MMBK writes "Dennis Chamberland is one of the world's preeminent aquanauts. He's worked with NASA to develop living habitats and underwater plant growth labs, among other cool things. His next goal is establishing the world's first permanent underwater colony. This video gets to the heart of his project, literally and figuratively, as most is shot in his underwater habitat, Atlantica, off the coast of Key Largo, FL. The coolest part might be the moon pool, the room you swim into underwater."

BioShock 2 launched today for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Windows, ending the wait for a sequel to the original 2007 blockbuster. The events in BioShock 2 take place 10 years after the story from the original game. This time around, players control a prototype Big Daddy in an attempt to overthrow the new leader of Rapture. Early reviews for the game are quite strong, though the developers were prepared for fan backlash over some of the changes they made. The Guardian's Nicky Woolf praises the new storyline, and adds that "there is a fundamentally excellent shooter here too, with some of the best combat dynamics in the business." Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Alec Meer also had good things to say about the combat: "I can't stress this enough – as a game about shooting people, it's very responsive and very rewarding." However, Meer expressed disappointment that some of the impressive new concept art didn't get used and that the story and environment couldn't match the novelty of the original game. "Part of Rapture's great wonder was that it was just believable enough, if you squinted your brain a bit (or a lot), but this lathers on so much wild sci-fi that it's much harder to connect to it. The Sisters are elevated from horrifying genetic/psychological experiment into all-powerful messiah figures capable of pulling any old deus ex machina out of the hat. Making them into so much reduces the power and the sadness of what they are. As a result, the concept feels too exhausted to ever be used again."

An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2002, we discussed a story about the so-called 'Perpetual Motion DeLorean,' which could 'supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge.' More than seven years later, the final shoe has dropped on this saga, with a $26 million judgment against Carl Tilley and his wife, who propagated this scam that ran for several years. Probably the height of its audacity was when Tilley told his shareholders in May of 2002 that GE had offered $2 billion 'sight unseen' to buy out the technology."

dragonturtle69 writes with this story, short on details but interesting: "These sea slugs, Elysia chlorotica, have evolved the ability to gain energy via photosynthesis. Forget about genetic modifications for sports enhancements. I want to be able to never need to eat again — or do I?"

idk07002 writes 'I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in-office file server (a Drobo), in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these two systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet, but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get maximum life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a Linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?'

longacre writes "I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human 'Jeopardy!' contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. ... The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications. ... The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking "grand challenges" like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. ... Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the 'Jeopardy!' producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show's host, Alex Trebek. ... Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the 'Jeopardy!' contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004."