Submission + - Astronomer Captures Enormous True-Color Photo of N (intel.com)
kenekaplan writes: "Amateur astronomer captures 5,000 megapixel panorama of the universe using a laptop and six digital cameras."
Submission + - Rethinking the fall of Rome's Republic (mit.edu)
kenekaplan writes: "Historian’s innovative hypothesis paints new picture of ancient Italy and aims to explain how the Roman Republic fell."
Mexican Cartel Beheads Another Blogger 536
sanzibar writes "The Zetas killed and beheaded an Internet blogger Wednesday in Nuevo Laredo, the fourth slaying in the city involving people associated with social media sites since early September. '"This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn't report on the social networks," advised a note left before dawn with the man's body at a key intersection in the city's wealthier neighborhood. The victim, identified on social networking sites only by his nickname — Rascatripas or Belly Scratcher — reportedly helped moderate a site called En Vivo that posted news of shootouts and other activities of the Zetas, the narcotics and extortion gang that all but controls the city.'"
Submission + - Crowdfunding for Science - Can it Succeed? (rockethub.com)
jearbear writes: "Can crowdfunding work for science? Having raised nearly $40,000 for scientific research in 10 days for projects as diverse as biofuel catalyst design to the study of cellular cilia to deploying seismic sensor networks (that attach to your computer!) to robotic squirrels, the #SciFund Challenge is taking off like a rocket. Might this be a future model for science funding in the U.S. and abroad? What would that mean?"
Feed Google News Sci Tech: Safety regulators open probe of electric vehicles after Volt fire - Los Angeles (google.com)
Reuters
Safety regulators open probe of electric vehicles after Volt fire
Los Angeles Times
Federal safety officials have launched a probe into whether the batteries in Chevrolet's Volt plug-in hybrid sedan are prone to fires. The probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was launched after a Volt caught fire following a ...
GM Volt Fire Said to Prompt U.S. Probe of Lithium BatteriesSan Francisco Chronicle
Regulators Examine Electric Car Batteries After FireNew York Times
Fire in GM's electric Chevy Volt prompts US probeAFP
Reuters-Chicago Tribune-WSOC Charlotte
all 308 news articles
Los Angeles Times
Federal safety officials have launched a probe into whether the batteries in Chevrolet's Volt plug-in hybrid sedan are prone to fires. The probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was launched after a Volt caught fire following a
GM Volt Fire Said to Prompt U.S. Probe of Lithium BatteriesSan Francisco Chronicle
Regulators Examine Electric Car Batteries After FireNew York Times
Fire in GM's electric Chevy Volt prompts US probeAFP
Reuters-Chicago Tribune-WSOC Charlotte
all 308 news articles
The Transistor Wars 120
An anonymous reader writes "This article has an interesting round-up of how chipmakers are handling the dwindling returns of pursuing Moore's Law. Intel's about four years ahead of the rest of the semiconductor industry with its new 3D transistors. But not everyone's convinced 3D is the answer. 'There's a simple reason everyone's contemplating a redesign: The smaller you make a CMOS transistor, the more current it leaks when it's switched off. This leakage arises from the device's geometry. A standard CMOS transistor has four parts: a source, a drain, a channel that connects the two, and a gate on top to control the channel. When the gate is turned on, it creates a conductive path that allows electrons or holes to move from the source to the drain. When the gate is switched off, this conductive path is supposed to disappear. But as engineers have shrunk the distance between the source and drain, the gate's control over the transistor channel has gotten weaker. Current sneaks through the part of the channel that's farthest from the gate and also through the underlying silicon substrate. The only way to cut down on leaks is to find a way to remove all that excess silicon.'"
Feed Ars Technica: Tough Droid Razr teardown reveals user-unfriendly assembly (arstechnica.com)
The Motorola Droid Razr released today has the folks over at iFixit shaking their collective head over its user repairability. The site tore down the phone to find an impressively tight arrangement affording the phone its 0.28-inch thickness, but one that uses a lot of adhesive and requires a tedious, sometimes precarious disassembly.
One of the big offenders to the Droid Razr's repairability is its LCD screen, which is permanently mated to the covering glass. Even if owners manage to break only the glass, they'll have to pay to replace the LCD as well. The rest of the phone is also secured with generous helpings of adhesive, which earned it even more demerits.
The 1750mAh battery powers the phone through contact points, rather than the more common sockets or soldered wires. A Torx T5 screwdriver is required to free the battery, but once the screw is taken care of, users need only pull the "remove battery" tab. Inside the team found 16GB of storage from Toshiba and 4Gb of Samsung RAM, among a bevy of other chips covered by tiny EMI shields.
IFixit notes that the back of the phone, despite being made of Kevlar, was very flexible, but should provide "tough protection" for the internals. The rest of the plastic frames and casing were secured so firmly, the team found them "tedious" to remove, saying that the parts "felt like they would break at any moment."
