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Competition Shines Light on Dark Matter->

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes "For a decade, the world's brightest physicists have been working on understanding and mapping dark matter. On May 23, a consortium including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Royal Astronomical Society, opened up the problem on Kaggle, a platform for machine learning competitions. To detect the presence of dark matter, the consortium asked entrants to build algorithms that detect a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which causes distortions in the shape of a galaxy. In less than a week, Martin O'Leary, a PhD student in glaciology from Cambridge University made a breakthrough, outperforming the most commonly used algorithms in astronomy. O'Leary applied techniques common in glaciology, to detect the edges of glaciers from satellite images. As profound as the breakthrough is for cosmology, this competition is a prime example of how harnessing interdisciplinary approaches can help make significant scientific discoveries."
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Mozilla

Firefox is for "regular" users, not businesses->

Submitted by
nk497
nk497 writes "Some have argued that Mozilla's switch to a faster release cycle has made it more difficult for companies to use Firefox, but the open-source browser maker isn't too bothered, according to one employee. Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing and founder of Mozilla's quality assurance scheme, said Firefox is for "regular users" — not businesses. "Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours," he said. "A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I’d much rather Mozilla was spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don’t have enterprise support systems already taking care of them.""
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Printer

Solar-Powered Printer That Makes Glass From Sand->

Submitted by
Mightee
Mightee writes "Solar energy never ceases to amaze people and recently industrial designer and tinkerer Markus Kayser came up with solar powered cutter that uses the solar energy to cut different parts of any material. Kayser didn't stop here but he also invented a magnificent device that uses the solar energy and prints a glassy version of sand made items by melting the sand into glass."
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Businesses

Mozilla Executive Snubs Enterprise Level Users

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes "In reponse to Firefox specialist and consultant Mike Kaply's blogpost, Mozilla Executive ended up saying something ironic and disturbing. Mike Kaply's blogpost was justifiably lamenting Firefox's rapid release scheduling and its negative impact on businesses. Firefox 4 was only released in March. Now, three months later Firefox 5.0 is out in stable release. Hence, Mozilla has ceased supporting Firefox 4. The response, which the executive clearly didn't think through because Mozilla earns most of its revenue through businesses (hence the irony), basically implied that Mozilla couldn't care less about businesses. It was disturbing because Dotzler's comment is also counter to what Mozilla and others in the open source community have been telling businesses for years: give open source a try."
Crime

Neverwinter Night Forums Hacked

Submitted by bannable
bannable writes "Tonight, BioWare sent out an email to account holders on their NWN forums:
"We recently learned that hackers gained unauthorized access to the decade-old BioWare server system supporting the Neverwinter Nights forums. We immediately took appropriate steps to protect our consumers’ data and launched a thorough ongoing evaluation of the breach. We have determined that no credit card data was compromised from the servers, nor did we ever have or store sensitive data like social security numbers. Our investigation shows that information such as user names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, CD keys and birth dates from these forum accounts on the system may have been compromised, as well as other information (if any) that you may have associated with your EA Account. In an abundance of caution, we have changed your password to ensure account security.""
Science

New multiferroic alloy creates electricity from wa->

Submitted by sanzibar
sanzibar writes "University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources."
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Power

Secrecy and collusion: Nuclear power regulation-> 2

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes "An AP investigation shows that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been systematically lowering safety standards to keep old and failing nuclear plants running. http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2011/06/nrc_loosens_ignores_safety_rul.html

Records show a recurring pattern: Reactor parts or systems fall out of compliance with the rules. Studies are conducted by the industry and government, and all agree that existing standards are "unnecessarily conservative." Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance.

At the same time, the shroud of secrecy is descending on international efforts to investigate the recent nuclear disaster in Japan http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-20/fukushima-disaster-failures-kept-behind-closed-doors-at-un-atomic-meeting.html

Sweeping under the rug seems to be the primary approach to nuclear safety at all levels."
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Politics

Wisconsin tried to ban Internet2->

Submitted by
jd
jd writes "The Wisconsin legislature attempted to pass a budget that would ban any school, college or university from being a member of Internet2 or WiscNet on the grounds that such networks "unfairly competed" against commercial offerings.

Of course, Internet2 is already partly supplied by those very same commercial vendors and last I heard there weren't too many DSL providers offering 100 gigabit pipes running onto 9 terabit backbones. Nor, as we all know, do that many ISPs offer IPv6. So who, precisely, were Wisconsin concerned about?

For now, there has been a reprieve. But the legislature has made it clear that academic networks will not be tolerated in future and it does not seem far-fetched to expect other legislatures to prohibit such systems."
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The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. -- Christopher Morley