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Australia

New Chili Is World's Hottest 201

Posted by samzenpus from the it-tastes-like-burning dept.
bazzalunatic writes "The Trinidad Scorpion Butch T chili is grown and harvested by an Australian company, and not by the inmates of an Australian insane asylum as rumored. The chili is claimed to be the world's hottest (1,463,700 SU), surpassing the current Naga Viper chili at 1,382,118 SU. From the article: '"They're just severe, absolutely severe," says Marcel de Wit, The Chili Factory co-owner. "No wonder they start making crowd-control grenades now with chilies. It's just wicked." The chili is so scorching that Marcel and his team have to wear protective gear when handling the new variety. "If you don't wear gloves your hands will be pumping heat for two days later," he says.'"
Handhelds

Smartphone Device Detects Cancer In an Hour 69

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-wait-for-my-itricorder dept.
kkleiner writes "Scientists at the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital have integrated a microNMR device that accurately detects cancer cells and integrates with a smartphone (abstract). Though just a prototype, this device enables a clinician to extract small amounts of cells from a mass inside of a patient, analyze the sample on the spot, acquire the results in an hour, and pass the results to other clinicians and into medical records rapidly. How much does the device cost to make? $200. Seriously, smartphones just got their own Samuel L. Jackson-esque wallet." Reader Stoobalou points out other cancer-related news that Norwegian researchers have found a group of genes that increase a person's risk to develop lung cancer.

Submission + - Smithsonian wants your vote (artofvideogames.org)

Submitted by
Doofus
Doofus writes: "The Smithsonian Institution is requesting help from the general public in selecting some of the most artistic video games, in a variety of categories.

The site allows voters to select games separated into 5 eras, and seeks to develop the exhibition to

explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers

"

Submission + - Paul Haggis vs. The CoS (newyorker.com)

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: Lawrence Wright has written a lengthy expose of the Church of Scientology, including an in-depth interview with Hollywood director Paul Haggis, who has defected from the Church. Haggis read about the abuse chronicled by the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, queried the Hollywood branch of the CoS, and decided to resign. Warning: Wright's article is long, and contains a great deal of detail, some of which has been covered by Slashdot in prior submissions. Wright's meticulous reporting should be praised.
Transportation

'Death By GPS' Increasing In America's Wilderness 599

Posted by timothy from the waiting-for-death-valley's-seasonal-ferry dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Every year, more and more Americans are dying in deserts and wildernesses because they rely on their GPS units (and, to some degree, their cellphones) to always be accurate. The Sacramento Bee quotes Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan: 'It's what I'm beginning to call death by GPS ... People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.'"

Comment NIST is all over the Smart Grid effort too (Score 4, Interesting) 64

by Doofus (#34801614) Attached to: US Revamps NIST's Standard-Setting Efforts
Summary left out a number of Smart-Grid related efforts NIST is heading up, all of which involve large numbers of private sector corporations and engineers.

See the following:

NIST Smart Grid overview

as well as this page

Who is involved?

Because the Smart Grid will touch so many aspects of life in the 21st century, the development of standards involves a wide range of stakeholders—national and international, private and public, large and small. This simplified illustration (see below) shows the many complex relationships and interactions that will take place within the Smart Grid, as electricity and/or information flows back and forth.

As part of the overall Smart Grid coordination effort, NIST is also pushing security issues for the Smart Grid, which is somewhat reassuring.

Comment Arsenic and old earth / Washington Post (Score 3, Informative) 405

by Doofus (#34420174) Attached to: NASA Finds New Life (This Afternoon)
The Washington Post has a story on the finding, Second Genesis on Earth?

quoting:

But now researchers have uncovered a bacterium that has five of those essential elements but has, in effect, replaced phosphorus with its look-alike but toxic cousin, arsenic.

News of the discovery caused a scientific commotion, including calls to NASA from the White House and Congress asking if a second line of Earthly life has been found.

A NASA press conference Thursday and an accompanying article in the journal Science, gave the answer: No, the discovery does not prove the existence of a so-called "second genesis" on Earth. But the discovery very much opens the door to that possibility, and to the related existence of a theorized "shadow biosphere" on Earth--life evolved from a different common ancestor than all that we've known so far.

Submission + - Watson, come here ... (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: The NYTimes has an interesting story titled What Is IBM's Watson, about IBM's efforts to build a knowledge engine capable of beating a human being at the game show Jeopardy!

The article describes the efforts IBM has made to build the knowledge engine, and the natural language parsing ability, to successfully compete against human beings. Watson, while impressive, cannot always best frail humans:

Yet the truth is, in more than 20 games I witnessed between Watson and former Jeopardy! players, humans frequently beat Watson to the buzzer. Their advantage lay in the way the game is set up. On Jeopardy! when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.

