Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - New Drug Treatment Could Cure All Viral Infections (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by Scottingham
Scottingham writes: TFA states that in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.
Education

Submission + - Google Pulls Plug on Programming for the Masses 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Google has decided to pull the plug on Android App Inventor, which was once touted as a game-changer for introductory computer science. In an odd post, Google encourages folks to 'Get Started!' with the very product it's announcing will be discontinued as a Google product. The move leaves CS Prof David Wolber baffled. ' In the case of App Inventor,' writes Wolber, 'the decision affects more than just your typical early adopter techie. It hurts kids and schools, and outfits like Iridescent, who use App Inventor in their Technovation after-school programs for high school girls, and Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, which teaches app building to kids in Oakland California. You've hurt professors and K-12 educators who have developed new courses and curricula with App Inventor at the core. You've hurt universities who have redesigned their programs.' Wolber adds: 'Even looking at it from Google's perspective, I find the decision puzzling. App Inventor was a public relations dream. Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups — this is good press for a company continually in the news for anti-trust and other far less appealing issues. And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'

Submission + - Yeast provide clues to evolution of complex life (msn.com)

Submitted by thebchuckster
thebchuckster writes: The budding yeast lives on simple sugars, which it makes by using an enzyme called invertase to chop more complex sugars, like sucrose, into smaller ones, such as glucose and fructose. But because most of these simple sugars escape by diffusing into the surrounding environment, the yeast cell can't consume all the food it makes.

Koschwanez and his team compared the success of single, isolated yeast cells (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in a low-sucrose solution (table sugar) with that of clumps of yeast cells, formed naturally when the cell walls of the yeast failed to fully separate during cell division. They found that the cells in clumps continued dividing, an indication they were eating well and growing normally, while single cells in the same solution did not divide.

The secret is that the clumped cells happen to help each other out.
Idle

Submission + - Right-Wing Extremists Tricked by Trojan Shirts (spiegel.de)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: Fans at a recent right-wing extremist rock festival in Germany thought they were getting free T-shirts that reflected their nationalistic worldview. But after the garment's first wash they discovered otherwise. The original image rinsed away to reveal a hidden message from an activist group. It reads: "If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We'll help to free you from right-wing extremism."

Comment Re:Not Even Close (Score 1) 116

by Scottingham (#36685192) Attached to: A Million Node Supercomputer
You pretty much hit it on the nose.

Not only would a brain simulator have to simulate neurons, but also synapses, neurotransmitters, neurotransmitter receptor types, glial cell types (e.g. astrocyte computation), mRNA expression and probably about a library of congress worth of stuff we don't even know about yet.

Comment Re:Traveling Wave Reactor (Score 1) 474

by Scottingham (#36685044) Attached to: Bill Gates On Energy
That's essentially true, but this beats out solar and wind on the grounds of power density. For nations with not a lot of land area available to devote to energy farming, these will come out on top. Just one of these reactors will likely put out 1-2 Gigawatts. Sustained. That's hundreds of acres equivalent for solar or wind, during ideal conditions only.

Comment Traveling Wave Reactor (Score 5, Informative) 474

by Scottingham (#36683340) Attached to: Bill Gates On Energy
How is there not a single post on the actual nuclear technology he is researching and advocating for! C'mon nerds!

Traveling wave reactors (google them) are projected to run without refueling for 60 years on what is 'waste' now and then become the storage facility for the next ~500 years until it fades into background rad. Oh, and they're made to be put in the ground like missile silos. Think of them as nuclear candles. Without having to refuel by hand and taking people out of the equation as much as possible the chances for error get reduced significantly. They also have large negative energy coefficients so a loss of coolant does not lead to a meltdown.

After researching as much as possible into TWRs I'd say the current stage of developement is trying to get the exact alloy of uranium, burnable poisons (look these up too, they're sweet), etc just right to create a long lived sustained reaction. I'd imagine that such work is really heavy on the super computer time.

I hope that these researchers have access to lots of money and super computer time. If only there was some tech billionaire funding them...

Slashdot Top Deals

If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.

Close