Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Books

Submission + - Ursula Le Guin Wins 6th Nebula at the 2009 Awards (fictioncircus.com)

Submitted by
Miracle Jones
Miracle Jones writes: "At the 2009 Nebula Awards in Los Angeles, Ursula Le Guin took home her 6th prize for her new novel called "Powers" about a slave boy in a mystic land who can "remember" the future. The other winners in the shorter categories were Catherine Asaro, John Kessel, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman (included are links to their podcasts and stories so you can read them or listen to them for free)."
Space

Submission + - Milkway X-Ray Source Explained (nasa.gov)

Submitted by
gpronger
gpronger writes: "The Chandra X-ray Observatory has explained the source of X-rays found along the plane of our galaxy.

Previous measurements seemed to indicate a disperse source of the x-rays. The proposed explanations attempted to attribute the source to 100-million-degree gas, however this explanation needed a large amount of super-heated gas, which did not have a plausible source.

The Chandra observatory was able to measure a very small segment of the galactic plane and attribute the x-rays to individual sources such as white dwarfs.

Greg"
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Classic Console Commercials (gameplayer.com.au)

Submitted by
Parz
Parz writes: "Guess what? Game companies want you to buy their machines. Surprised? Well, of course not, but the ways in which they've gone about enticing you to buy their products over the years makes for a fascinating journey. We thought we'd take a look back at exactly how they got us excited for the next big thing — how they introduced us to each exciting new step in the evolution of video gaming. To do this we have decided to dig-up the old television commercials that inspired generations of gamers to plug in, boot up and get lost in worlds only limited by the imagination. Some ads were funny, some weird and some clever — there were even those that outright attacked the competition. So, sit back and rub that nostalgia bone until you go 'ohhh'. — from gameplayer"
Biotech

Submission + - Nuclear Testing helps Identify Fake Vintage Whisky

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Industry experts claim the market for vintage whisky has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit made just a few years ago. Now researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have developed a method that can pinpoint the date a whisky was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. "It is easy to tell if whisky is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature," says Dr Tom Higham, deputy director of the facility. Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon 14 in the atmosphere rise around the world so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Whisky extracted from antique bottles is sent to the laboratory where scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the carbon 14 in the sample. In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve was withdrawn from auction at Christies, where it was expected to sell for up to £20,000, after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950. "So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whisky," says Higham."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close