PC9001 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Carbon And Boron Nanosponge Cubes Absorb Oil From Water

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25, 2012 @11:24AM

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Rice University and Penn State University have developed a nanosponge of Carbon and Boron which can absorb oil from water, and then be ignited to remove the oil, with the sponge intact and able to be reused. The blocks have very significant potential for usage in the clean up of oil spills.

Submission + - 'Sexting' a Universal Human Urge Says Neuroscientist

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Thursday May 24, 2012 @12:32PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Over the past two years, photographs of bare-naked celebrity anatomy have been leaked to the public eye including Scarlett Johansson, Vanessa Hudgens, Jessica Alba, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Charlize Theron, Rihanna, and dozens more prompting folks to wonder, ‘Why are so many famous people exhibitionists?’ According to computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas, the answer lies in the design of our sexual brains. “Being desired is very arousing to women,” says clinical psychologist Marta Meana, president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research. “An increasing body of data is indicating that the way women feel about themselves may be very important to their experience of sexual desire and subjective arousal, possibly even outweighing the impact of their partners’ view of them.” The desire to be desired drives young women’s willingness to enter wet T-shirt contests and multi-millionaire Joe Francis built his Girls Gone Wild empire by taping college girls stripping down for his no-budget camera crew. And where male exhibitionism is considered a psychiatric disorder and sometimes a crime, female exhibitionism is rarely considered a social problem. The female exhibitionist urge is universal with well-trafficked websites in Brazil, Japan, Ghana, and the USA offering galleries of tens of thousands of racy amateur self-portraits surreptitiously downloaded from women’s private MySpace or Facebook accounts or maliciously provided by ex-boyfriends. “Look I’m human, & just like every girl in this world, I admire my body," wrote singer Teyana Taylor after her graphic self-portraits were leaked, "so i take pics just like EVERY other human being.”"

Submission + - "Oracle v Google Judge Is A Programmer!" (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by quantic_oscillation7 on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:20PM

quantic_oscillation7 writes: "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?...rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment." — Judge Alsup "who has a mathematics degree, really does understands the technical issues at the heart of this case. He has written code and over the period of his involvement of this case has extended his knowledge of programming languages to include Java."

Submission + - Huawei to help build Canadian Telecom infrastructure. (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by newbie_fantod on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:13PM

newbie_fantod writes: Despite warnings from Canadian, American and Australian intelligence services, The Government of Canada is proudly trumpeting the contracts it has helped broker between Huawei and its national telcos.

Huawei will be providing the LTE networks for Telus, Bell and SaskTel (Telus, Canada's second largest telco, is also under contract to provide secure wireless communication for The Canadian Armed Forces).

Ironically, the technology Huawei provides may well have been developed from R&D stolen from Nortel (the Canadian company whose computer network was open — for a decade — to hackers originating in China).

Submission + - Un-green Facts about e-Readers (greenprophet.com)

Submitted by

jackandtoby

on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @11:44AM

jackandtoby writes: "It’s estimated that the environmental impact of a single “eReader” (Kindle, iPad) equals that of 100 books. First-world households frequently possess multiple devices, so a family’s annual carbon emissions could be 600-750% higher than if they just tapped into the town library. Last year, Amazon was selling one million Kindles a week. Apple hawked 40 million iPads. And those are just two brands in the digital readers aisle in the world’s virtual tech store.

Digital publishing is here to stay, and it is challenging green goals of the book industry and individual readers. Can sustainable printing continue to step up? How best to improve the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of eReading devices?"

Submission + - After The IPO, Facebook Privacy Will Get Worse (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruh

on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @11:39AM

jfruh writes: "There's been a steady drumbeat of panics over the past few years involving how Facebook uses the personal information you give it; nevertheless, someday you'll look back at 2012 as the golden age of Facebook privacy. That's because, once Facebook has its IPO, it'll come under huge pressure from the markets to extract more revenue from its business. And with display advertising not generating game-changing amounts of money, Facebook has only one valuable resource: your data, which is going to be monetized as hard as possible."

Submission + - DARPA program to power instant language translation (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @09:40AM

coondoggie writes: "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $7.1 million contract to SRI International to start building the latest in a long line of technologies that seek to translate and understand multiple languages. DARPA’s Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program seeks to create technology capable of translating into English multiple foreign languages in all genres including informal speech and text such as occurs in email, messaging and conversational speech..."

Submission + - Google+ is a ghost town, study says (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:26PM

zacharye writes: Google’s emerging social network Google+ may boast big user numbers, but a new study suggests that social activity and user engagement are anything but impressive. Intended to give Google a stronger grip on the massive amount of data shared by users on social networks, Google’s answer to Facebook opened its doors to the public last September. After using some user acquisition methods that seemed a bit desperate, Google revealed in December that Google+ was then home to 62 million users. Google+ boasted an impressive 100 million users as of early April, but according to eCommerce analytics firm RJ Metrics, the social network is not the waterfall of data Google hoped it would be...

