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Comment: Re:Fresh water? (Score 3, Insightful) 292

by cunniff (#38840035) Attached to: Graphene Membranes Superpermeable to Water

Spend a little time thinking about it, and you will realize that distilled water urban legend is silly. In your mouth, it is mixed with saliva and mucous and whatever else is stuck to your teeth, gums, and tongue. The instant it hits your stomach, it is mixed with stomach acids and whatever you ate recently. I.e. it is no longer pure distilled water. From there, the molecules wander through your body like any other water molecule. Distilling water does not give its component molecules magic properties.

Science

First "Goldilocks" exoplanet discovered?->

Submitted by cunniff
cunniff writes "According to a press release sent out today, the Keck Observatory on top of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, has discovered the first "Goldilocks" exoplanet — a rocky Earth-class planet within the liquid water zone of its parent star:

The new planet, known as Gliese 581g, is at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface... Gliese 581g has a mass 3 to 4 times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.

The parent star, Gliese 581, is a red dwarf in the direction of the constellation Libra."
Link to Original Source

Image

The Science of Caddyshack 55

Posted by samzenpus
from the it's-in-the-hole dept.
astroengine writes "Thirty years after the release of the cult classic comedy Caddyshack, Discovery News has geeked out and gone on the hunt for any trace amount of science they can find in the movie (video). From gopher territoriality to seismic deformation, from pool poop bacteria to the color of lightning, it turns out there's quite a lot of science to talk about..."
HP

Commission Affirms NVIDIA Violated Rambus Patents 35

Posted by timothy
from the infringe-group dept.
MojoKid writes "The International Trade Commission has announced its findings in the NVIDIA/Rambus patent infringement lawsuit, and it's not the sort of ruling Team Green would've preferred. The commission found NVIDIA to be in violation of three Rambus patents. The trade panel also granted an injunction Rambus had requested, which theoretically prevents NVIDIA and the various companies attached to the lawsuit (Asus, HP, Palit, and MSI among others) from selling products that contain the infringing IP. The commission's decision this week affirms a January ruling that saw NVIDIA in violation of three Rambus patents while dismissing two additional claims of infringement Rambus made."

Comment: Newton's Third Law? (Score 2, Interesting) 609

by cunniff (#32220044) Attached to: Inventor Demonstrates Infinitely Variable Transmission

For every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction. So, when your monster torque motor is spinning the input shaft, surely it is pushing against the counterspinning shafts with exactly that amount of power? In other words - won't the mechanism (electric motor, flywheel, etc.) that keeps the counterspinning shafts running at the desired speed ratios have to overcome this reaction? It's possible that the frictional and mass inertia of the system helps some, but how much?

I'm not an ME, but the explanation of what the required control motor power is relative to input motor power is very thin here. Be very interesting to see what the detailed input / output / control torque & power measurements end up being.

Games

Do Gamers Want Simpler Games? 462

Posted by Soulskill
from the i'd-say-no-but-i-used-to-love-frogger dept.
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting: "Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"

The magic of our first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. -- Benjamin Disraeli