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Biotech

How a Key Enzyme Repairs Sun-Damaged DNA 97

Posted by kdawson from the one-proton-and-one-electron dept.
BraveHeart writes "Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme — one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants — that reverses severe sun damage. For the first time, researchers have witnessed how this enzyme works at the atomic level to repair sun-damaged DNA. 'Normal sunscreen lotions convert UV light to heat, or reflect it away from our skin. A sunscreen containing photolyase could potentially heal some of the damage from UV rays that get through.'"
Government

Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality 564

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-the-comedians-are-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Democratic Sen. Al Franken weighed in on Net Neutrality over the weekend at the Netroots Nation conference of liberal activists in Las Vegas, calling it 'the First Amendment issue of our time,' and warning against Republican plans for less regulation. More from a blog post on CBSNews.com: 'Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation, Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.'"
PC Games (Games)

JavaScript/HTML 5 Gaming? 201

Posted by Soulskill from the five-by-five dept.
cjcela writes "Lately I've seen some HTML 5/JavaScript games popping up on the web. Most of them lack sound, and are not polished, but little by little this is changing. As an example, check Galactic Plunder. While it is only a single-level proof of concept, it is one of the first arcade non-Flash games that I've found playable. Do you know of other comparable or better pure JavaScript games?"
The Internet

Submission + - ISPs Challenge UK Internet Copyright Laws in Court (ispreview.co.uk)

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: Two United Kingdom Internet Service Providers (ISP), BT Retail and the TalkTalk Group, have called on the country's High Court to mount a Judicial Review of the controversial UK Digital Economy Act (DEA). The DEA was rushed through parliament prior to May's general election and is designed to protect copyright on the internet. Unfortunately the new law also threatens to identify those "suspected" of unlawful copyright P2P file sharing to Rights Holders for further legal action and could lead to the blocking of legitimate websites, service speed restrictions, limits on public Wi-Fi use or even account disconnection from your ISP. The methods used by the act are also unreliable (IP address tracking) and have been known to catch innocent individuals.

Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT Retail, said: "It is disappointing that we feel the need to take action but we feel we have no choice. We have to do this for our customers who otherwise run the risk of being treated unfairly. We need clarity about whether this legislation is compatible with important EU laws."

Submission + - The Proton Just got smaller (nature.com) 1

Submitted by inflame
inflame writes: A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."'

Would this indicate new physics if proven?
Databases

Good IC / Electronic Component Inventory Software? 70

Posted by timothy from the what-have-we-here? dept.
Smerky writes "As I've been getting more and more into hobby electronics I have been finding it difficult to keep track of all the different ICs and other electronics that I have (resistors, capacitors, etc.). What are Slashdotters' recommendations for some inventory software? Certain qualifications that I'd be looking for personally are that it has to run on Linux/OSX well or be web-based (to run well on an Apache2 server)."

Submission + - Merry merry copyright king of the bush is he... (abc.net.au) 2

Submitted by neonsignal
neonsignal writes: Iconic Australian band Men at Work have been ordered to pay royalties for an instrumental riff in their song "Down Under". The notes were sampled from a well-known children's song "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree", written in 1934 for a Girl Guide's Jamboree. The Justice found the claims of the copyright owner Larrikin to be excessive, but ordered the payment of royalties and a percentage of future profits. Let's hope the primary schools are up to date with their ARIA license fees!
Books

Submission + - Ebooks Slower to Read than Paper

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "PC World reports that a study shows that reading from a printed book—versus an e-book on any of the three tested devices, an iPad, Kindle 2, and PC, was a faster experience to a significant degree. Readers measured on the iPad reported reading speeds, on average, of 6.2 percent slower than their print counterparts while the Kindle 2 clocked in at 10.7 percent slower. Jacob Nielsen had each participant read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Each participant was timed, then quizzed to determine their comprehension and understanding of what they just read. Nielsen also surveyed users' satisfaction levels after operating each device (or page). For user satisfaction, the iPad, Kindle, and book all scored relatively equally at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6 on a one-to-seven ranking scale (seven representing the best experience). The PC, however, did not fare so well with its usability score of 3.6. "Most of the users' free-form comments were predictable," writes Nielsen. "For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter." Neilsen concludes that the study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. "Even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.""
Science

Submission + - PLANCK paints its first all-sky map of the univers (edgeofphysics.com) 1

Submitted by edgeofphysics
edgeofphysics writes: The European Space Agency unveils the first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background — the radiation leftover from the big bang. Planck took 10 months to gather this data and it contains unprecedented details about the foreground emissions from our galaxy.
Biotech

