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Hardware Hacking

Disassembling the US Nintendo DSi 102

Posted by timothy from the keep-all-27-pieces dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday iFixit tore apart the Nintendo DSi and found several internal upgrades from the outgoing DS Lite. It seems that an experienced hand can completely disassemble the DSi in less than ten minutes using standard tools, especially since the job does not require a tri-wing screwdriver. This should make repairing and tinkering with the DSi substantially easier. The DSi now includes two integrated cameras that, unfortunately, have only 0.3 megapixel resolution. This is certainly a bit underwhelming considering most mainstream phones have cameras of at least 1.3 megapixels. As for chips, Nintendo is using a Samsung MoviNAND integrated 256 MB Flash memory / MMC controller chip, as well as a custom ARM CPU + GPU is stamped with the revision code 'TWL.' The DSi's chips all had manufacture dates around September 2008, indicating that Nintendo has been stockpiling these devices for quite a while prior to the North American release."

Comment Re:Virtualbox is superior to VMware (Score 1) 374

by YooHoo2U2 (#26210999) Attached to: VirtualBox 2.1 Supports 64-Bit VM In 32-Bit Host

But VMWare Server's 'boot guest OS on host OS startup' and being able to close the virtual machines window and have the OS continue running (i.e. run it in the background with no GUI) are great features that are missing in VirtualBox.

VBoxHeadless startvm "Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop"

For automatic startup on a Linux host, you can use @reboot in cron tab or add a line to /etc/rc.local. Windows has something similar.
Biotech

Scientists Create Zombie Cockroaches 243

Posted by Zonk from the almost-as-good-as-'them' dept.
Reservoir Hill writes "Zombie insects might sound like a B-movie plot device (quicktime video) but to the emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa), they're a tried and tested way to provide food for their hungry larvae. The wasp relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle but unlike many venomous predators, which paralyze their victims before eating them, the wasp's sting leaves the cockroach able to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement. Researchers have discovered that the wasps sting the cockroaches once to subdue them, then administer another, more precise sting right into their victim's brain. The venom works to block a neurotransmitter called octopamine with a similar action to dopamine, which is involved in preparations to execute complex behaviors such as walking. Then the wasp grabs the cockroach's antenna and leads it back to the nest 'like a dog on a leash', says one researcher. The team found that they could restore spontaneous walking behavior in stung cockroaches by giving them a compound that reactivates octopamine receptors in the insects' central nervous system. Researchers were also able to create their own zombies by injecting unstung cockroaches with a compound that blocks the receptors producing a similar effect to that of the venom."
Science

The Rules of the Swarm 166

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-the-collective dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers are starting to discover the simple rules that allow swarms of thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory at Princeton University, builds computer models of virtual swarms with thousands of individual agents that he can program to follow a few simple rules. Among the findings are that swarm behavior has patterns common to many different species, that just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, swarm behavior can also change abruptly in character, and that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively by creating a bias in the swarm's movement that steers it in a particular direction. The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies and researchers are working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish. "How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you're seeing?" Dr. Couzin says. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm."
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Checkers Solved

Submitted by
JnKor
JnKor writes: "Scienctific American is reporting that checkers has been solved by researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton."
United States

Submission + - C.I.A. to declassify "skeletons"

Submitted by sgt_doom
sgt_doom writes: The C.I.A. announced today it was going to reveal "skeletons" by declassifying hundreds of pages of documents detailing illegal abuses over the years. As a preamble, the National Security Archive at George Washington University released a separate set of documents covering internal government deliberations of the abuses from January 1975. Mandatory reading for all those history-challenged individuals who believe government knows best!

Comment Re:For the non-statistically minded (Score 1) 577

by YooHoo2U2 (#19394721) Attached to: Misuse of Scientific Data By the White House

Here's the catch: the string is actually knotted at intervals of 110 cm. So all the fudgers who get a result of 9.8 +/- 0.5 ms^-2 because they knew that was the 'right' answer get to fail, while those who got ~9 ms^-2 get full marks.

Unless someone is thorough enough to actually measure the distance between the knots.
United States

Submission + - H-1B visa cap -- proposed increases

Submitted by poshdev
poshdev writes: There is a growing amount of discussion in the IT world on the topic of H-1B and L-1 visas. How are they being used, and what is the effect of the visa programs on the job market in the USA? On the economy in the USA? Will the visas enable the USA to remain on top technically, or will they merely fuel the increasing tendency for USA and other 1st world -based business interests to offshore their jobs to 3rd world countries such as India and China? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/04/02/AR2007040201538.html
United States

Submission + - Chinese Industry Produces Contaminated Food

Submitted by
reporter
reporter writes: "Investigative reporters at the "International Herald Tribune" have just discovered that China has an entire industry devoted to directly or indirectly adding contaminants to food destined for human consumption. According to their report, "In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair, to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim . [...] for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.""
United States

Submission + - Geologists discover world's largest fossil forest

Submitted by solitas
solitas writes: The St.Louis post-Dispatch says that geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface.

The four-square-mile fossil forest — the largest find ever — is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.

No photos; but a graphic about how they believe it happened.
Security

Submission + - Apple: Is Mac OS X wide open by default?

Submitted by evw
evw writes: Subrosasoft has announced MacLockPick that claims to grab all the passwords stored in the Key Chain including but not limited to logins, disk images, Wi-Fi passwords, iTunes, iChat, Remote Desktop, email, all your banking info, and peer to peer information. MacNN, Gizmodo and other blogs review it.

This sounds like snake-oil to me. Granted, anyone with physical access to your machine to plug in this USB based device can probably pwn you to start with, but this device seems to rely on the user leaving everything wide open. If you use FileVault, turn off auto-login, require a password to wake from sleep, use a decent password and don't grant KeyChain Access blanket permission to access your key chains, does this thing really work? It seems to me that it relies on the digital equivalent of the password written on a post-it stuck to the monitor.

But even if the claims are true, don't panic because it's only for sale to licensed investigators.

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