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Science

Using Infrared Cameras To Find Tastiness of Beef 108

Posted by Soulskill from the i-use-a-fork dept.
JoshuaInNippon writes "Might we one day be able to use our cell phone cameras to pick out the best piece of meat on display at the market? Some Japanese researchers seem to hope so. A team of scientists is using infrared camera technology to try and determine the tastiest slices of high-grade Japanese beef. The researchers believe that the levels of Oleic acid found within the beef strongly affect the beef's tenderness, smell, and overall taste. The infrared camera can be tuned to pick out the Oleic acid levels through a whole slab, a process that would be impossible to do with the human eye. While the accuracy is still relatively low — a taste test this month resulted in only 60% of participants preferring beef that was believed to have had a higher level of Oleic acid — the researchers hope to fine tune the process for market testing by next year."
Science

Submission + - Wearable rubber films could power electronics (princeton.edu)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: Princeton researchers have published a paper that describes power-generating rubber films that could harvest the energy of walking, running and breathing to power mobile electrical devices. The material is composed of nanoribbons of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), a ceramic material that is piezoelectric. These are then embedded into silicone rubber sheets. The resulting material is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy provided by flexing into electrical energy. The researchers suggest it could be used in shoes, or placed against the lungs. I'd certainly buy a t-shirt that could power my laptop.
Apple

Submission + - The iPad is Future Shock (macworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad misses the point. What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
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."

Submission + - Firefox Mobile reaches 1.0 (mozilla.com)

Submitted by Majix
Majix writes: Firefox Mobile, the mobile browser developed by Mozilla based on the same engine as in the recently released Firefox 3.6, has finally hit version 1.0. The first device to be officially supported is the Nokia N900. With a long list of features, Firefox Mobile looks to be the most complete mobile browser to date. Highlights include the familiar Awesome Bar, Weave Sync for sharing your browser state between your PC and mobile, and of course tabbed browsing and Firefox add-ons. With the Nokia 900 and Firefox Mobile 1.0, even Flash content including the normal YouTube site is working, showing that a mobile browser does not have to equal a compromised Internet experience.
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?
Television

Submission + - Japan will start 3D TV programming this summer (eming.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Japan HD TV operator Sky Perfect will start 3D programming this summer with focuses on live events and sports events.
As more Hollywood movies are shot in 3D as well as 3D TVs are expected to come onto the market in the very near futures, Sky Perfect is hoping that people will switch to 3D TV just like people switching from black and white to colors.

How about 3D TV in other countries?
Apple

Submission + - iPad Vs HP, Google, Dell, Camangi Slates (katonda.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Interestingly, the iPad will not be challenged from Microsoft but from the sleeping-giant Gnu-Linux. Here is a comparison with some of the to-be-released Gnu-Linux powered tablets. There is one advantage of these “Muktware” powered tablets — they will not be 'restrictive' devices. Unlike Apple's airtight compartments where you can't even drag and drop, these devices will allow you to do virtually everything you can do with a PC.

Here is a chart comparing devices which will compete with the iPad, and may even beat it! The devices we compared are: Apple iPad, Dell Mini5 Streak, Camangi Webstation, HP Slate and Google Gpad*.
Hardware

Submission + - Defect scandal at Toyota grows -- without bound. (wsj.com) 2

Submitted by reporter
reporter writes: The latest defect in Toyota cars is quickly developing into the scandal of the 21st century. The problem started when customers of Toyota vehicles began experiencing sudden unexplained acceleration; these incidents began appearing in 2002. Over time, Toyota management claimed that the problem is the floor mat. So, the management issued a recall to replace all the floor mats.

Then, after further studying the problem, the management claimed that the throttle's pedal sometimes becomes stuck due to weather conditions. This new claim lead to the massive global recall of many vehicles sold over the past 3 years.

However, none of these explanations for the sudden acceleration has been satisfactory. Independent investigations leading to an explosion of lawsuits have determined that the problem is the electronic throttle control (ETC) — the so-called drive-by-wire mechanism that links the pedal via some cables to the fuel controller. According to a report by "Businessweek" and another report by the "Wall Street Journal", Toyota is now the defendant in 3 separate class-action lawsuits. The plaintiffs claim that the ETC is defective.

According to a report by the "New York Times" (NYT), "a few years ago, the company sent out a technical bulletin saying some cars accelerate on their own between 38 and 42 mph, and it reprogrammed the electronics with new software codes".

The NYT notes, "John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automotive Lab at MIT, said because Toyota is the only automaker having this problem, it could be something specific to its design, such as the location and integration of the electronics relay sensor."

