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Submission + - Statistician Cracks Code for Lottery Tickets (lotterypost.com)

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, an MIT educated statistician who became intrigued by a particular type of scratch-off lottery ticket called an extended-play game — sometimes referred to as a baited hook — that has a tic-tac-toe grid of visible numbers that looks like a miniature spreadsheet. Srivastava discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off — the ticket could be cracked if you figured out the secret code. Srivastava's fundamental insight was that the apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie because the software that generates the tickets has to precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. "It wasn't that hard," says Srivastava. "I do the same kind of math all day long."
NASA

Submission + - NASA Mercury Probe Will Answer Big Questions (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Next month, the first space probe in nearly 40 years will approach the planet Mercury, with an array of instruments that could help answer fundamental questions about how planets form.

The mission is called MESSENGER, for Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. On March 17 it will pull into orbit around mercury, after more than six years of maneuvering between the Earth, Venus and Mercury itself.

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, completing one of its revolutions in only 88 days. Surface temperatures on during the day top out at 426 degrees Celsius (798 degrees Fahrenheit) — hot enough that lead and zinc would melt like ice on a hot day. Nighttime temperatures plunge to -173 degrees C (-279 F), cold enough to liquefy neon gas. Mercury also spins very slowly, and does so in such a way that a single day on Mercury lasts 176 days — two of the planet's years.
Earth

Submission + - NASA finds family of habitable planets (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA's star-gazing space telescope continues to find amazing proof that there are tons of habitable planets in space and we have only scratched the surface of what's out there. The space agency said today its Kepler space telescope spotted what it called its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in what it considers to be the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.
Biotech

Doubled Yield For Bio-Fuel From Waste 97

Posted by timothy from the what-about-the-oil-from-anything-guy? dept.
hankwang writes "Dutch chemical company DSM announced a new process for production of ethanol from agricultural waste. Most bio-fuel ethanol now is produced from food crops such as corn and sugar cane. Ethanol produced from cellulose would use waste products such as wood chips, citrus peel, and straw. The new process is claimed to increase the yield by a factor of two compared to existing processes, thanks to new enzymes and special yeast strains."
Democrats

Liberal Watchdog Questions White House Gmail Use 283

Posted by timothy from the it-cannot-be-it-must-not-be dept.
MexiCali59 writes "Liberal watchdog CREW has joined Republican Congressman Darrell Issa in calling for an investigation into whether White House staffers regularly use private email accounts to communicate with lobbyists. The allegations, first reported last week by the New York Times, would likely constitute a violation of federal law as well as an ethics pledge created by Obama upon taking office last year."
Security

Submission + - Microsoft: Don't press F1 key in Windows XP (computerworld.com) 2

Submitted by Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: Microsoft has issued a security advisory that warns users not to press the F1 key in Windows XP owing to an unpatched bug in VBScript discovered by Polish researcher Maurycy Prodeus. The security advisory says that the vulnerability relates to the way VBScript interacts with Windows Help files when using Internet Explorer, and could be triggered by a user pressing the F1 key after visiting a malicious Web site using a specially crafted dialog box.

Submission + - Is Dark Matter real? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
robinstar1574
robinstar1574 writes: "Stars move at speeds faster then the visible matter on them suggests that they would according to Newtons Law of Gravity. Previously, this has been attributed to "Dark Matter", which includes Nutrinos, WIMPs, and Dark Energy. However, what if he was slightly off?

If the second law is correct at all accelerations, a measuring device mounted on the rim should register no anomalous force at these points. However, if MOND is correct, the device should feel an aberrant kick. "We are able to control the conditions to produce the MOND regime in any place at any time," says De Lorenci.

Amazing, don't you agree?"
The Internet

Submission + - DoS attack over Olympic figure skating (examiner.com)

Submitted by JoshuaInNippon
JoshuaInNippon writes: Popular Japanese message board 2ch was kicked off line by a denial of service attack that started at around noon on March 1st (JST). According Japanese and Korean media reports, the attack was carried out by Korean internet users angry over anti-Korean comments written on several of the 2ch boards where Japanese ultra-nationalists are known to lurk. The recent remarks that have reportedly got Koreans up in arms are those defaming 2010 Olympic gold medalist Yu-Na Kim. The company that manages the 2ch message board servers originally claimed that they believed around 50,000 people had caused the denial of service by repeatedly hitting F5 to refresh 2ch pages, overwhelming the 2ch host system. However, it turns out that the Japanese company actually rents their servers from an American company, Pacific Internet Exchange. That company is reported as believing the attack was actually performed by a bot network, although still of Korean origin. Since the affected 2ch servers are physically located in the States, Pacific Internet Exchange is reported as stated that they intend to present the incident to US cyber crime authorities.

Submission + - Shock waves from rocket launch destroy sundog (nasa.gov)

Submitted by jcgam69
jcgam69 writes: NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory amazed onlookers last week when it flew past a sundog and destroyed it. Videos of the event captured shock waves from the rocket billowing through the sundog, eliciting cries of delight and amazement from the crowd below.

Submission + - The upside of the NASA budget (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by teeks99
teeks99 writes: There's a lot of articles out there today about the changes to the NASA budget, but this is the only one that gets a lot of the details. From what I'm seeing it looks great...cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going.

— Commercial space transportation
— Keeping the ISS running (now that we've finally got it up and running)
— Working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we _can_ go off to the far flung places)
— Automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit)


I'm excited :-)
Politics

Submission + - TSA 'Jeopardy' Board in FL ridicules minorities (cnn.com)

Submitted by crazyvas
crazyvas writes: No points for guessing this would happen. From the article:

In a a TSA air marshal field office in Florida, supervisors are alleged to have used a crew assignment board to ridicule and keep score on women, gays and minorities. The board, resembling the TV game show "Jeopardy," includes categories such as "pickle smokers," "our gang" and "creatures," which sources said were names used by managers for gay men, African-Americans and lesbians.

Submission + - Newzbin.com Usenet Indexing Set to Begin Next Week

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Only a few weeks after a jury acquitted Alan Ellis, the owner of the BitTorrent site "OinK's Pink Palace", of copyright infringement, another high profile case for the newsgroup side of things is about to start next week. Slyck news is reporting that the MPA (Motion Picture Association) trial against Newzbin.com, a website that indexes NZB files and content on the newsgroups, is about to begin next week in London. Will lightening strike twice in favor of website indexing?
Space

Submission + - Give space a chance (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration. This simply is not true.The budget will call for a new rocket design, and a lot of money will go toward private space companies, who may be able to launch people into orbit years ahead of Ares being ready anyway."
Apple

Submission + - Tinkering, R.I.P.? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Having cut his programming teeth on an Apple ][e as a ten-year-old, Mark Pilgrim laments that Apple now seems to be doing everything in their power to stop his kids from finding the sense of wonder he did: 'Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of 'jailbreaks' stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers. There won’t ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won’t be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart. And that's a real loss. Maybe not to you, but to somebody who doesn’t even know it yet.' Time for Woz to have a sit-down with Jobs?

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