is the product of almost 15 years of work, with the goal of creating a comprehensive set of fonts for scientific and engineering manuscript creation. The fonts have been released under the SIL Open Font License, and can be downloaded here. Among the many potential applications is proper universal support for MathML in web browsers." If you want a peek, here's "a page for viewing the thousands of glyphs (as a first approximation, think of a glyph as an individual character)."

Submission + - Citrix XenServer 5.6 now available (citrix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New and improved Citrix XenServer 5.6 is now available for download.While XenServer was generally technically on par with VMware, this release further closes usability the gap between XenServer and VMware ESX.
Open Source

Google WebM Calls "Open Source" Into Question 185

Posted by Soulskill from the branding-is-everything dept.
snydeq writes "As open source becomes mainstream, vendors are under pressure to market their offerings using the 'open source' brand to the highest degree possible — a trend that may eventually degrade the meaning of 'open source' as we know it, Savio Rodrigues writes. Witness WebM, which Google has positioned as an open alternative to H.264. After examining the software license, some in the open source community have questioned whether WebM should be classified as open source software. Google did not use an OSI-approved license for WebM, meaning that, at least in theory, WebM cannot be considered open source under the OSD — the 'gold standard' by which many government and business open source policies are defined. Moreover, when prodded for OSI review, Google required that the OSI agree to 'changes to how OSI does licenses' as a precursor to submitting a license for OSI review and approval. 'When Google, one of the largest supporters of open source, goes out and purposefully circumvents the OSI, what signal does this send to other vendors? How important is using an OSI-approved license likely to be in the future if other vendors follow Google's lead?'" An anonymous reader adds: "It turns out that libvpx, Google's VP8 library, isn't compatible with the GPLv2. Google is apparently aware of the problem and working on a solution.
Science

Submission + - What Scientists Really Think About Religion 4

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post has a book review of "Science and Religion: What Scientists Really Think" by Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund who did a detailed survey of 1,646 scientists at elite American research universities that reveals that scientists often practice a closeted faith worrying about how their peers would react to learning about their religious views. "After four years of research, at least one thing became clear: Much of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. The 'insurmountable hostility' between science and religion is a caricature, a thought-cliche, perhaps useful as a satire on groupthink, but hardly representative of reality," writes Ecklund. Unsurprisingly, Ecklund found that 64 percent of scientists are either atheists (34%) or agnostic (30%) but only five of the 275 in-depth interviewees actively oppose religion and even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves "spiritual" with one describing his spiritual atheism as being rooted in "wonder about the complexity and the majesty of existence," a sentiment many nonscientists — religious or not — would recognize. "According to the scientists I interviewed, the academy seems to have a “strong culture” that suppresses discussion about religion in many areas," says Ecklund. "Yet so few scientists talk openly about issues related to religion that we do not know the true consequences of having such discussions. To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.""

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