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The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."

Quantrell writes "The RIAA has decided to cut its losses in the case of Atlantic v. Andersen, a case where the RIAA sued a 42-year-old disabled single-mother with a single seven-year-old daughter for file-sharing. 'What's unusual is that the RIAA has stipulated to a dismissal with prejudice, completely exonerating Andersen. Next to a negative verdict, an exonerated defendant is the last thing the RIAA wants. When faced with an undesirable outcome, the RIAA's tactic has been to move to dismiss without prejudice, a "no harm, no foul" strategy that puts an end to a lawsuit without declaring a winner and a loser. Dismissing a case with prejudice opens the RIAA up to an attorneys' fee award, which happened in the case of another woman caught in the music industry's driftnet, Debbie Foster."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-riaa-throws-in-the-towel-in-atlantic-v-andersen.html

Chicken bones found in Chile have been carbon-dated to 100 years before Europeans landed in the Americas - DNA analysis indicates an origin in Polynesia

http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=47ca05f4aea05088311fb9d5e33b6e4d

An image depicting research findings linking brain chemistry with aggressive personality has been named "2007 Image of the Year" by the Society for Nuclear Medicine. The research showed that healthy men with lower levels of a particular brain enzyme exhibited more aggressive personality traits, as measured by a standard personality questionnaire.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155818.htm

Eight years after being treated with a new drug for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, 86 percent of patients were still alive and half had not had a relapse of their disease, according to researchers from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155824.htm

An advanced molecular imaging technique influenced the management of women with ovarian cancer, detected more sites of disease and identified women whose disease was likely to progress, according to an Australian study recently released.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155830.htm

Researchers tied the accumulation of the toxic brain protein beta-amyloid to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study. One of the hallmarks of the always-fatal disease is the accumulation of protein amyloid plaques between nerve cells in the brain. Beta-amyloid is a protein fragment that normally is broken down and eliminated in a healthy brain.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155835.htm

Sargonas writes "Gaming-wiki.com has been launched recently, a fresh attempt at a community driven gaming site. While the review sites are in an over-abundance, they are limited to information written by staff that is paid to write specific issues, with a user opinionated slant. While this is good, it does not provide the one stop shopping source for all-encompassing info that a wiki on the same subject can provide.

Gaming-wiki aims to be the first gaming related wiki that builds up a strong user base and CONTINUES to move forward with community backing, unlike similar attempts in the past that were left on the side of the tubes due to disuse. A wiki is first and foremost a community driven system, without users to submit, it grows stale and old. With hope, this new endeavor will build up enough momentum to carry itself into the spot of the premier place for gaming information."
http://www.gaming-wiki.com/

SleepyHappyDoc writes "The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave may indicate the existence of a hidden ocean underneath the surface of Titan. The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe, which entered Titan's atmosphere over two years ago, collected evidence and information which has led to this potential discovery. This technology may lead to entirely new ways of finding out information about other planets."

Ravengbc writes "Hey everyone, I am in the process of planning and buying some hardware to build a media center/media server. While there are still quite a few things on it that I haven't decided on, such as motherboard/processor, and windows xp vs. Linux, right now my debate is on storage. I'm wanting to have as much storage as possible. At first I was thinking about just putting in a bunch hdd's and leaving it at that. Then I started thinking about doing a RAID array, looking at RAID 5. However, some of the stuff I was initially told about RAID 5, I am now learning to be not true. Such as, RAID 5 drives are limited to the size of the smallest drive in the array. And the way things are looking, even if I gradually replace all of the drives with larger ones, the array will still read the original size. For example, say I have 3x500gb drives in RAID 5 and over time replace all of them with 1TB drives. Instead of reading one big 3tb drive, it will still read 1.5tb. Is this true? I also considered using JBOD simply because I can use different size hdd's and have them all appear to be one large one, but there is no redundancy with this, which has me leaning away from it. If y'all were building a system for this purpose, how many drives and what size drives would y'all use and would y'all do some form of RAID or what? Also, if anyone has suggestions on motherboard/cpu thoughts, I'm open to suggestions. Thanks guys."

The molecular imaging power of PET/CT is invaluable in noninvasively monitoring Crohn's disease -- a chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract that mainly affects young people, according to a new study.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155841.htm

The use of combined imaging technologies may hold the key to stopping -- and even preventing -- heart attacks, according to new research. The slow, progressive buildup of fats, cholesterol and other substances--called plaque--on the inner lining of arteries causes atherosclerosis, which can lead to heart disease.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155844.htm

Technically advanced molecular imaging provides a 3-D way to significantly improve the diagnosis of heart disease, according to researchers.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155847.htm

The world's first PET/MR images of the human brain--taken simultaneously by positron emission tomography imaging and magnetic resonance recently debuted.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604155852.htm

Some samples of the pathogen Campylobacter coli showed resistance to antibiotics that were intended to protect swine from diseases, tests performed at Iowa State University revealed. There's more to be learned about the situation, which is keeping Qijing Zhang's research team busy this year.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070604161646.htm