CresentCityRon - Slashdot User

Science magazine for geek girls

Submitted by HotScienceBabe2007 on Tuesday December 19 2006, @03:12PM

HotScienceBabe2007 writes "Inkling Magazine, a science site aimed at geeky girls, has just launched. The articles are all free and should equally appeal to boy nerds in touch with their feminine side. Among the first articles are the biology of vampires, nuclear test site tourism and ecologically-friendly panties. You go girl."

Good moods prevent colds?

Submitted by

duguk

on Tuesday December 19 2006, @03:11PM

duguk writes "As most of you will probably end up ill over the winter season, it might be best to keep happy over Christmas. A new scientific study suggests that people who have a positive outlook are less likely to catch colds. Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University exposed more than 300 healthy adults to a cold virus and interviewed them about their emotional state. Those with "generally positive outlooks... reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.

From Science News:

"We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk," Cohen says.

Those who displayed generally positive outlooks, including feelings of liveliness, cheerfulness, and being at ease, were least likely to develop cold symptoms. Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.

The new study, which appears in the November/December Psychosomatic Medicine, replicates those results and rules out the possibility that psychological traits related to a positive emotional style, rather than the emotions themselves, guard against cold symptoms. Those traits include high self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and a feeling of mastery over one's life."

Keep happy and you might not get ill?"

Flying Spaghetti Monster is a neutron star ...

Submitted by

Thee Maun

on Tuesday December 19 2006, @03:09PM

Thee Maun writes "It seems that Physicists have been working Har'd on the FSM...
Physicists explore Strange Matter Hypothesis
From the Article: A neutron star has a complicated multilayered surface. According to a description by M. Coleman Miller, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland, the deeper portions of the crust has voids that can be likened to Swiss cheese, overlaid by regions with sheets like lasagna, rods like spaghetti, and finally blobs like sprinklings of meatballs on the outside."

Help make the new year IE free

Submitted by

iefree

on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:54PM

iefree writes "This is more of an appeal to sites such as slashdot that show some hint of social consciousness. The new year is coming and I am suggesting a new year's resolution for web developers to commit to. Please help make 2007 IE-FREE, this is really easy to do if websites would only be courageous enough to remove IE hacks from their sites. It might be scary to remove IE hacks from your sites considering IE's market share but jumping over a bridge just because everyone else is doing so isn't cool. So please slashdot, commit to this new year's resolution and try to recruit other sites to follow suit. More information can be found at: http://nomoreiehacks.org/"

Christmas Behind an EB Cash Register

Submitted by amitlu on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:41PM

amitlu writes "The Escapist is running a holiday-themed feature written by a guy who went through video game retail hell and lived to tell the tale. From the article: ""Where are the foot massagers?" "This is Electronics Boutique," I explain, naively possessed of the illusion that this will be information enough. An uncomfortable moment passes. I wait for him to cogitate. He waits for me to sell him a foot massager. Eventually I add, "We sell videogames."""

WarGames Sequel Now Filming

Submitted by

iluvcapra

on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:40PM

iluvcapra writes "This news is a little late, but on November 20th WarGames 2: The Dead Code began filming in Montreal, produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (distributor of the original WarGames) and directed by Stewart Gillard (apparently the director of such gems as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3.) Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, the team behind the original film, are not involved, and the plot revolves around a hacker breaking into a terrorism-simulation computer.

I only became aware of the new production when I read MGM was suing the rightful owner of WarGames.com for his domain name."

IE7 Anti-Phishing To Hurt Small Businesses?

Submitted by

hobo sapiens

on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:37PM

hobo sapiens writes "Looks like IE7's Anti-Phishing feature will have some unintended consequences for small online businesses. The problem is that IE7 will visually indicate, via a green address bar, which web sites are certified as legitimate. Sole proprietorships are currently not elgible for such certification.

Of course, just because a website is not certified doesn't mean it is not legitimate, but will people tend to stay with "certified" sites? From the article, "'Yes, they will,' says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc. and an expert on online payments and fraud. 'All the business is going to go to the greens, it's kind of obvious.'"

Is this an attempt to steer consumers to large businesses, or is this merely an unintended consequence of a well intentioned feature?"

Human Sense of Smell Underestimated 278

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:31PM
from the we-got-something-of-a-hounddog dept.

Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail — an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed. Furthermore, the study demonstrated for the first time that humans make use of differential information from the two nostrils. The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail. Here is the abstract of the paper in Nature Neuroscience. From the article: "The humans, however, still sniffed much more slowly than dogs, which may partially account for canines' greater efficiency at scent tracking. [A commentator] says that despite their relatively sluggish speed, the fact that subjects improved with training is noteworthy. 'I think that shows the effect of our distinctively different behavior in actually using this sense,' he says. 'The dog [has] been doing this its whole life, and humans [were] just asked to plunge in the first time they've ever done it.'"

Journal: MSN Groups is Dying 0

Journal by Roanna on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:25PM

One of the social internet's healthiest and most innovative cultures is threatened because MSN Groups is dying.

Yahoo search -- Moving towards paid search.

Submitted by Gaurav on Tuesday December 19 2006, @02:19PM

Gaurav writes "I recently searched for a Hindi movie Dhoom 2 on Yahoo. Here is the result page: Search results for Dhoom 2. If you observe first 5 results have a certain category (Movie Titles > Dhoom 2) attached to them. Click on that category and on the top of the page there is a link "Suggest a site". Clicking on that link takes you to a page wherein you have to pay $300 per annum to get your site included to that category. Personally, I am offended since before this change, my site was among the top 5 results for this particular keyword and got thrashed after they put in place this piece."