Slashdot

An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"

Geoffrey.landis writes "A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation — a finding that would be groundbreaking, if true, but one that apparently could not be replicated by other researchers. The allegations against Taleyarkhan were made in March of 2006. A local Indiana paper gives the full list of allegations against Taleyarkhan, and the resolution of each by the panel. The full report (PDF) is also available. Of the nine specific allegations, only two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,' but notes that this comes 'just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent.'" We've discussed this gentleman's work and the scrutiny it has received several times, and members of the scientific community seem to have given him the benefit of the doubt in many cases.

arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"

cartman94501 writes "My wife and I use Vonage for Voice over IP at home, mainly for work-related phone calls so we don't have to give out our home number to clients and colleagues. Most of the time it works fine, but when I'm using BitTorrent or other high-bandwidth applications (purely for legal and non-copyright-violating purposes, of course), the call quality gets choppy. I have used my Linksys (not a WRT54G, so 'upgrading' it to Linux probably won't work) router's QoS feature to assign high priority to the MAC address of the Vonage box, low priority to the BitTorrent box, and medium quality to everything else, which helps a little, but not enough. Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VoIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VoIP call going on at the moment or not?" (More below)

Stony Stevenson writes "Researchers are predicting that one quarter of the world's population will be connected to the internet within the next four years. According to the report by Jupiter Research, the total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet. The company sees the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil. Overall, the number of users online is predicted to grow by 44 percent in the time period between 2007 and 2012." Is it just me or does that seem incredibly small?

Barence writes "UK researchers are working on fitting CCTV cameras with artificial intelligence, allowing them to more quickly respond to crimes. The technology, being developed by University of Portsmouth scientists, would allow cameras to "hear" violent sounds and react, swiveling quickly in the direction of a broken window or somebody shouting abusively for example, before alerting an operator. The artificial intelligence powering the camera would also be able to respond to visual cues such as fights, or violent behaviour."

Elektroschock writes "At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation. Whether or not OOXML ever gets published is an open question after four national bodies appealed the ISO decision."

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The tower of Pisa began to lean five years after its construction began, in 1178, and by 1990 it had tilted more than four meters off its true vertical. Conservationists estimated that the entire 14,500-ton structure would collapse 'some time between 2030 and 2040.' Now the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilized and declared safe for at least another three centuries. The stabilization, which cost $30M, was accomplished by anchoring it to cables and lead counterweights, while 70 tons of soil were removed from the side away from the lean, and cement was injected into the ground to relieve the pressure. The tilt has now returned to where it was in the early 19th century. Nicholas Shrady, author of Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa, says that the tower was destined to lean from the outset because it was built on 'what is essentially a former bog.' Shrady adds that the tower previously came close to collapsing in 1838, 1934, and 1995. (The commission convened in 1990 to study the tower's stability was the 17th such.) Although Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped cannon balls from the tower in a gravity experiment, Shrady says the myth is the result of 'the overripe imagination of Galileo's secretary and first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani.'"

CWmike writes "Friday Microsoft will demonstrate integration between its new Silverlight browser plug-in and Ruby on Rails. Microsoft's John Lam, a program manager in the dynamic language runtime team, said in a recent blog item: 'Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn't a more real Ruby program than Rails.' Also at the event, Microsoft officials will demonstrate IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application."

Swifty Nifty has an adventure submitted a link to a story about Toshiba's new High Def Disc Format. No, I'm not kidding — apparently Blu-ray has a new contender. This seems to be intended as a DVD backwards-compatible format, but there's not a lot of detail.

esocid writes "Researchers at TU Delft (Netherlands) and the FOM (Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) have found irrefutable proof that the so-called avalanche effect by electrons occurs in specific semiconducting crystals of nanometer dimensions. This physical effect could pave the way for cheap, high-output solar cells. Solar cells currently have relatively low output, typically 15%, and high manufacturing costs. One possible improvement could derive from a new type of solar cell made of semiconducting nanocrystals and could theoretically lead to a maximum output of 44%, with the added benefit of reducing manufacturing costs. In conventional solar cells, one photon can release precisely one electron. However, in some semiconducting nanocrystals, one photon can release two or three electrons, hence the term 'avalanche effect.' This effect was first measured by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in 2004, and since then the scientific world had raised doubts about the value of these measurements. This current research does in fact demonstrate that the avalanche effect can occur."

An anonymous reader writes "My housemate uses an aggressive P2P client, that when in use makes the Internet unusable for everyone else connected to the network. After hearing about various ISPs shaping traffic to reduce P2P traffic, I was wondering if there was a solution for managing P2P traffic on a home network. I have a Linksys WRT54G available for hacking. Can Slashdot recommend a way to reduce the impact of P2P on my network and make it usable again?"

kitzilla writes "Two research groups working independently have come up with what they say are cheap processes for growing nanowires to be used with solar cells. The 'hairy' cells provide a direct path for electrons collected at the panel face to reach an electrode, something which has the potential to dramatically improve system efficiency."

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Is Nvidia worried about the advent of both CPUs with graphics processor cores and Larrabee, Intel's future discrete graphics processor? Judging by the tone adopted by Nvidia's CEO during a financial analyst conference yesterday, not quite. Huang believes CPU-GPU hybrids will be no different (and just as slow) as today's integrated graphics chipsets, and he thinks people will still pay for faster Nvidia GPUs. Regarding Larrabee, Huang says Nvidia is going to 'open a can of whoop-ass' on Intel, and that Intel's strategy of reinventing the wheel by ignoring years of graphics architecture R&D is fundamentally flawed. Nvidia also has some new hotness in the pipeline, such as its APX 2500 system-on-a-chip for handhelds and a new platform for VIA processors."

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "In an unexpected move, Microsoft has disclosed 14,000 pages of coding secrets. According to The Register: 'This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.' The article mentioned that this will be done in three phases. 'Between now and June it will garner feedback from the developer community. Then, at the end of June, Microsoft will publish the final versions of technical documentation — along with definitive patent licensing terms.' Lets just hope those terms are pro open source."