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+ - Play Tetris to Fix Your Lazy Eye->

Submitted by MightyMait
MightyMait writes "As someone born with crossed-eyes who underwent surgery as an infant and has lived with a lazy eye his whole life (without 3-D vision), the prospect of fixing my vision by playing Tetris is an enticing one."
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Comment: Re:Misleading headlines are misleading (Score 1) 953

by linatux (#43520041) Attached to: Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade

It's not always the software that is the problem - drivers connecting a $100,000 piece of equipment may not be available for current versions of the O/S.
It may net even be possible to get them written if the company no longer trades, or refuses to support older equipment.

$10,000 may well be the pointy end of the problem!

+ - Parasite Inspires Surgical Patch->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "By mimicking a technique used by an intestinal parasite of fish, researchers have developed a flexible patch studded with microneedles that holds skin grafts in place more strongly than surgical staples do. After burrowing into the walls of a fish's intestines, the spiny-headed worm Pomphorhynchus laevis inflates its proboscis to better embed itself in the soft tissue. In the new patch, the stiff polystyrene core of the 700-micrometer-tall needles penetrates the tissue; then a thin hydrogel coating on the tip of each needle—a coating based on the material in disposable diapers that expands when it gets wet—swells to help anchor the patch in place. In tests using skin grafts, adhesion strength of the patch was more than three times higher than surgical staples. Because the patch doesn't depend on chemical adhesives for its gripping power, there's less chance for patients to have an allergic reaction. And because the microneedles are about one-quarter the length of typical surgical staples, the patches cause less tissue damage when they're removed. Besides holding grafts in place, the patch could be used to hold the sides of a wound or an incision together—even, in theory, ones inside the body if a slowly dissolving version of the patch can be developed. Moreover, the researchers say, the hydrogel coating holds promise as a way to deliver proteins, drugs, or other therapeutic substances to patients."
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+ - Blame austerity on Excel ..-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "From Mike Konczal, summarizing a new study that says Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff made a coding error in a famous paper claiming that economic growth slows down in countries with debt levels above 90 percent of GDP:"
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+ - ZDNet proclaims "Windows: It's over" 1

Submitted by plastick
plastick writes ""You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end."

ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains "The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved.""

+ - Search Engine more dangerous than Google->

Submitted by mallyn
mallyn writes "This is an article about a search engine that is designed to look for devices on the net that are not really intended to be viewed and used by the general public. Devices include pool filters, skating rink cooling system, and other goodies"
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Comment: Re:Has Slashdot officially become a paid shill? (Score 1) 168

by linatux (#43399213) Attached to: HP Launches Moonshot

:-) 1st time accepted, 2nd or 3rd submission I think. Sad how the quality of stories seems to have declined over the last few years, but the quality of the posts & the turns they take still sometimes surprise me. Without their seasoned contributors, this site would fade away in no time. I hope the people running it recognise that.

+ - Camera Uses Laser Beams to Take 3-D Images From 1 Kilometer Away->

Submitted by SternisheFan
SternisheFan writes "Wired reports: Using superconducting nanowires and lasers, a new camera system can produce high-resolution 3-D images of objects from up to a kilometer away.

The technology works by sending out a low-power infrared laser beam, which sweeps over an object or scene. Some light gets reflected back, though most is scattered in different directions. A detector measures how long it takes one particle of light, a photon, to return to the camera and is then able to calculate the distance from the system to the object. The technique can resolve millimeter-size bumps and changes in depth from hundreds of meters away.

The new camera takes advantage of superconducting nanowires, materials with almost no electrical resistance that have to be cooled to extremely low temperatures. These superconductors are very sensitive and can tell when just a single photon has hit them.

“That’s the beauty of this system,” said physicist Gerald Buller of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, co-author of a paper on the system that appeared Apr. 4 in Optics Express. “Each laser pulse contains many photons, but we only need one photon to return for every 10 optical pulses.”

The technology is similar to LIDAR, a remote sensing technique that also uses laser light to measure the distance to different objects. By using infrared light, Buller’s camera is able to detect a wide variety of different items that don’t reflect laser beams well, like clothing. And the long-wavelength infrared light is safer than other lasers because it won’t harm people’s eyes when it scans them.

Buller said the technology could have a lot of different scientific applications. The system could be placed on airplanes and used to scan the vegetation in a forest, helping to determine the size and health of the plants. The team is also interested in making the camera work well underwater, which would allow people to scan the depth of oceans or lakes and determine their shape.

OpticsInfoBase has the paper published April 4, 2013: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-21-7-8904"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Has Slashdot officially become a paid shill? (Score 1) 168

by linatux (#43398695) Attached to: HP Launches Moonshot

I don't know about Slashdot's priorities when it comes to deciding what makes the cover, but I submitted in good faith.

I'm not a fan of HP by any means & we have truck-loads of their servers at work. The concept for this sounded interesting & maybe there is a place for it in the 'cloud'.
What we really need at work is big kick-ass servers like IBM's new Power 7 machines (IBM - please direct debit my account ASAP)

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school. -- George Ade

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