Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
NASA

NASA to future lunar explorers: Don't mess with our Moon stuff ->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes "NASA today gently reminded any future Moon explorers that any relics of its Apollo missions or other US lunar artifacts should be off limits and are considered historic sites. NASA issued the reminder in conjunction with the X Prize Foundation and its Google Lunar X Prize competition which will use NASA's Moon sites guidelines as it sifts through the 26 team currently developing systems and spacecraft to land on the Moon."
Link to Original Source
Medicine

The better to see you with->

Submitted by
ericjones12398
ericjones12398 writes "Unlike the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, doctors wanting to get a good look inside you are developing ever-smaller “eyes” to do the job. Even as dimensions shrink, other improvements bring qualitatively better sight to the instruments, allowing doctors to conclusively diagnose ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease and cancers. These improvements were recently on display and demonstration this week in San Diego, Calif., at the annual Digestive Disease Week (DDW) meeting, attended by gastroenterologists from around the US and world.
Narrow Band Imaging (NBI)
The traditional endoscope consists of a soft, flexible tube with a light and lens on one end and an eyepiece on the other for the doctor — or, more likely, for the digital imaging device the doctor is using. The light used on the distal end of the endoscope, inside the patient, has typically been a full-spectrum source. By contrast, NBI endoscopes use only selected wavelengths of the white light spectrum, from 415 nanometers (blue) to 540 nanometers (green). By dropping out the red wavelengths, small blood vessels become more visible and, hence, so do smaller, newly emerging lesions, such as precancerous polyps of the colon."
Link to Original Source
Space

Starships powered by antimatter could approach the speed of light-> 3

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes "With the increased focus on extrasolar planetary systems, there will be an increased focus on getting there to better look for sciences of life, even sentient life.

Recently, physicists Ronan Keane and Wei-Ming Zhang wrote a paper and studied on antimatter propulsion. Their latest results from computer simulators have shown that at least one key component in creating a working antimatter propulsion engine is that of highly efficient magnetic nozzles. Their studies have shown that these nozzles need to be efficient and that it is feasible to make them this way using our current technology.

Keane and Zhang also outlined how the particles would avoid a matter/antimatter annihilation as they exit the engine. Their technique relies on charged pions that result from proton-antiproton collisions. A nozzle that emits a strong magnetic field could channel the emitted charged particles into a focused stream of charged pions accelerating them to make an even stronger thrust.

Past calculations showed the nozzle's efficiency was only 36 percent, but Keane and Zhang redesigned the nozzles to be 85 percent efficient, making the a speed of around 70 percent the speed of light possible, given a pion exit speed of 80 percent of the speed of light. Such a speed gets us to Proxima Centauri 4.3 light years away in 6 years."
Link to Original Source
Games

Blizzard Bombshell: All Your Passwords Are Case-Insensitive->

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes "In the wake of massive account hacks, Blizzard released a statement reassuring their user base that it takes account security very seriously. That's why Battle.net passwords are all case insensitive! Blizzard Battle.net passwords have never been case-sensitive. But this issue takes on significantly different meaning when you consider that the company in question plans to launch a Real Money Auction House in five days. So how much does having a case-sensitive password matter? It won't save you from a dictionary attack, but it will make that attack take longer. That's a given. Assuming that Blizzard implements some sane policy of attack detection, it also increases the chance that a brute-force attack will generate a sufficiently high number of incorrect attempts to trigger the game to lock down the account."
Link to Original Source
Facebook

Facebook Privacy Suit Seeks $15 Billion->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Facebook may be focusing on their IPO today, but a complaint filed in federal court has given them something else to think about. The filing consolidates 21 separate but similar cases and alleges Facebook invaded users privacy by tracking their browsing behavior even after they had logged out of the site. The claim seeks $15 billion in damages. 'If the claimants are successful in their case against Facebook, they could prevent Menlo Park from collecting the huge amount of data it collects about its users to serve ads back to them. Like the previous lawsuits, Facebook is once again being accused of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages per user of $100 per day per violation, up to a maximum per user of $10,000. The complaint also asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California Statutes and California common law.'"
Link to Original Source
Earth

Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "A project to drill deep into the heart of a “supervolcano” in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep."
Link to Original Source
United States

ZTE Confirms Security Hole in U.S. Phone->

Submitted by fishmike
fishmike writes "ZTE Corp, the world's No.4 handset vendor and one of two Chinese companies under U.S. scrutiny over security concerns, said one of its mobile phone models sold in the United States contains a vulnerability that researchers say could allow others to control the device."
Link to Original Source
Software

Wozniak's Original System Description of the Apple ][->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "Opening with the line, "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive." Stephen Wozniak gave his system description of the Apple-II in the May, 1977 issue of BYTE.
It's instructive to read what was worth bragging about back then, such as integral graphics, "A key part of the Apple-II design is an integral video display generator which diectly accesses the system's programmable memory. Screen formatting and cursor controls are realized in my design in the form of about 200 bytes of read only memory."
And it shows what the limitations were in those days, "While writing Apple BASIC, I ran into the problem of manipulating the 16 bit pointer data and its arithmetic in an 8 bit machine.
My solution to this problem of handling 16 bit data, notably pointers, with an 8 bit microprocessor was to implement a nonexistent 16 bit processor in software, interpreter fashion.""
Link to Original Source

Every black hole contains a new universe-> 1

Submitted by Eponymous Hero
Eponymous Hero writes "Quantum gravity explained! Well, maybe not. But the "torsion" theory is interesting to say the least. You can tell it's gonna be a great one because, like all the greats, it raises more questions than it answers and it answers a lot of questions. The article is layman-friendly and gets us started:

'For example, what do we know about the parent universe and the black hole inside which our own universe resides? How many layers of parent universes would we have? How can we test that our universe lives in a black hole?'"
Link to Original Source

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. -- William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheel Barrow"