Comment Re:Bikes lanes are nice (Score 1) 213
FYI, that is called a Michigan left: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Comment Re:Confusing summary - here's my version (Score 1) 74
I wish I had mod points to give any of the above.
Comment Identity theft monitoring (Score 1) 111
If I'm already receiving monitoring from another database breach, is there a way to enqueue this monitoring so it goes in effect after that year lapses?
Signs of bad systems...
Submission + - Soccer Superstar Plays With Very Low Brain Activity
jones_supa writes: Brazilian superstar Neymar's (Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior) brain activity while dancing past opponents is less than 10 per cent the level of amateur players, suggesting he plays as if on "auto-pilot", according to Japanese neurologists Eiichi Naito and Satoshi Hirose. The findings were published in the Swiss journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience following a series of motor skills tests carried out on the 22-year-old Neymar and several other athletes in Barcelona in February this year. Three Spanish second-division footballers and two top-level swimmers were also subjected to the same tests. Researcher Naito told Japan's Mainichi Shimbun newspaper: "Reduced brain activity means less burden which allows [the player] to perform many complex movements at once. We believe this gives him the ability to execute his various shimmies." In the research paper Naito concluded that the test results "provide valuable evidence that the football brain of Neymar recruits very limited neural resources in the motor-cortical foot regions during foot movements".
Comment This is why I stick with reliable sites (Score 4, Funny) 57
Ones that always are up to date and maintain the same functionality, like http://zombo.com/
Comment Re:Monty Python Reference (Score 1) 86
Your references are out of control.
May I suggest BibTex for that?
Comment Re:In related news ... (Score 1) 99
Yes. Next test of google's speed: "flurtle wurtle jurtle turtle."
Maybe we could get everyone to learn arbitrary subjects by spreading rumors about a code hidden in Euclid's elements that successfully predicts all major aspects of traditional geometry.
Incidentally, it is normally spelled "naan"
Submission + - GIMP Abandons SourceForge. Distributes via FTP Instead (gimp.org)
Dangerous_Minds writes: GIMP, a free and open source altenernative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was "the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge." The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead. Is Sourceforge becoming the next CNET?
Submission + - Tape is not dead in the cloud (itnews.com.au)
Bismillah writes: Tape as a storage medium may seem like a last-millennium solution, but Amazon begs to differ with its Glacier service. For one cent per gigabyte, Amazon offers an abstracted tape library and takes care of the operational complexities of using it.
The downside to Glacier is expensive retrieval that takes three to five hours...
The downside to Glacier is expensive retrieval that takes three to five hours...
Submission + - Physicists probe urination 'splashback' problem (bbc.co.uk)
gollum123 writes: US physicists have studied the fluid dynamics of urine "splashback" — and found tips to help men and women with their accuracy and hygiene. Splashback was low when the jets were used close up with a narrow "angle of attack", said the Brigham Young University team. micturation is still a messier business than it needs to be, according to the research. The team fired coloured water at various target "toilets" at the velocity and pressure of average human urination. Then, using a high-speed camera, they captured the moment of impact in remarkable visual detail. the biggest thing you can do to reduce splashback — sitting or standing — is to alter the "angle of attack".
Submission + - The Silent Killer, Hepatitis C, Meets Its Match
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: An estimated three to four million Americans are infected with "the silent killer," Hepatitis C, but most people who are infected do not know it because it can take decades for the virus to damage the liver sufficiently to cause symptoms. Now Andrew Pollack writes in the NYT that medicine may be on the brink of turning the tide against hepatitis C, a plague that kills more Americans annually than AIDS and is the leading cause of liver transplants. If the effort succeeds, it will be an unusual conquest of a viral epidemic without using a vaccine. “There is no doubt we are on the verge of wiping out hepatitis C,” says Dr. Mitchell L. Shiffman. Over the next three years new drugs are expected to come to market that will cure most patients with the virus, in some cases with a once-a-day pill taken for as little as eight weeks, and with only minimal side effects. The new drugs are specifically designed to inhibit the enzymes the hepatitis C virus uses to replicate, the same approach used to control HIV. But the big difference is that HIV forms a latent reservoir in the body, so HIV drugs must be taken for life to prevent the virus from springing back. Hepatitis C does not form such a reservoir, so it can be eliminated permanently. Many doctors are now “warehousing” their hepatitis C patients — urging them to forgo treatment until the new drugs are approved. But the new drugs are expected to cost from $60,000 to more than $100,000 for a course of treatment and some critics worry that the bill will be run up when huge numbers of people who would have done fine without them turn to the drugs. “The vast majority of patients who are infected with this virus never have any trouble,” says Dr. Ronald Koretz. "Since the vast majority of patients become infected after age 20, most patients infected with hepatitis C will have to die of something else before their livers fail."
