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+ - Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday?->

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls boring. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., told Discovery News. "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe.""
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Biotech

+ - Hidden Viral Gene CaMV IV in GMO Crops Discovered by Researchers->

Submitted by Jeremiah Cornelius
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Researchers with the European Food Safety Authority discovered variants of the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S in the most widely harvested varieties of genetically-modified crops, including Monsanto's RoundupReady Soy and Maze. According to researchers, Podevin and du Jardin, the particular "Gene IV" is responsible for a number of possible consequences that could affect human health, including inhibition of RNA silencing and production of proteins with known toxicity. The EFSA is endorsing "retrospective risk assessment" of CaMV promoter and its Gene VI sequences — in an attempt to give it a clean bill of health. It is unknown if the presence of the hidden viral genes were the result of laboratory contamination or a possible recombinant product of the resultant organism. There are serious implications for the production of GMO for foodstuffs, given either possibility."
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Comment: Re:Lenovo Thinkpads Already Suck (Score 1) 347

by ice3 (#42529771) Attached to: Change the ThinkPad and It Will Die

Yes I have, I just happen to work at a place where they get those by the thousands.
Part of my job is actually using the laptops before the users get them.

Ever since T410 the T series (and by extension X, W and L) are going down hill.
T410 has its share of problems, like the crappy screen and the flimsy docking port. But (IMHO) it's the last good laptop from the T series by Lenovo.

Hardware

+ - "self-healing" NAND flash memory that can survive over 100 million cycles->

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes "Taiwan-based Macronix has found a solution for a weakness in flash memory fadeout. A limitation of flash memory is simply that eventually it cannot be used; the more cells in the memory chips are erased, the less useful to store data. The write-erase cycles degrade insulation; eventually the cell fails. "Flash wears out after being programmed and erased about 10,000 times," said the IEEE Spectrum. Engineers at Macronix have a solution that moves flash memory over to a new life. They propose a "self-healing" NAND flash memory solution that can survive over 100 million cycles."
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Mars

+ - Curiosity takes picture of material appearing to be plastic or a cocoon-> 1

Submitted by njinsa
njinsa writes "NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has taken a picture today of something that does not appear to belong on Mars. It kind of looks like a piece of torn plastic or an old cocoon.Can fellow /.s figure out what it is?
Here is the image:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0065MH0055000002R0_DXXX&s=65"
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Open Source

+ - GCC Code-Base Being Converted To C++-> 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The GCC compiler is being rewritten in C++ by Google. Currently this leading open-source GPLv3 compiler is written in C90 but developers have been converting the source language to C++. The cited rationale includes: C++ is a standardized, well known, popular language, C++ is nearly a superset of C90 used in GCC, The C subset of C++ is just as efficient as C, C++ supports cleaner code in several significant cases, C++ makes it easier to write and enforce cleaner interfaces, C++ never requires uglier code, and C++ is not a panacea but it is an improvement."
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Music

+ - "Open Source Bach" project completed; score and recording now online -> 1

Submitted by
rDouglass
rDouglass writes "MuseScore, the open source music notation editor, and pianist Kimiko Ishizaka have released a new recording and digital edition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The works are released under the Creative Commons Zero license to promote the broadest possible free use of the works. The score underwent two rounds of public peer review, drawing on processes normally applied to open source software. Furthermore, the demands of Bach's notational style drove significant advancements in the MuseScore open source project. The recording was made on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in the Teldex Studio of Berlin. Anne-Marie Sylvestre, a Canadian record producer, was inspired by the project and volunteered her time to edit and produce the recording. The project was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that was featured on Slashdot in March 2011."
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+ - Landmark Calculation Clears the Way to Answering How Matter is Formed->

Submitted by
smazsyr
smazsyr writes "An international collaboration of scientists is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors. “This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,” says a co-author of the paper."
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China

+ - Backdoor Found in China-Made US Military Chip 5

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Information Age reports that the Cambridge University researchers have discovered that a microprocessor used by the US military but made in China contains secret remote access capability, a secret "backdoor" that means it can be shut off or reprogrammed without the user knowing. The "bug" is in the actual chip itself, rather than the firmware installed on the devices that use it. This means there is no way to fix it than to replace the chip altogether. "The discovery of a backdoor in a military grade chip raises some serious questions about hardware assurance in the semiconductor industry," writes Cambridge University researcher Sergei Skorobogatov. "It also raises some searching questions about the integrity of manufacturers making claims about [the] security of their products without independent testing." The unnamed chip, which the researchers claim is widely used in military and industrial applications, is "wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan", Does this mean that the Chinese have control of our military information infrastructure asks Rupert Goodwins? "No: it means that one particular chip has an undocumented feature. An unfortunate feature, to be sure, to find in a secure system — but secret ways in have been built into security systems for as long as such systems have existed.""
IBM

+ - IBM Seeks Patent on Judging Programmers by Commits 5

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "How'd you like to be deemed unworthy of a job based upon a scan of your GitHub updates? That's what proposed in a newly-published IBM patent application for Automated Analysis of Code Developer's Profile, which proposes weeding out developer candidates for certain roles based on things like the amount of changes one typically makes with each commit, how frequently and regularly one makes commits, what hours of the day one makes commits, the percentage of commits with conflicts that one resolves, and the 'depth' of one's commit comments ('shallow', 'mid-range' or 'deep'). Big Blue explains that commit or repository interactions can be used to produce a 'conclusion report' that compares a developer to others who have profiles on the repository, which helps management 'avoid wasted time with ineffective developers."

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