Due to the mated LCD and glass, difficult disassembly, and injudicious application of adhesive, iFixit awards the Droid Razr a 4 out of 10 for repairability. Those who are not very interested in doing their own repairs, or are very interested in doing difficult repairs, can pick the phone up as of today.
Read the comments on this post
Submission + - iPhone owners report even worse battery life with (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple on Thursday released an update to iOS 5 that addressed issues many users were having with poor battery performance. Despite Apple’s determination that iOS 5.0.1 resolved issues related to battery life, however, not all users are finding that to be the case.
Submission + - Helium White Dwarfs Bear New Quasiparticle (technologyreview.com)
eldavojohn writes: Helium white dwarf stars are now theorized to produce a new kind of quasiparticle that would explain a known temperature anomaly between helium white dwarfs and vanilla white dwarfs (lumps of charcoal). Since helium can form a Bose-Einstein condensate and there are extra constraints inside such a dense object, a new quasiparticle emerges. Their models claim it 'reduces the specific heat of the white dwarf core by two orders of magnitude compared to a crystalline core.' But even with that figured in, measurements of some nearby ancient helium white dwarfs show that they don't fit the specific temperature curve exactly. So some questions remain with the possible explanation that these stars undergo internal transition late in their age. The heavy reading is available on the prepublication site arxiv.
Submission + - A Network Appliance Built for the Battlefield (securityweek.com)
wiredmikey writes: Juniper Networks and GE are helping the U.S. Military deploy ruggedized networking appliances to their defense vehicles that can hold up in harsh conditions make typical products almost useless.
The first product from the partnership is the RTR8GE, an appliance built for war that can act as a firewall and IPS/IDS appliance, while enabling secure IPv4/IPv6 connectivity for military vehicles, aircraft, and operating bases. It has eight Gigabit Ethernet ports integrated in a SWaP-optimized enclosure designed to deal with the environmental situations that can render other equipment mangled beyond repair.
The first product from the partnership is the RTR8GE, an appliance built for war that can act as a firewall and IPS/IDS appliance, while enabling secure IPv4/IPv6 connectivity for military vehicles, aircraft, and operating bases. It has eight Gigabit Ethernet ports integrated in a SWaP-optimized enclosure designed to deal with the environmental situations that can render other equipment mangled beyond repair.
Submission + - NFC will tell you when a Rolex is fake (extremetech.com)
MrSeb writes: "French company Inside Secure has released a NFC solution to help consumers detect whether the premium goods they are looking to buy are counterfeit or not. Street vendors the world over better think twice about their knockoff Prada bags and Nike sneakers being laughed at by tech savvy consumers armed with smartphones. Named the VaultIC150 security module, the NFC-based product gets embedded by manufacturers into the products they wish to authenticate. For items like wines or shoes where hiding the chip is not as easy, bank-level encryption is available to prevent data tampering. Using voltage, frequency and even temperature change sensors, the authentication process can tell if someone has tried to alter the information, resulting in a warning being returned. Furthermore, Inside Secure provides a customizable smartphone app that pings when a customer is near a discounted item — or perhaps tells a sales assistant when a potential customer has been standing next to a product for a while and might need help."
What's Keeping You On Windows? 1880
tearmeapart writes "It may be time again for another discussion/flamewar on the reasons why a lot of us are (still) using Microsoft. The last big discussion on Slashdot was close to 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then: Windows XP and 7 have proven to be stable (and memories of Windows ME are mostly gone.) There are many more distributions for Linux, especially commercial options. Distributions like Ubuntu and CentOS have made GNU/Linux more friendly. Options for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. have grown. Apple and their products have changed considerably, though their philosophy hasn't. Microsoft Silverlight came and is on the way out. Wine and solutions like Transgaming have matured. So... why are a lot of us still using Windows? What would it take for us to switch?"
Submission + - Linux Kernel Power Bug Is Fixed (phoronix.com) 3
An anonymous reader writes: The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the ASPM Linux power problem by mimicking Microsoft Window's power behaviour in the Linux kernel. A patch is on LKML for this solution to finally restore the battery life under Linux.
Submission + - Smallest fossils In The World have been Found (yochascience.com)
yochascience writes: "Scientists from the University of Manchester managed to find a fossil thought to be the smallest yet discovered. The fossil is a fossil parasitic mites in the spider’s body and 50 million years old. He preserved in tree sap that has been petrified into Baltic amber."
Submission + - Brits rejecting superfast broadband (pcpro.co.uk)
Barence writes: "Britain's biggest ISPs are struggling to convince customers to upgrade to superfast broadband. Of the six million customers who can get fibre broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, only 300,000 have done so — a conversion rate of only 5%. Only 2.3% of Virgin Media customers, meanwhile, have upgraded to 50Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec connections. The chief of Britain's telecoms regulator, Ofcom, admits that take-up is "still low" and says only families with teenage children are bothering to upgrade to fibre."