Submission + - Republican proposal puts 'national interest' requirement on US science agency (nature.com)
ananyo writes: Key members of the US House of Representatives are seeking to require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to justify every grant it awards as being in the “national interest”. The proposal, included in a draft bill from the Republican-led House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and obtained by Nature, would force the NSF to document how its basic science grants benefit the country.
The requirement is similar to one in a discussion draft circulated in April by committee chairman Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas). At the time, scientists raised concerns that ‘national interest’ was defined far too narrowly. The current draft bill provides a more expansive definition that includes six goals: economic competitiveness, health and welfare, scientific literacy, partnerships between academia and industry, promotion of scientific progress, and national defence.
But many believe that predicting the broader impacts of basic research is tantamount to gazing into a crystal ball. All scientists know it’s nonsense,” says John Bruer, president of James S. McDonnell Foundation and former co-chair of an NSF task force that examined requiring scientists to state the 'broader impacts' of their work in grant applications.
The requirement is similar to one in a discussion draft circulated in April by committee chairman Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas). At the time, scientists raised concerns that ‘national interest’ was defined far too narrowly. The current draft bill provides a more expansive definition that includes six goals: economic competitiveness, health and welfare, scientific literacy, partnerships between academia and industry, promotion of scientific progress, and national defence.
But many believe that predicting the broader impacts of basic research is tantamount to gazing into a crystal ball. All scientists know it’s nonsense,” says John Bruer, president of James S. McDonnell Foundation and former co-chair of an NSF task force that examined requiring scientists to state the 'broader impacts' of their work in grant applications.
Submission + - Texas Unleashes Stampede for Science (utexas.edu)
aarondubrow writes: You hear it before you see it — a roar like a factory in full production. But instead of cars or washing machines, this factory produces scientific knowledge.
Stampede, the newest supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and one of the most advanced scientific research instruments in the world, fills aisle after aisle of a new 11,000-square-foot data center on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus of The University of Texas at Austin. Over the past year TACC staff designed, built and deployed Stampede, working closely with Dell and Intel engineers and university researchers.
According to the November 2012 Top 500 list of supercomputers, Stampede is the seventh-most powerful advanced computing system on the planet, but it is the most powerful in the U.S. dedicated to academic research, capable of outperforming 100,000 home computers. In the first three months of operations, approximately 600 projects and more than 1,200 scientists have run on Stampede. These include top researchers in every field of inquiry from earthquake prediction to brain tumor imaging to CO2 capture and conversion.
Stampede, the newest supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and one of the most advanced scientific research instruments in the world, fills aisle after aisle of a new 11,000-square-foot data center on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus of The University of Texas at Austin. Over the past year TACC staff designed, built and deployed Stampede, working closely with Dell and Intel engineers and university researchers.
According to the November 2012 Top 500 list of supercomputers, Stampede is the seventh-most powerful advanced computing system on the planet, but it is the most powerful in the U.S. dedicated to academic research, capable of outperforming 100,000 home computers. In the first three months of operations, approximately 600 projects and more than 1,200 scientists have run on Stampede. These include top researchers in every field of inquiry from earthquake prediction to brain tumor imaging to CO2 capture and conversion.
Submission + - Soyuz Breaks Speed Record to ISS (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: A manned Soyuz spacecraft set a record for traveling to the International Space Station (ISS), arriving six hours after launch instead of the usual two days. Soyuz 34 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, March 28 at 4:43 p.m. EDT (08:43 GMT) and docked with the ISS at 10: 28 PM EDT (03:28 GMT). It was able to catch up and match trajectories with the ISS in only four orbits using new techniques previously tested in ISS rendezvouses with Russian unmanned Progress cargo ships.
Submission + - Human Brain Cells Injected In Mice, They Get Smarter (singularityhub.com)
kkleiner writes: "In an experiment that might seem like something only a mad scientist would conjure, researchers injected human brain cells into the brains of mice to see how it would affect the way the mice thought. It did: the mice got smarter. But the cognition boosting cells weren’t neurons, they were the red-headed step-children of neuroscience called astrocytes. The study turns on its head the role historically attributed to astrocytes of simply supporting the all important function of neurons without playing a significant role in how we learn and think."
