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+ - "Cosmos" remake coming to FOX in 2014 1

Submitted by TheSync
TheSync writes "The long-awaited remake of Carl Sagan's amazing "Cosmos" series, "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey", will be coming to FOX television next year. It will star astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Surprisingly, Seth MacFarlane of "Family Guy" fame is an executive producer. MacFarlane was introduced to Carl Sagan's widow Ann Druyan by deGrasse Tyson, and MacFarlane helped them pitch the show to FOX executives."

+ - Carnivorous Plant Ejects Junk DNA->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "The carnivorous humped bladderwort, found on all continents except Antarctica, is a model of ruthless genetic efficiency. Only 3% of this aquatic plant's DNA is not part of a known gene, new research shows. In contrast, only 2% of human DNA is part of a gene. The bladderwort, named for its water-filled bladders that suck in unsuspecting prey, is a relative of the tomato. The finding overturns the notion that this repetitive, non-coding DNA, popularly called "junk" DNA, is necessary for life."
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+ - Poll: How much Astronomy were you taught in school?->

Submitted by Balrogg
Balrogg writes "I've been a lifelong amateur astronomer, and space enthusiast; in recent years, I've been doing increasing amounts of astronomy outreach. Wherever I setup my telescopes, I find that a majority of the people had NEVER looked through a telescope.

There's no reason in the world, you should go through school, never having looked through a telescope.

Every time I ask people about how much astronomy they covered during their schooling, they tell it was either: not covered at all, covered for a few days, or maybe for a single quarter. This includes people of ALL ages, but most disturbingly, people in their teens and twenties.

If students are fortunate enough to have a teacher like my wife, who actually knows (and likes) astronomy, they'll get a LOT of good information crammed into whatever brief time she's allotted to cover astronomy. But even as amazing a teacher as my wife is, that time is simply not sufficient anymore Within the subject of astronomy, there's too much that should be taught.

It has been my experience that ignorance of astronomy is at near epidemic proportions. It is my very firm conviction that EVERY student in this country (and planet, really) should be taught and experience astronomy during their school years. It needs to start earlier, around the 3rd or 4th grade, and be taught not just for one single quarter — but over the course of several years, integrated with Physics, Chemistry, Math, and History.

Carl Sagan once said that learning about astronomy is a humbling and character building experience; I can attest to that fact. Astronomy is a subject that inspires you to branch out to other scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, math, etc. Neil deGrasse Tyson frequently talks about how NASAs Moon missions inspired a generation to dream about tomorrow — it certainly did for me. We need a return to this type of thinking, to inspire students and young adults to become engineers and scientists."
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+ - NASA is migrating ISS laptops from Windows to Linux

Submitted by celticryan
celticryan writes "NASA is making a change on the International Space Station. In what has been linked to possible issues with exploit vulnerability with Windows XP, the laptops that provide the ISS crew with vital capabilities for day-to-day operations (called OpsLAN) are being transitioned from Windows XP to Debian. Keith Chuvala, leader of the Laptops and Network Integration Teams said, "We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.""

+ - First person saved by a police drone in Canada->

Submitted by AchilleTalon
AchilleTalon writes "As the US continues to grapple with the idea of letting drones fly through the country's airspace, our neighbors to the north have reported a new milestone for unmanned aerial technology: the first life saved using a drone. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the province of Saskatchewan announced yesterday that they successfully used the small Draganflyer X4-ES helicopter drone to locate and treat an injured man whose car had flipped over in a remote, wooded area in near-freezing temperatures. Zenon Dragan, president and founder of the Draganfly company that makes the drone, said in a statement: "to our knowledge, this is the first time that a life may have been saved with the use of a sUAS (small Unmanned Aerial System) helicopter.""
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Network

+ - Five Internet Founders Share first £1 Million Engineering 'Nobel' Prize ->

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. As well as Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recpients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreeseen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort “Fortunately we are still alive," joked Pouzin. “It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.” Awarded in the UK, the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judgesconsidered entries from 65 countries."
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Your Rights Online

+ - Stricter COPPA laws coming in July->

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes "The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was enacted in 1998. In 2011, the FTC beefed up the measure, preventing sites from collecting personal information from kids such as name, location and date of birth without a parent's consent. This July, new amendments for kids under 13 will go into effect, approved by the FTC in December. The rules are targeted at sites that market specifically to kids. However, even a site like Facebook could be fined for allowing minors to post self-portraits, audio recordings of their voice, and images with geo-location data. There are also new restrictions on tracking data, with cookies or a unique identifier that follow registrants from one site to another. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/19/coppa-stricter-rules-july-underage-kids-on-facebook/">About time, said Denise Tayloe, the CEO of PRIVO, a company that makes an age-verification system called PrivoLock."Somebody damn-well better do something to communicate with parents [so they] understand what their kids are doing," Tayloe said."
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Your Rights Online

+ - Doing Hard Time for Hacking Doesn't Actually Require Any Hacking->

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes "It's hard to know what to make of Andrew Auernheimer. The 27-year-old grey hat, known in the hacker community as "Weev," was sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a $75,000 fine to AT&T on Monday morning for his involvement in a 2010 incident involving iPads on the carrier's network. However, as Weev himself points out and tech bloggers confirm, he is being punished as a hacker who never actually did any hacking — not technically speaking, anyways.

