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Science

+ - Rats Ate Easter Island->

Submitted by kgeiger
kgeiger writes "The Wall Street Journal reviews a new book about Easter Island. Contrary to Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo's The Statues that Walked (Free Press, 2011) posits that brown rats deforested Rapa Nui, that slavers decimated the population, and that the phosphate-poor soils limited both agriculture and population. Because palm trees are soft and fibrous, they make poor rollers; the moai were in fact "walked" into position the same way one person can move a heavy, upright refrigerator by rocking and shifting it."
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Microsoft

+ - Study: Internet Explorer Users Have Lower IQ->

Submitted by
fysdt
fysdt writes "Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser have lower IQ than their counterparts who use other browsers, a study from a web consulting firm reveals.

According to a large study conducted by Vancouver, Canada-based AptiQuant, those who use the Internet Explorer web browser scored lower in an IQ test they conducted.

The large study which involved 100,000 participants says Internet Explorer users scored lower than average in the IQ test."
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+ - Tracking Service That Can't Be Dodged->

Submitted by Worf Maugg
Worf Maugg writes "Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ “incognito” functions.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics."
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The Military

+ - Lockheed Experimental Blimp crashes in PA->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Lockheed Martin launched and experimental Airship on Wednesday morning in Akron,OH. It ascended to 30,0000 feet and the an anomaly occurred and the plan mission to go to 60,0000 feet was aborted. It crashed in a wooded area south of Pittsburgh and then caught on fire a few days later"
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+ - Norway takes the high road in fight against terror->

Submitted by bakayoko
bakayoko writes "Glenn Greenwald's latest column addresses the difference between American and Norwegian responses to domestic terror attacks after the horrifying recent violence in Oslo. While attacks on American soil have almost inevitably resulted in moves to clamp down on individual rights, leaders in Norway have been resolutely opposed to such restrictions, and remain committed to fighting terror without surrendering their people's liberty. Something which, once upon a time, was a distinctly American stance to security."
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+ - Matlab Integrate GPU Support for UberMath Computat->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Matlab now comes with GPU native support in the 2010b version. This means loads of Matlab commands can be parallelized onto the GPU without having to re-code things in C++ or Fortran using CUDA. Pretty sweet for the HPC community."
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Supercomputing

+ - Watson To Be Tasked With Solving Medical Problems->

Submitted by The Installer
The Installer writes ""A doctor who is helping to prepare IBM's Watson computer system for work as a medical tool says such blog entries may be included in Watson's database.

Watson is best known for handily defeating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV earlier this year. IBM says Watson, with its ability to understand plain language, can digest questions about a person's symptoms and medical history and quickly suggest diagnoses and treatments.

The company is still perhaps two years from marketing a medical Watson, and it says no prices have been established. But it envisions several uses, including a doctor simply speaking into a handheld device to get answers at a patient's bedside.""
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+ - SPAM: Hygroelectricity could be Next Big Power Source

Submitted by
liqs8143
liqs8143 writes "Hygroelectricity, or humid electricity could be the next big power source. We’re already making great progress in pulling electricity from the motion of the air & from the photons that stream through it, but what about pulling electric charges right out of the air itself?
Researchers have solved a mystery about how electricity forms in the atmosphere, and in doing so may have found a way to pull electricity right out of the air.

Research unveiled today at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society has defined the mechanism by which water vapor in the air become charged, a discovery which could lead to devices capable of creating electricity from the atmosphere’s own charges.

For a long time, scientists though that water droplets adrift in the atmosphere remained electrically neutral even after attaching themselves to dust particles or other particulates in the atmosphere. But recent evidence has suggested otherwise, which led Dr. Fernando Galembeck and his colleagues to dig deeper. What they found, and then proved in the lab, is that in fact water in the atmosphere does pick up a slight charge."
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Government

+ - UK doctors say they must direct health service IT->

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes "The British Medical Association has called on the NHS to “take stock” on the national programme and reconsider its remit, as a series of tough parliamentary reviews began and a lead supplier proposed a strategy U-turn.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, a member of the doctors’ association IT industry party, told Computerworld UK: “Too often the programme has been aimed at supporting a political ambition instead of taking account of the real needs of the NHS. The programme’s remit must be decided by clinicians and patients.”"
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Privacy

+ - Google Profiles Exposes Millions of Usernames->

Submitted by
mrkoot
mrkoot writes "It is known since at least 2008 that Google exposes sitemaps that link to Google Profiles — 35 million in total. A while ago I checked ALL those links -my connection did NOT get blocked after any amount of connections- and found that ~40% of the Google Profiles expose their owner's username and hence their @gmail.com e-mail address. It totals to ~15 million exposed usernames or @gmail.com e-mail addresses. With no apparent download restriction in place and people disclosing their profession, employer, education, location, links to their Twitter account, Picasa photoalbums, LinkedIn accounts et cetera, is this spear phishing waiting to happen?"
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Transportation

+ - Cooperative cars battle it out in Holland->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The first cooperative platooning competition, where vehicles use radio communication in addition to sensors, was held in Helmond, Holland a week ago. By using wireless communication the awareness range of each vehicle is extended, enabling vehicles to travel closer together which increases road capacity while at the same time avoiding the shockwave effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave) responsible for traffic jams. The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge distinguishes itself from earlier platooning demos (e.g. the PATH project, http://www.path.berkeley.edu/nahsc/) by having a completely heterogeneous mix of vehicles and systems built by multiple researcher and student teams. Using wireless communication to coordinate vehicles raises concerns about the safety of such systems, would you trust WiFi to drive your car?"
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United States

+ - How Area 51 Hid Secret Craft ->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "No word yet on alien starships, but now that many Cold War-era Area 51 documents have been declassified, veterans of the secret U.S. base are revealing some of the clever—and surprisingly low-tech—ways they hid futuristic prototypes from prying eyes."
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Idle

+ - Smart Pajamas Monitor Patients with Sleep Disorder

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Emily Singer reports in MIT Technology Review that a nightshirt embedded with fabric electronics can monitor user's breathing patterns while a small chip worn in a pocket of the shirt processes that data to determine the phase of sleep, such as REM sleep (when we dream), light sleep, or deep sleep. "It has no adhesive and doesn't need any special setup to wear," says Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-inventor of the shirt. "It's very easy—you just slip it on at night." Until now people with sleep disorders were hooked up to a complex array of sensors that monitor brain activity, muscle activity, eye movement, and heart and breathing rate but the "smart pajamas" simplify this by focusing only on respiration. "It turns out that you can tell if someone is awake or asleep and which stage of sleep they are in purely based on breathing pattern," says Bianchi. "That's a much easier signal to analyze than electrical activity from the brain." Sleep specialists hope the pj's can help patients with insomnia or other sleep disorders since the shirt allows repeated measurements over time in the home so users can log their habits, such as coffee or alcohol intake, exercise, or stress, and look for patterns in how those variables affect their quality of sleep."

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