Further, the Toyota ETC lacks an important safety mechanism: if the customer presses both the throttle pedal and the brake pedal, then the ETC should give priority to the brake. The Toyota ETC gives priority to the throttle. How can Toyota engineers commit such a gross design mistake? Common sense tells us that the brake should receive priority.
News

Submission + - Russian police raid office of environmental group. (wsj.com)

Submitted by reporter
reporter writes: According to a disturbing report issued by the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ), the world's largest body of fresh water is about to meet its demise. Known as Lake Baikal, this pristine creation of Mother Nature "contains one-fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water and has been declared a Unesco World Heritage Site".

Unfortunately for humankind, Lake Baikal is situated near a paper mill now owned by Oleg Deripaska, a wealthy confidant of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The mill had been dumping toxic waste into the lake from 1966 until October 2008. In 2008, a court banned the further discharge of waste into the lake, and Deripaska shutdown the mill.

Then, last week Putin signed a decree that removes "waste discharges in the production of pulp, paper and cardboard from a list of operations banned by environmental legislation in and around" Lake Baikal. This decree legalized the continued dumping of toxic waste into the lake.

Freed from inconvenient environmental rules, Deripaska will soon restart the mill. He claims that he has upgraded the technology of the mill to the point that it will "not do any ecological harm to the lake".

According to a new report just issued by the WSJ, "Russian police this week raided the offices of a prominent environmental group that had protested government plans to reopen [the paper mill owned by Deripaska] on the shores of Siberia's Lake Baikal.." The environmental group is Baikal Ecological Wave. The police justified the raid by claiming that the organization is using unlicensed computer software.

In the past, the Kremlin has used the same tactic to shutdown organizations protesting injustices committed by dictator Vladimir Putin and his henchmen.

Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have issued a statement supporting Baikal Ecological Wave. Though the statement is courageous, it likely cannot rescue the Russian environmentalists from prison sentences based on "evidence" fabricated by the Kremlin.
Space

Spectrum of Light Captured From Distant World 32

Posted by Soulskill from the what-are-you-made-of dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos: "Astronomers have made the first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the Solar System and are deciphering its composition. The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ... The find is important, because hidden within a light spectrum are clues about the relative amounts of different elements in the planet's atmosphere. 'The features observed in the spectrum are not compatible with current theoretical models,' said co-author Wolfgang Brandner. 'We need to take into account a more detailed description of the atmospheric dust clouds, or accept that the atmosphere has a different chemical composition from that previously assumed.' The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said the ESO. Until now, astronomers have been able to get only an indirect light sample from an exoplanet, as worlds beyond our Solar System are called. They do this by measuring the spectrum of a star twice — while an orbiting exoplanet passes near to the front of it, and again while the planet is directly behind it. The planet's spectrum is thus calculated by subtracting one light sample from another."

Submission + - Web Scraping AI Lives Forever (scitedaily.com) 1

Submitted by blee37
blee37 writes: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a web-scraping AI program that never dies. It runs continuously, extracting information from the web and using that information to learn more about the English language. The idea is for a never ending learner like this to one day be able to become conversant in the English language.
Internet Explorer

German Government Advises Public To Stop Using IE 320

Posted by Soulskill from the enough-is-enough dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After McAfee's disclosure of an IE 0-day vulnerability this week that had been used in Operation Aurora, the hack and stealing of data from Google, Adobe and about 3 dozen other major companies, the German government has advised the public to switch to alternative browsers (untranslated statement). Given that the exploit has now been made public and the patch from Microsoft is still nowhere to be seen, how long will it be before other governments follow suit?"
Businesses

Should Gaming Worlds Join the Workplace? 68

Posted by Soulskill from the gotta-farm-those-tps-reports dept.
destinyland writes "A Stanford professor argues that gaming worlds can keep workers engaged, and advocates elements of World of Warcraft or Second Life to hone workplace skills like teamwork, leadership, and data analysis. An IBM report also argues games like World of Warcraft teach leadership and that 'there is no reason to think the same cannot be done in corporate settings of various sizes.' The professor even suggests putting online gaming experiences into your resume. ('There's just so much that gets done [in a virtual world] that's just right on target with what happens in real business.') And Google's CEO also claims that multiplayer gaming also provides good career training, especially for technology careers. 'Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game. If I were 15 years old, that's what I would be doing right now... It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking.'"
Space

A Space Cannon That Might Actually Work 432

Posted by timothy from the whoooshing-sound dept.
Unequivocal writes "Chalk another one up to Jules Verne. Physicist John Hunter is proposing a space cannon with a new design idea: it's mostly submerged. 'Many engineers have toyed with the [space cannon] concept, but nobody has came up with an actual project that may work. Hunter's idea is simple: Build a cannon near the equator, submerged in the ocean, hooked to a floating rig ... A system like this will cut launch costs from $5,000 per pound to only $250 per pound. It won't launch people into space because of the excessive acceleration, but those guys at the ISS can use it to order pizza and real ice cream.' Though it won't work on people, with launch costs that low, who cares?"

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