Players use this precious interval to figure out whether or not they have enough confidence in their answers to hazard hitting the buzzer. After all, buzzing carries a risk: someone who wins the buzz on a $1,000 question but answers it incorrectly loses $1,000.

Often those six or seven seconds weren't enough time for Watson. The humans reacted more quickly. For example, in one game an $800 clue was "In Poland, pick up some kalafjor if you crave this broccoli relative." A human contestant jumped on the buzzer as soon as he could. Watson, meanwhile, was still processing. Its top five answers hadn't appeared on the screen yet. When these finally came up, I could see why it took so long. Something about the question had confused the computer, and its answers came with mere slivers of confidence. The top two were "vegetable" and "cabbage"; the correct answer "cauliflower" was the third guess.

Wordplay may give Watson some trouble, but is this an impressive advance, or just another evolutionary step toward pervasive weak AI?

Submission + - A ballsy way to stop the oil leak (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A maverick scientist who made a name for himself by directing the capping of the more than 500 hundred burning oil wells in Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991 is proposing a deceptively simple way to plug the gulf oil leak: drop steel balls into the gushing well. If the steel balls are big enough in diameter, their weight will pull them downward even through the upward-rushing torrent of oil and gas. So they'll settle into the well at some deep level and begin to clog it. Two hundred tons of the things should slow the gusher enough that it can then be stopped with a more conventional injection of mud, he says.

Comment Re:Creative class? Please join the real world (Score 4, Informative) 185

by Doofus (#32389832) Attached to: Intelligence Density and the Creative Class
Being "creative" is not the sole criterion for being a member of the Creative Class.

Several key factors that differentiate members of the Creative Class and "people in any field that happen to be creative" include the generation of new knowledge, of one sort or another, or the generation of innovative solutions to difficult problems.

This does not take away any sliver of the importance of the creativity demonstrated by the classes of work you noted, but the scope of their impact is completely different.

Submission + - Intelligence Density and the Creative Class (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: The Atlantic has an interesting review of some open-sourced work by Rob Pitingolo about the comparative educational attainment levels of various metropolitan areas.
While people are now capable of being far more mobile than in generations past, many people remain within 100 miles or so of where they were born. For the technology-partition of the creative class, this is less likely to be the case, in my personal experience. Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move? Or is it more complicated?
Is it more about the fact that the creative jobs are where the creative people are?
Google

Submission + - Google Android Headed to the Chevy Volt (treehugger.com) 1

Submitted by jerryjamesstone
jerryjamesstone writes: Earlier this month, General Motors hinted at a partnership with a major tech company to fully overhaul their telematics system OnStar. While OnStar CEO Chris Preuss was tight-lipped about who that partner was, Motor Trend has just reported it's Google. If the rumor's true, GM will make the Chevy Volt the first Android-based vehicle to hit the road.
Bug

Submission + - Toyota: Engineering Process and the General Public (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Doofus
Doofus writes: The Washington Post has published in today's paper Why it's so hard for Toyota to find out what's wrong by Frank Ahrens on the Toyota situation and the difficulties of adequately conveying to Senators and Representatives — most of whom are non-technical — the debugging process. Ahrens interviews Giorgio Rizzoni, an "expert in failure analysis" at Ohio State, who describes the iterations of testing that NHTSA will likely inflict on the Toyota sample cars they have purchased, and then moves into the realm of software and systems verification:

He explained that each vehicle contains "layers of computer code that may be added from one model year to next" that control nearly every system, from acceleration to braking to stability. Rizzoni said this software is rigorously tested, but he added: "It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating software."

Here's an example everyone is familiar with: You're working at your computer in Windows software and an error message pops up. It asks whether you want to report the error to Microsoft. Microsoft has exhaustively tested this version of Windows before its release, but it cannot completely predict how it will operate out in the world, subject to user demands. That's why it gathers error reports and uses them to fix the software on a rolling basis.

If you put a lot of parts together to form a complex electromechanical machine and make it talk to itself via software, it can behave, sometimes, in ways you cannot anticipate. It can fail for reasons you cannot anticipate.

Ahrens ends the piece with a quote from a 2009 LA Times interview with a psychologist:

"Richard Schmidt, a former UCLA psychology professor and now an auto industry consultant specializing in human motor skills, said the problem almost always lies with drivers who step on the wrong pedal.

'When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong,' Schmidt said. 'The human motor system is not perfect, and it doesn't always do what it is told.' "

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