So if Weev isn't a hacker, is he another activist, like Aaron Swartz, who's been swept up by too strict hacking laws? Or is he more of a rabblerouser, like Matthew Keys, the Reuters employee who helped Anonymous deface the Los Angeles Times's website? Or is he really a regular old criminal like the court says he is? The ambiguity here places Weev in a growing line-up of digital usual suspects, from Swartz to Keys, boy-men whom the government wants to make examples of and whom the internet freedom community, for better or worse, is eager to embrace as heroes."
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Medicine

+ - 1 in 3 Seniors Now Dies with Dementia

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Serena Gordon reports that new report finds that one in every three seniors now dies while suffering from Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. Even more concerning is that the Alzheimer's Association estimates that by 2050, nearly 14 million people will have Alzheimer's disease up from 5 million today. "Alzheimer's disease is a public health crisis that is here," says Beth Kallmyer. "One in three seniors is dying with Alzheimer's or another dementia. For other major diseases, the death rate is going down because the federal government funds and invests in research. We have not seen that same commitment for Alzheimer's disease." The US government currently funds about $500 million in Alzheimer's research, according to Kallmyer. In comparison, heart disease receives about $4 billion in research funding and cancer gets about $6 billion (PDF). Dr. Brian Appleby says while current treatments won't cure or reverse the disease, they can increase the amount of time until someone needs nursing home care. Right now, he says, the focus is on trying to prevent Alzheimer's disease from occurring. Alzheimer's disease is really a chronic illness. It starts decades before we see the symptoms," Appleby says. The best advice to potentially prevent Alzheimer's disease is to keep your heart healthy. That means quitting smoking, eating healthy, maintaining a healthy weight and getting regular exercise. It also means staying active mentally, Appleby added."

Comment: Re:Iraq for less - Whatever (Score 1) 727

by celticryan (#43104597) Attached to: North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike
I agree with you on the fact if it was only about oil, there are better pickings. However, oil had to be part of the equation, even it was just a nice cherry on top.

However, I am not sure about your notion that somehow taking Saddam out makes the US safer. Iran and Iraq are old enemies. It always seemed to me that keeping them pointed at each other was smart. However, claiming that there was an arms race that was just getting started seems odd. The arms race between those two nations has been a long standing "normal" in the Middle East. Do you have a reference for that? I would be interested in reading it.

Your analysis of NK is spot in, IMO. Thanks for the well reasoned post.
United States

+ - First Successful Test of the Navy's Newest Anti-missile Interceptor->

Submitted by fishmike
fishmike writes "U.S. forces said they had destroyed a target in the first successful test of the Navy's newest anti-missile interceptor, designed to protect allies from attacks by countries like North Korea and Iran.

A target ballistic missile was downed near Hawaii late on Wednesday by the latest Raytheon Co-built Standard Missile-3 interceptor, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said.

The advanced interceptor is key to the next phase of an anti-missile shield being built by the United States in and around Europe."
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+ - Netherlands first country in Europe with net neutrality->

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes "On 8 May 2012 The Netherlands adopted crucial legislation to safeguard an open and secure internet in The Netherlands. It is the first country in Europe to implement net neutrality in the law. In addition, it adopted provisions protecting users against disconnection and wiretapping by providers. Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example."
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Biotech

+ - Japanese scientists use particle accelerator to create salt-resistant rice->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "An unfortunate and little reported side effect of last year’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami is that thousands of acres of farmland were contaminated with seawater. Rice is a staple crop in Japan, and it requires large amounts of water to grow. The salt in seawater, however, stunts or outright kills the plant. Researchers out of Riken Nishina Centre near Tokyo have been looking at the problem, and it just so happens they have a particle accelerator laying around. Mutations naturally accumulate over time (this is evolution), but this rate is far too slow for meaningful research. Past efforts in inducing mutations have relied on X-rays or gamma radiation to cause mutations in crops, but a particle accelerator should be able to accomplish the same thing much faster. Dr. Tomoko Abe is leading the research and hopes that the particle accelerator will prove superior to traditional methods. Initial results indicate this approach can produce 10-100 times more mutations. After bombarding 600 seeds in her particle accelerator, Dr. Abe has created 250 mutant strains that were able to grow in salt water and produce fertile seeds of their own. The next step is to replant the most successful specimens and begin sorting out the traits that make them grow so well. With enough testing, Dr. Abe hopes to be able to generate an edible strain of rice in four years that can grow in a high-salt environment. If this research is a success, the effects could reach much farther than northern Japan; there are many coastal locations around the world that could benefit from a more hearty strain of salt-resistant rice."
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My idea of roughing it is when room service is late.

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