Submission + - Kodak housed a secret nuclear reactor in its basement? (tech-stew.com)

Submitted by

techfun89

on Monday May 14, 2012 @03:05PM

techfun89 writes: "Talk about a Kodak moment, in this case how did the Kodak camera company manage to house a nuclear reactor along with weapons-grade uranium in its basement from 1978 until 2006? Sources are reporting that in Rochester, N.Y., the home area of Kodak there was a nuclear reactor housed there intended for research.

The small reactor contained 3.5 pounds (1.36kg) of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. Some seem to think this would even classify as "weapons-grade."

It was apparently for neutrons that were used to analyze the purity of materials along with an interest in neutron radiography."

Submission + - Did North Korean GPS jamming down drone (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Friday May 11, 2012 @04:16AM

garymortimer writes: "A foreign engineer from an Austrian company was killed and two South Korean colleagues were injured Thursday when an unmanned spy drone crashed into their control vehicle during a test flight, police said.

The trio were testing the aircraft for South Korea’s military in the western port city of Incheon, police said.

“A 50-year-old foreign engineer from an Austrian company died on the spot when the S-100 drone crashed while they were controlling it remotely from inside the vehicle,” a police spokeswoman at Incheon told AFP.

The crash triggered a fire and completely destroyed the 2.5-tonne vehicle, she said.

The 150-kilogram (330-pound) drone and the vehicle were together worth about five billion won ($4.38 million).

The South Korean military are reported to be investigating whether the jamming of GPS signals by North Korea could have caused the crash. There have been several noted jamming incidents since April 28th, including another incident on the 10th which forced a Coast Guard helicopter to abort take off at Gimpo airport. At least 4 aircraft landing at Inchon are reported to have had GPS failures as well."

Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage 684

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 03, 2012 @03:10PM from the could've-told-you-that dept.

ideonexus writes "NFL Linebacker Junior Seau's suicide this week bears a striking similarity to NFL Safety Dave Duerson's suicide last year, who shot himself in the chest so that doctors could study his brain, where they found the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy that has been found in the brains of 20 other dead football players. Malcom Gladwell stirred up controversy in 2009 by comparing professional football to dog fighting for the trauma the game inflicts on players' brains. With mounting evidence that the repeated concussions football players receive during their careers causing a lifetime of brain problems, it raises serious concerns about America's most popular sport and ethical questions for its fanbase."

Submission + - New Nanocrystal Solar Cell Ink Can be Printed Onto Plastic (usc.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03, 2012 @02:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: Imagine a solar cell that comes in a jar instead of a big, clunky panel, and that can be painted on a piece of plastic. It might be closer than you think — scientists at the University of Southern California have developed a new type of solar cell made from nanocrystals that are so small that you could fit about 250 billion of them on the head of a pin. Due to their size, the nanocrystals can be made into an ink and painted or printed onto clear surfaces. The breakthrough could open the door to solar cells that can be printed onto plastic instead of glass, and then bent and shaped to fit anywhere.

NASA Boss Accused of Breaking Arms Trade Laws 88

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 03, 2012 @01:46PM from the what-part-of-regulation-XXIII-459823(aiii)-don't-you-understand? dept.

ananyo writes "The head of NASA Ames Research Center may have fallen victim to restrictive arms regulations — just as a US government report recommends changing them to help the space industry. Simon 'Pete' Worden, who recently announced that Mars exploration would be done by private companies, has been accused of giving foreign citizens access to information that falls under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR has hampered U.S. firms seeking to export satellite technology. The allegations against Worden come just as the new report recommends moving oversight of many commercial satellites and related activities from the State department to the Commerce department, and some fear they could provide lawmakers with reasons to not ease export controls."

Submission + - Religious sites riskier than porn sites (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by drkim on Thursday May 03, 2012 @11:28AM

drkim writes: Article: "According to a report released... by security software firm Symantec, religious and ideological websites are riskier to visit than adult and pornographic websites. ...analysis found that religious sites had more than triple the average number of threats per infected site than pornographic sites..."

Submission + - Google makes $1bn a year in Australia; pays just $74k tax (delimiter.com.au)

Submitted by daria42 on Thursday May 03, 2012 @11:13AM

daria42 writes: Looks like Apple isn't the only company with interesting offshore taxation practices. The financial statements for Google's Australian subsidiary show the company told the Australian Government it made just $200 million in revenue in 2011 in Australia, despite local industry estimating it actually brought in closer to $1 billion. The rest was funnelled through Google's Irish subsidiary and not disclosed in Australia. Consequently the company only disclosed taxation costs in Australia of $74,000. Not bad work if you can get it — which Google apparently can. About that 'don't be evil' motto? Yeah. Not so much.

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