Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission Summary: 0 pending, 18 declined, 4 accepted (22 total, 18.18% accepted)

×
Biotech

Submission + - cancer resistant super-mouse and cell death (molvray.com)

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "The BBC enthusiastically reports:

Mice carrying a gene which appears to make them invulnerable to cancer may hold the key to safer and more effective treatments for humans. The new breed, created with a more active "Par-4" gene, did not develop tumours, and even lived longer, said the journal Cancer Research.
The original abstract is more restrained. But this really is exciting work. Programmed cell death is the body's way of getting rid of cells beyond repair. Problems with that process are a large part of the reason why cancer can develop in the first place. Exciting times."
Power

Submission + - Reversing Casimir force for levitation (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "We live in interesting times. From the (UK) Telegraph:

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate. But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
More at Dr. Ulf Leonhardt's page on this research."
Moon

Submission + - Space "pile-up" condemned dinosaurs (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "From the BBC report:

A colossal collision in space 160 million years ago set the dinosaurs on the path to extinction, a study claims. An asteroid pile-up sent debris swirling around the Solar System, including a chunk that later smashed into Earth wiping out the great beasts. Other fragments crashed into the Moon, Venus and Mars, gouging out some of their most dominant impact craters, a US-Czech research team believes. Its study, based on computer modelling, is reported in the journal Nature. ... unless a rogue comet came from the outer edge of the Solar System ("a rather unlikely event"), the Baptistina asteroid family remains a likely source for the Chicxulub impactor. "It is a poignant thought that the Baptistina collision some 160 million years ago sealed the fate of the late-Cretaceous dinosaurs well before most of them had evolved,"
"
Microsoft

Submission + - Hard data on Vista usage: not so much (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs. You think?"
Worms

Submission + - badware

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "(Similar to my last submitted story, but this time via the BBC.) More and more, badware doesn't need any action on the user's part, as it did in the days of email attachments. Recently, even ISP servers are infected, then infect all hosted pages, and spread to anyone who visits those pages. Via the BBC:

The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found. For example, postings in blogs and forums that contain links to images or other content could unwittingly infect a user. The study also found that gangs were able to hijack web servers, effectively taking over and infecting all of the web pages hosted on the computer. In a test, the researchers' computer was infected with 50 different pieces of malware by visiting a web page hosted on a hijacked server. The firm [i. e. Google] is now in the process of mapping the malware threat."
Worms

Submission + - IPowerWeb hosting service compromised by hackers?

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "This come from Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Heart's in Accra:

Stop Badware announced that there are 10,834 sites hosted by IPowerWeb in the Stop Badware index — this index is composed of sites that Google and other partners have identified as hosting code that could damage a visitor's machine. More than one in five of the sites Stop Badware analyzed was hosted by IPowerWeb. That statistic strongly suggests that IPowerWeb has been systematically compromised, allowing hackers to inject this hostile code, possibly through a bug in cpanel (which IPowerWeb runs on at least some of their servers.) ...

A major webhosting provider is vulnerable to attacks on hosted pages. Over 10,000 pages have been affected, and some now contain a Javascript designed to load a Windows trojan horse onto visitors' machines. That trojan horse may be sending data (including passwords entered into your browser!) to a cabal of Russian hackers.
As he says, it seems like the sort of story that should be getting more coverage from the tech community."
Biotech

Submission + - a longevity gene found

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "Calorie restriction while maintaining nutrient levels has long been known to dramatically increase life spans. Very different lab animals, from worms to mice, live up to 50% longer (or even more) on the restricted diets. However, so far, nobody has been able to figure out how this works. Scientists at the Salk Institute have found a specific gene in worms (there's a very similar one in people) that is directly involved in the longevity effect. That opens up the interesting possibility that doctors may someday be able to activate that gene directly and we can live long and prosper . . . without giving up chocolate."
The Internet

Submission + - free speech versus death threats

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "(I'm sure you've received a thousand suggestions on this topic, but just in case you haven't, here it is anyway.)

The BBC has a story about Kathy Sierra who's been freaked into silence by threats in her blog comments. Another thing that struck me was Robert Scoble's comment: ""It's this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. ... whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."

Free speech is only possible if we let each other speak. What do you think, Slashdtters?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Scriptural violence can foster aggression (Nature)

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "Unfortunately, Nature isn't even posting the abstract on this one, "Scriptural violence can foster aggression" by Heidi Ledford and probably others. (Title listed here. ) The article is behind a paywall ($30, I believe).

The title is so intriguing, that I thought maybe Slashdot has a budget for this kind of thing ...? ;-} Bests, quixote9."
PHP

Submission + - Suggestions for comment / collaboration software?

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "I'm looking for an online way that a group of people can comment on each others' manuscripts. Ideally, the software would be a php script that runs in any browser. I'd like it to show the original ms in one pane, say on the left, and the comments, if any, in a right side pane. Comment position in the right pane would be fixed relative to the paragraph it relates to in the original ms. Multiple comments about the same original point would appear on separate lines, as close to the correct position as feasible. Comments could be collapsed completely, show just the first line, or be expanded to full length temporarily. The original could be saved with all the added comments, if desired.

For my purposes, this would be a system for collaborative review, not for a top-down, boss-worker, teacher-student type of situation. There's no need for grading, for someone's comments to have priority, for some people to be unable to comment, and the like. Although if these things are there, it doesn't matter so long as they're optional.

Is there anything like this out there anywhere? Moodle courseware has a "workshop" module, but it's top-down, and the original and the comments aren't visible together. I see complicated php scripts on sourceforge, freshmeat & some php sites for "enterprise level workflow coordination" and simple ones to coordinate calendars. I don't even know how to search for what I'd like. No matter what terms I use, I wind up back in enterprise whiteboard chatspace.

If the reason I can't find it is because it doesn't exist, any suggestins for how a complete n00b should go about cobbling together a php script to do this?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - new nanoparticle cancer therapy

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "Tbe BBC reports on a new nanoparticle-based therapy that sounds particularly promising. Biologically, it makes sense. For the drug companies, they don't need to tailor individual drugs, which is their problem with monoclonal antibodies. Watch this one closely!

From the article:

"The researchers used the nanoparticles to zero in on the network of blood vessels that supply the tumours in mice with nutrients and oxygen. A potentially powerful function of nanoparticles is the ability to home in on particular targets inside the body. While various nanoparticles have been designed to target tumours, the efficiency is relatively low. The researchers developed a technique for amplifying this homing ability by designing a multifunctional nanoparticle that binds to a protein structure found only in tumours and associated blood vessels. ... The tests showed that within hours of the injection, the artificial platelets began blocking the supply without harming normal tissues. The scientists believe the nanoparticles could also be used to carry drugs to the tumour.

[PS. No "medicine" subtopic. Couldn't find a relevant subtopic.]"
Announcements

Submission + - action needed to halt stoning of 7 Iranian women

Submitted by
quixote9
quixote9 writes: "On October 12th, seven women have been sentenced to death by stoning for "crimes against chastity." The crime here is the one against humanity. We need to let the UN (petitions for two of the women: Kobra, and Malak), and the Iranian government know that this barbarism has been noticed, and it needs to be stopped. Eteraz has sample messages as well as email addresses of Iranian leaders to whom to protest. Please, Slashdotters, there are thousands of us. We can make the difference. These horrible acts get stopped when they realize people have noticed. They've been stopped before, and we can do it now."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker

Close