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Education

Submission + - Largest Viking Treasure Unearthed on English Farm (msn.com)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "One of the largest known hoards of Viking treasures has been uncovered by a father and son on a farm in northern England. The collection of coins and jewelry was buried over 1,000 years ago, and includes items from Ireland, France, Russia and Scandinavia. It's the largest such find in over 160 years. In all, more than 600 coins and dozens of other objects, including a gold arm band, silver ingots and fragments of silver were found in and around the container. According to an expert from the British Museum, at least some of the treasure was taken by force, possibly in raids on northern Europe or Scandinavia. The article includes an impressive photograph of the entire collection."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Multi-Gigabit Wireless To Make Wires Obsolete (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
Invisible Pink Unicorn
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Researchers at Georgia Tech are investigating the use of extremely high radio frequencies to achieve broad-bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances, eliminating the need for wired connections in offices and data centers. Within as little as three years, multi-gigabit wireless approach could result in next generation home multimedia and wireless data connections able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds. From ScienceDaily: 'The research focuses on RF frequencies around 60 gigahertz (GHz), which are currently unlicensed — free for anyone to use — in the United States. GEDC researchers have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters. At 10 Gbps, you could download a DVD from a kiosk to your cell phone in five seconds, or you could quickly synchronize two laptops or two iPods.'"
Power

Submission + - Ice Block Air Conditioning (yahoo.com)

Submitted by JumperCable
JumperCable writes: The AP has an interesting article on the use of ice blocks as air conditioning in New York high rises. The concept is pretty basic. Overnight during off peak energy pricing hours & during the coolest part of the 24 hour day, the system freezes water in storage tanks into giant blocks of ice. These storage tanks are located in the basement (coolest location). They are frozen with ethylene glycol.

Given that most of the brown outs occur during the summer months due to high electric demand for air conditioning, I wonder how much of an effect this system would have in reducing brownouts if it's use was more wide spread. The article mentions it is only cost efficient for large companies. But how much of this is profit padding? Couldn't a smaller system be worked out for home use? CALMAC is one of the producers of these systems.
Biotech

Submission + - Self-Centered Cultures Narrow Your Viewpoint (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by
InvisblePinkUnicorn
InvisblePinkUnicorn writes: "NewScientist reports on research indicating that people from Western cultures such as the US are particularly challenged in their ability to understand someone else's point of view because they are part of a culture that encourages individualism. In the experiment, Chinese students outperformed their US counterparts when ask to infer another person's perspective. Volunteers had to follow the instructions of a director and move named objects from one compartment to another. But sometimes the researchers placed two objects of the same kind (eg, "wooden block") in the grid. 95% of Chinese students would immediately understand which object to move — the one visible to both them and the director. Their US counterparts, however, did not always catch on — only 35% understood what to do."
United States

Submission + - The New Science of Parking

Submitted by
Articles Directory
Articles Directory writes: " The New Science of Parking If you live in a city and drive a car, chances are you know the hassles of looking for a place to park. Studies of traffic congestion in New York and Los Angeles have found that cruising for parking is, in fact, a major source of gridlock. In a 2006 study undertaken in a Brooklyn neighborhood by Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based advocacy group, 45% of drivers interviewed admitted they were simply looking for a parking spot. A more rigorous analysis was conducted in Los Angeles by Dr. Douglas Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the nation's top parking gurus. Over the course of a year, he and his students found, the search for curb parking in a 15-block business district "created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon," which consumes "47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.""
Power

Submission + - NRC getting wolloped (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's mission is to regulate the nation's civilian use of byproduct, source, and special nuclear materials to ensure adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment. The Government Accountability Office is finding some problems with it's performance. They set up a shell company to procure sufficient materials to build a dirty bomb, got a license from the NRC in thirty days which they easily modified to allow larger purchases of materials as reported here.

Nearly at the same time they are taking heat from Congress for holding a secret public meeting that nobody attended (because it was secret) to hear about concerns about the licence for a Tennesee plant that spilt 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution on the floor near a narrow shaft. Concentration of the solution in the shaft would have caused a fatal criticality accident. Federal Register notice here.

What reforms of the Commission might help it do its job better?"
Enlightenment

Submission + - Sun did'nt cause recent climate change: U.K. study (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Mikkeles
Mikkeles writes: The Royal Society has recently published an article (abstract full article(PDF)) written in response to Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle .

There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth's pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
Space

Submission + - Site Chosen for Underground Lab

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to Nature , the US Government has chosen the Homestake Mine in South Dakota site for a half-a-billion underground laboratory. The mine was used in the 1960s by Nobel Prize winner Raymond Davis Jr. to study neutrinos, tiny, ghostlike particles that rarely interact with matter. Now, physicists say they want to do still more neutrino experiments there, and microbiologists want to look for primitive "dark life," that can live without sunlight.
Businesses

Submission + - Mislabelling Organic Foods

Submitted by BayaWeaver
BayaWeaver writes: These days I try wherever possible to eat organic foods: bread, olive oil, tofu, veges but then there's this article in the LA Times USDA may relax standards for organic foods.
This looks like an attempt to water down the meaning of organic. Here's a quote from the article: "This proposal is blatant catering to powerful industry players who want the benefits of labeling their products 'USDA organic' without doing the work to source organic materials"
So I may not be free of pesticides and preservatives after all. If we can't trust the USDA to enforce accurate labelling of foods, who else can we turn to? Are there independent organizations that can be trusted?
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Hillary says save Scott's hut (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "The World Monuments Fund has recently identified 100 monuments that are endangered by, among other things, global warming. One of them, the base hut of Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic is beginging to rot because it is no longer permanently frozen. Sir Edmund Hillary strongly supports efforts to preserve the hut which could cost $6.7 million."
Biotech

Submission + - Watching Drug Resistance Develop in Vivo

Submitted by nursegirl
nursegirl writes: As the spread of multi-drug resistant bacteria like MRSA and the new XDR-TB (extremely drug resistant tuberculosis) becomes a growing concern throughout the world, a team of scientists has been able to learn how bacteria evolves in vivo as a response to vancomycin and other antibiotics.

The team isolated S. aureus bacteria intermittently through a patient's antibiotic therapy and sequenced the genome of the bacterium multiple times. The results demonstrated 35 mutations in 31 locations as the bacteria evolved from vancomycin-susceptible to vancomycin-resistant.
Patents

Submission + - US patents Yoga

Submitted by
SmellTheCoffee
SmellTheCoffee writes: "Members of Parliament (MPs) in India on Tuesday slammed the US patenting authority for granting yoga-related copyrights to American companies, saying yoga is a part of Indian heritage. Terming the whole exercise as preposterous, the MPs said yoga had originated in India. Till date, the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. TOI is reporting on this."

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