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Networking

Submission + - Particle physics on your home computer (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
michaelmarshall
michaelmarshall writes: "The Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator being built in Switzerland, is going to generate an enormous amount of data. To help cope with it, the LHC team have relaunched the LHC@home system. This allows people to donate their computer's downtime to the LHC's computing projects. It's modelled on the popular SETI@home software. http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12791-you-too-can-do-particle-physics.html"
Education

Submission + - 'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found (physorg.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "When exposed to high voltage, water does some interesting things. From the article, ' When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.'"
Programming

Submission + - Lisaac : The first prototype object compiler (u-strasbg.fr)

Submitted by
Ontologia
Ontologia writes: "Lisaac is a new prototype based object language. It stands as a Self and SmallTalk successor and takes some Eiffel ideas like genericity and contract programming. The goal of the project is to provide a high level language as fast as C.
In fact, with some benchmarks on an mpeg2 decoder rigorously translated from C, Lisaac is 17% faster to 44% slower than C, for 40 % less lines of code with lots of gcc optimizations.
Lisaac provides a lot of powerful features thanks to the prototype based object model : Absolutely all is object, contract programming, dynamic inheritance, block type which is a list of instruction giving functional programming facilities, and so on..

The 0.12 version, distributed in GPLv3, is the latest stable version for the 0.2 specification.
Lisaac was convincing enough for writing IsaacOS, a fully object operating system. IsaacOS runs on five different architectures."
Education

Submission + - Major fraud in climate research

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: The European Science Foundation has just held the first World Conference on Research Integrity. A major conference topic was the fraud allegation against SUNY professor Wei-Chyung Wang. Wang's research has been crucial evidence that urbanization effects are insignificant in global warming studies (and Wang's research was relied upon in the latest report from the IPCC). Now it has been alleged that Wang's research was fabricated. The Daily Tech has the story. The allegation was made by mathematician Douglas Keenan, whose report is clear and disturbing. Wang's university has begun an investigation.
Biotech

Submission + - Pen testing and unintended consequences. 2

Submitted by shdo
shdo writes: Over at http://isc.sans.org/ Craig Goranson submitted a thought provoking question about unintended consequences of pen testing.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3407

A nagging feeling is telling me that this is just the tip of the iceberg and one which is not only something we will need to take in to account but the possibility of abuse is staggering.
Communications

Submission + - Squirrels use infrared signalling to scare snakes

Submitted by arneMan
arneMan writes: A recent article in PNAS reveals a novel mode of communication between ground squirrels and rattlesnakes. Apparantly, squirrels can scare off snakes by employing a technique called "tail flagging" — frenetic back and forth waving of the tail, "harassing" the snake. Using infrared cameras, scientist have discovered that when encountering infrared sensitive rattle snakes, the tail also heats up, putting even more fear into the snake. Experiments using a robotic squirrel (!) confirms this. Interestingly, the squirrel can discriminate between infrared sensitive and non-sensitive snakes, only heating up the tail if it encounters the former kind. Only the abstract is availabe for non-subscribers, but here is a summary of the article along with some nice pics and movies.
Space

Submission + - Cassini's Spectacular Iapetus Flyby

Submitted by cupofjoe
cupofjoe writes: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is reporting on the Cassini spacecraft's recent close flyby of the Saturnian moon Iapetus, highlighting images taken from distances 100 times closer than the Voyager 2 flyby in 1981. Near real-time images were shown to Cassini mission team members in a presentation at JPL yesterday, during which a pre-recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke was played to the audience. Clarke wished them luck on the flyby, reminding all present that he had included a pretty accurate description of Iapetus in the original 1968 text of "2001: A Space Odyssey", years before Voyager made its flyby. The images are pretty spectacular, trumping the mosaic shot during Cassini's New Years' 2004 flyby — no sign of the Star Gate, though.
Announcements

Submission + - Brain Differences In Democrats and Republicans

Submitted by i_like_spam
i_like_spam writes: Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.' Moreover, 'the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry ... as a flip-flopper.
Media

Submission + - CNN is using subliminal advertising? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
krakman
krakman writes: "CNN has subliminal Advertising? I just got a email from a friend who said she was watching CNN over her DVR and had a clip that showed CNN's subliminal advertising. She uploaded the clip to youtube, and I extracted the frame, (go to http://brainwashingbycnn.blogspot.com/ to check it out) Innocent mistake by CNN or bigger plot to brainwash us...... I look forward to comments...."
Space

Submission + - Spelunking the caves of Mars

Submitted by OriginalArlen
OriginalArlen writes: After earlier images caught glimpses of mysterious cave openings on flanks of the Martian volcano Arsia Montes, the MRO's superb HiRISE camera has now captured amazing close-up images of this cave / "skylight" on Arsia Montest. How big is the cavern below? What does it look like inside? Somehow I doubt we'll get data from inside in my lifetime, so let the wild-eyed speculation begin!
Software

Submission + - Danny Smith stepping down as MinGW maintainer (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by
derrida
derrida writes: "From the cygwin mailing list: "Danny Smith sent email to the MinGW lists yesterday indicating that he was stepping down as a maintainer. Danny was the key person responsible for most of the improvements made to gcc and binutils for windows in the last couple of years. His contributions will be sorely missed. This is a real blow for Windows versions of gcc and binutils on both MinGW and Cygwin.""
Space

Submission + - Antique Viking Technology (smh.com.au)

Submitted by sea_stuart
sea_stuart writes: COMPARED with the latest electronic wizardry, they are fossils from the age of the techno-dinosaurs. Yet the bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. Housed at the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, the 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometres from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometres from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. "The Voyager technology is so outmoded," said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, "we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them." http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/thirty-years-tr acking-faint-whispers-from-space/2007/08/31/118806 7368154.html
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - How to make submarines invisible to sonar

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: Chinese researchers have figured out how to make objects invisible to sound. All you need is a "a periodic array of rubber-coated gold spheres along with spheres of water containing air bubbles, all embedded within an epoxy resin." Acoustic metamaterials are the sound-wave version of the much-hyped 'invisibility cloak' [slashdot.org], and are probably already on the US Navy's shopping list.

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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