What Bilski Means For Biotech Patents 47

Posted by Soulskill from the reply-hazy-try-again dept.
eldavojohn writes "Patents aren't just a software thing, and while Bilski's dismissal didn't shake the ground for software, it's certainly making waves in the biotech community. You may recall Prometheus v. Mayo, in which doctors fought a biotech startup's methodology patents. Well, medical method patents are now being reconsidered by order of the Supreme Court. Stocks of biotech startups jumped as this news broke, but questions remain on how the lower Federal Circuit court will rule when it reconsiders these cases of medical testing. It's clear the Supreme Court has 'ruled that judges should be more flexible in determining if methods, rather than objects, are eligible for patents, citing emerging technologies such as medical testing.' So Bilski may result in dire news for medical methods and testing patents."

Submission + - Google crumble in the face of Chinese pressure? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by siloko
siloko writes: Google appear to have backed down in their ongoing battle with China over censorship. After months of enjoying automatic redirection to their non-censored Hong Kong site Chinese users will now have to follow a link to the Hong Kong site making the uncensored results a bigger pain to access. Google's license to operate in China expires tomorrow so one presumes this concession is part of a negotiated deal ensuring they can continue doing business.

Submission + - Dell Sold Millions of Faulty Optiplex Workstations (nytimes.com)

Submitted by christoofar
christoofar writes: In a damning condemnation of Dell by the NYT, your half-decade long nightmare with corporate Dell Optiplex computers with their impossible-to-figure-out driver updates and difficult mobo upgrading methods and fighting the mysteriously-odd dead computer in your IT department was all for nought. The major problem that affects millions of Dell Optiplex workstations delivered between 2003 and 2005 were faulty capacitors manufactured by Nichicon, a Japanese supplier. E-mails now unsealed in the lawsuit customers filed against Dell revealed that Support Engineers and Sales both knew of the problem, but Dell emphasized "ambiguity" when discussing support problems with customers related to the broken computers.
Bug

Submission + - Serious design flaw in Western Digital's Velocirap (livingagile.com)

Submitted by MarkSmeltzer
MarkSmeltzer writes: There are numerous forum posts (see Google search results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2204.04V01%22+49+raptor) about the flaw in Western Digital's Velociraptor drives that I found while researching a problem that I was having with my servers that are running these drives. In Living Agile's server farm there are over 50 Velociraptor drives, and each of the servers that are using these drives would have major disk problems every few months.

It turns out that any Western Digital Velociraptor drive that is running firmware version 04.04V01 has the following flaw: Every 49.71 days (49 days 17 hours and 4 seconds), any hard drive running the 04.04V01 firmware will experience a delay of roughly seven seconds. This delay is sufficient to cause most RAID controllers to fail the affected drives whenever this delay occurs. If there are sufficiently many affected drives in a RAID set that experience this delay at the same time, all of the affected volumes will also fail.

Submission + - Dell shafts SSD early adopters

Submitted by
cl_everett
cl_everett writes: "Dell has shipped tons and tons of laptops with solid state disk drives, but without ATA TRIM enabled. ATA TRIM support allows the drive to consolidate free blocks, and keeps the performance high. SSDs without ATA TRIM support eventually begin to slow down to a crawl and begin stuttering as they fragment. You would think that Dell would be happy to make a firmware upgrade for these laptops available for download, but for now the only way to get your firmware upgraded is to call in to Delhi support and tell them you had an extended period of slowdowns followed by a BSOD:

STOP: 0x000000ED (0X82F937C8, 0XC0000006, 0X00000000,0X00000000)

and then tell them that the pre-boot diagnotic utility tells you :

Hard Drive — DST Short Test
Error code 2000-0142
Msg : Unit 1 : Drive Self Test failed. Status byte = 79.

Then you have to pray that they send you a new drive with up to date firmware.

Dell's attitude on this has been reprehensible; We know that Samsung has released upgraded firmware for the drives in question, months ago. But we can't use that firmware, it apears to brick SSDs with Dell branded firmware, so we have a problem only Dell can solve.

To top it all off, we see Dell's contempt for us as consumers: Halfway down http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254961-32-warning-careful-ordering-dell-machines-ssds we have prize quote: ... as long as your computer is starting, there is no problem for us. You know your computer is slow only because of your computer knowledge, if we give it to somebody else, they won't notice, so there is no problem ...

At this point, I see the only alternative as naming and shaming. Please help."

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