makellan - Slashdot User

Psychadelic Corn Could be Key to Better Biofuels-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2010, @05:27PM

An anonymous reader writes "Pennsylvania State researchers recently published an article detailing their discovery of a set of genes that help transport carbohydrates through corn plants. It just so happens those genes are called psychedelics — because of the green and yellow stripes they cause in corn leaves — and the researchers believe that with some manipulation they could increase crop yields, assist with drought resistance, and improve the amount of biofuel available in each plant."
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US Patent Office teams with Google on database-> 0

Submitted by PatPending on Tuesday June 08 2010, @05:09PM

PatPending writes "From the article:

The Patent and Trademark Office announced today it has reached a two-year "no-cost" agreement with Google to make patent and trademark data electronically available for free to the public in bulk form.

Saying it lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service, PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form."
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Olympus digital camera ships with computer worm-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2010, @04:00PM

An anonymous reader writes "Olympus Japan has issued a warning to customers who have bought its Stylus Tough 6010 digital compact camera that it comes with an unexpected extra — a virus on its internal memory card.

The Autorun worm cannot infect the camera itself, but if it is plugged into a Windows computer USB port it can copy itself onto the PC, and then subsequently infect any attached USB device. Olympus says it "humbly apologises" for the incident which is believed to have affected some 1700 units, and that it will make every effort to improve its quality control procedures in future.

Security company Sophos says that more companies need to wake up to the need for better quality control to ensure that they don't ship virus-infected gadgets. At the same time, consumers should learn to always ensure Autorun is disabled, and scan any device for malware, before they use it on their computer."
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Violent Videogames Only Affect Some People-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2010, @03:24PM

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent videogames will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games."
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Comparing Open Source Neural Network Frameworks-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2010, @03:17PM

An anonymous reader writes "Encog, Neuroph, and JOONE are the primary open source Java neural networks frameworks. In this article the author benchmarks them and gives some guidance to choosing the most suitable one. Encog, with its GPU acceleration and multi-core support is the fastest of the bunch."
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Stem Cell Tourists Take Costa Rica off the Agenda-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2010, @01:16PM

An anonymous reader writes "Stem cell tourism is a booming and troubling industry, in which clinics in places like Mexico, China, and India offer rich tourists experimental stem cell-based treatments, none of which have been approved by the FDA here in the U.S. (Check out some of these creepy sites that offer treatments for everything from autism to MS, and even the "very common ailment called aging.") But in one positive development, Costa Rica just shut down its top stem cell clinic. Said the country's health minister: “This isn’t allowed in any serious country in the world.”"
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IBM to recycle silicon wafers for solar industry 0

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday October 30 2007, @03:56PM

Stony Stevenson writes "IBM has developed a silicon wafer recycling system that may help ease the refined silicon shortage that has limited output of solar energy panels. IBM said it can remove intellectual property from discarded scrap semiconductor wafers made out of silicon. It can then sell them to the solar industry which uses the silicon in photovoltaic cells that generate electricity on rooftops. Every day about 250,000 wafers are produced globally to make chips for products from cell phones to computers and to monitor and control manufacturing, according to a wafer industry group."

Internet Tax Bill approved by U.S. House-> 0

Submitted by

Noah Garrett at NGC Communications

on Tuesday October 30 2007, @03:55PM

Noah Garrett at NGC Communications writes "By a vote of 402-0, the House of Representatives cleared a seven-year extension of the Internet tax moratorium. The President is expected to sign the bill on October 31, just hours before the current Internet Tax Moratorium expires November 1. The seven year agreement is a compromise between the House that had approved a four year bill and the Administration and the Industry that had advocated for a permanent extension. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gFIKjS4XyxT0XE8_hEJ1aIXGnZkAD8SJLQ282"
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Cybercriminal bets you will trade sex for security 0

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday October 30 2007, @03:37PM

Stony Stevenson writes "The author of a new Trojan is betting that e-mail users will trade sex for security. According to security company Trend Micro, new malware is tempting computer users to enter CAPTCHA codes — the images of letters and numbers used to separate humans from bots — to remove clothing from the image of a model.

"A nifty little program that Trend Micro detects as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A disguises itself as a strip-tease game, wherein a scantily clad 'Melissa' agrees to take off a little bit of her clothing," said security researcher Roderick Ordonez on the Trend Micro blog. "However, for her to strut her stuff, users must identify the letters hidden within a CAPTCHA. Input the letters correctly, press 'go,' and 'Melissa' reveals more of herself." But the CAPTCHA characters that users provide are used to subvert security measures at other Web sites."

Moving Eyes and Moving Thought 0

Submitted by Razzy on Monday September 24 2007, @07:19PM

Razzy writes "Researchers at the University of Illinois have shown that by guiding a person's eye movements, it is also possible to guide her thoughts. In the study described here participants were presented with a tricky spatial problem that they were asked to solve while they also occasionally performed an unrelated task that led them to move their eyes in specific patterns. The researchers found that participants who were forced to move their eyes in a pattern that mimicked the problem's solution were more likely to solve the problem, although they were unaware of the relationship between their eye movements and the problem. This is further evidence for embodied cognition, a theory that is becoming increasingly popular among cognitive scientists, philosophers, and even roboticists. Also food for thought for the UI designers out there."