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Comment Re:Range (Score 1) 159

Are missles accurate from that altitude? I would expect the maximum firing altitude to be much lower than the maximum crusing altitude. While the device in question might not help much if you are being spied on by a drone, it seems possible that you could hear one which might be shooting at you soon. It is also worth mentioning that the operating celing is measured in feet above sea level, and a drone flying over the mountains in Pakistan is much closer to the ground.
Government

Submission + - Hardware vendors sue Dutch government over copyright levies (itworld.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying.

"The companies now hold the State liable for all damages caused by the levies," the hardware vendors said in a joint news release on Wednesday. Trade association FIAR Consumer Electronics, which has as members companies such as Samsung, Sharp, Sony and LG, is also a party to the litigation. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the District Court of The Hague."
NASA

Submission + - NASA Working on Getting Rid of the "New Satellite" Smell (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland is working to eliminate new car smell. No, they aren't a bunch of killjoys. That distinctive odor is caused by outgassing of chemicals used in car manufacturing. Some scientists believe these gases to be harmful, but whether they are or not, satellites suffer from the same problem. The gases released by satellites themselves can damage them, so NASA is working on new ways to control or eliminate these emissions.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Entries open for first ever 24-hour Raspberry Pi hackathon (techworld.com)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Called the Raspberry Pi “hack day”, the competition will pit 100 entrants against one another in a number of categories using only the board, Internet access, soldering irons and as much coding as they think appropriate.

Participants will have 24-hours to complete projects, at the end of which judges will category winners will be awarded from a variety of prizes including camcorders, Android tablets and the geek must-have, the Hubsan H107 Quadcopter.
Biotech

Submission + - Nose cell transplants allow paralyzed dogs to walk again (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Scientists from the University of Cambridge’s Veterinary School, working with colleagues from the UK Medical Research Council’s Regenerative Medicine Centre, have got disabled dogs walking again. More specifically, they’ve used the dogs’ own cells to repair their spinal cord injuries, and at least partially restored the functionality of their back legs. The researchers believe that the process shows promise for use on physically challenged humans.

The cells in question are known as olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs), and they aid in growing the nerve fibers that allow the nose to communicate with the brain. One of the more unusual qualities of the mammalian olfactory system is its ability to regenerate itself throughout adulthood – this is due to the activity of the OECs.
Earth

Submission + - Where has all the Xenon gone? (nature.com)

Submitted by
LucidBeast
LucidBeast writes: "Xenon the second heaviest of the noble gasses is only found in trace amounts in the atmosphere. Atmosphere contains less Xenon than other lighter noble gasses. Missing Xenon has perplexed scientists and it has been speculated that it is hiding in the earths mantle. Now a group at the University of Bayreuth in Germany think that they might found the answer. I turns out that Xenon does not dissolve easily into Magnesium silicate perovskite, thus it cannot hide there. And because it had no place to hide it is now gone forever."
Math

Submission + - Mathematicians Extend Einstein's Special Relativity Beyond Speed of Light 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Christian Science Monitor reports that despite an apparent prohibition on faster-than-light travel by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, applied mathematician James Hill and his colleague Barry Cox say the theory actually lends itself easily to a description of velocities that exceed the speed of light. "The actual business of going through the speed of light is not defined," says Hill whose research has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A. "The theory we've come up with is simply for velocities greater than the speed of light." In effect, the singularity at the speed of light divides the universe into two: a world where everything moves slower than the speed of light, and a world where everything moves faster. The laws of physics in these two realms could turn out to be quite different. In some ways, the hidden world beyond the speed of light looks to be a strange one. Hill and Cox's equations suggest, for example, that as a spaceship traveling at super-light speeds accelerated faster and faster, it would lose more and more mass, until at infinite velocity, its mass became zero. "We are mathematicians, not physicists, so we've approached this problem from a theoretical mathematical perspective," says Dr Cox. "Should it, however, be proven that motion faster than light is possible, then that would be game changing. Our paper doesn't try and explain how this could be achieved, just how equations of motion might operate in such regimes.""
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

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