Raver32 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ballmer deflects rumoured Yahoo buy (itbusiness.ca)

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Raver32

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @12:19PM

Raver32 writes: "Try as he might, not even veteran U.S. television interviewer Charlie Rose could get Microsoft Corp.'s CEO Steve Ballmer to disclose whether the company continues to mull an acquisition of Yahoo Inc. "If we were I wouldn't tell you, if I weren't I wouldn't tell you," Ballmer said earlier this week when asked point-blank by Rose in a joint interview with Cisco Systems Inc.'s CEO and Chairman John Chambers if Microsoft was currently in negotiations with Yahoo to merge. The two industry heavyweights appeared together in New York to discuss the collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco, which have begun to encroach on each other's territory in the areas of unified communications and network security infrastructure as well as products for the digital home. There was widespread speculation that Microsoft and Yahoo were talking about a possible deal earlier this year, speculation that was quieted by Microsoft's announcement it would buy digital media and marketing services firm aQuantive in May in a US$6 billion deal to boost its online advertising strategy. The deal, Microsoft's biggest to date, closed last week, and the possibility of the company purchasing Yahoo seemed a moot point."

Submission + - Is There a Theory of Everything? (space.com)

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Raver32

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @09:31AM

Raver32 writes: "Ancient philosophers thought wind, water, fire and earth were the most basic elements of the cosmos, but the study of the small has since grown up. Physicists continue to carve the known universe into particles to describe everything from magnetism to what atoms are made of and how they remain stable. Yet striking similarities in the world of quantum mechanics, as the study of particles and their forces is known, has led to a one of the most important questions in modern science: Is there a single theory that can describe everything? "We understand a lot about the universe up to the first few energetic microseconds, but earlier than that our physics break down," said Mark Jackson, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "But those first moments are where the really interesting things happened." If a theory can be designed to withstand the incredible energies of the early universe as well as incorporate gravity, Jackson said, then a universal theory of physics could become a reality."

Submission + - Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists (space.com)

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Raver32

on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @09:25AM

Raver32 writes: "Two space rocks in our solar system's outer asteroid belt might contain mineral evidence for a new class of asteroids or long eroded mini-worlds. The asteroids, (7472) Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY16, were found to contain basalt, a grey-black mineral that forms much of the crust on Earth and the other inner planets. Basalt has also been found in space rocks shed by Vesta, the third largest object in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. The presence of basalt is evidence that an object was once large enough to sustain internal heating. "We need now to observe both objects in the near-infrared range to confirm whether they have a basaltic surface," said study leader Rene Duffard of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Grenada, Spain. "If they do, we will need to try to work out where they came from and the fate of their parent objects. If they do not, we will have to come up with a new class of asteroid." The finding, made using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), was presented at annual European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany"

Submission + - Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary (space.com)

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Raver32

on Monday August 20, 2007 @02:11PM

Raver32 writes: "NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are celebrating three decades of flight as they careen toward interstellar space billions of miles from the solar system's edge. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Both spacecraft continue to return information from distances more than three times farther away than Pluto, where the sun's outer heliosphere meets the boundary of interstellar space. "The Voyager mission is a legend in the annals of space exploration. It opened our eyes to the scientific richness of the outer solar system, and it has pioneered the deepest exploration of the sun's domain ever conducted," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. "It's a testament to Voyager's designers, builders and operators that both spacecraft continue to deliver important findings more than 25 years after their primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn concluded." Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers)."

Submission + - Storm Subsides: Mars Rovers Now Battle Fallout (space.com)

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Raver32

on Friday August 17, 2007 @08:08AM

Raver32 writes: "Mars' globe-engulfing dust storm has died down during the past several weeks, but the two robotic rovers on its surface now face the fallout of dust from the thin atmosphere. Conditions were so bad in early August that just before the launch of the Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft, rover scientist Mark Lemmon feared the demise of the Opportunity rover. "There was one sol [Martian day] when there was real uncertainty we'd hear from Opportunity," said Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University. He added that the plucky robotic explorer almost entered a power-saving mode that would have been dangerous "uncharted territory" for the rover team. Still, Lemmon thinks the Mars rovers will persevere through the dusty conditions. "Mars could throw worse storms at us, but for this season I think we have seen the worst," he told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "We got a good demonstration that Mars could kill them.""

Submission + - Mars Phoenix Spacecraft Corrects Course (space.com)

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Raver32

on Wednesday August 15, 2007 @12:36PM

Raver32 writes: "NASA's Mars-bound Phoenix lander completed its first and biggest course correction planned during the spacecraft's journey. The second of the remaining five planned adjustments prior to landing is scheduled for mid-October. "These first two together take out the bias intentionally put in at launch," said Brian Portock, Phoenix navigation team chief at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Phoenix blasted off Earth aboard a Delta 2 rocket on Aug. 4 and now careens through space at 74,200 mph (33,180 meters per second)-a speed necessary to cover the 422 millions miles (679 million kilometers) between Earth and Mars by May 25, 2008."

Submission + - Bigelow Aerospace Fast-Tracks Manned Spacecraft (space.com)

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Raver32

on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @01:20PM

Raver32 writes: "Following the successful launch and deployment of two inflatable space modules, on Monday the owner and founder of Bigelow Aerospace announced plans to move ahead with the launch of its first human habitable spacecraft, the Sundancer. The decision to fast-track Sundancer was made in part to rising launch costs as well as the ability to test some systems on the ground, company CEO Robert Bigelow said in a press statement. "As anyone associated with the aerospace industry is aware, global launch costs have been rising rapidly over the course of the past few years," Bigelow is quoted as saying. "These price hikes have been most acute in Russia due to a number of factors including inflation, previous artificially low launch costs and the falling value of the U.S. dollar.""

Submission + - Fourth-generation pig cloned in Japan (yahoo.com)

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Raver32

on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @11:21AM

Raver32 writes: "A Japanese geneticist said Wednesday his research team created the world's first fourth-generation cloned pig, an achievement that could help scientists in medical and other research. The male pig was born at Tokyo's Meiji University in July, said Hiroshi Nagashima, the geneticist at the university who led the project. Earlier attempts to clone animals for several generations were problematic. Scientists had thought that was because the genetic material in the nucleus of the donor cell degraded with each successive generation, Nagashima said. But the team's findings show that a large mammal can be cloned for multiple generations — in this case, the clone of a clone of a clone of a clone — without degradation, he said, while acknowledging that mice have already been successively cloned for multiple generations"

Submission + - Star Trek:TOS special effects to be remastered (sciam.com)

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Raver32

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @11:23AM

Raver32 writes: "As I settled in, half attentive, I started noticing something was odd. First off, the crew's uniforms were brighter than I remembered. And wait, why was the image on the bridge view screen so crisp? Even odder, when the ship entered orbit around a planet, it's features, as well as those of the Enterprise, seemed much more detailed. Not only that, the planet was much larger in respect to my favorite starship; the scale seemed much more realistic. Later, in a shuttle bay scene, I could swear I saw figures in the windows of the observation decks looking down on a landing shuttlecraft. Wait a minute, what shuttle bay observation decks? By now I was wide awake. Something had changed. Had I, in my grogginess, somehow slipped into an alternate universe? That would be bad, because it would mean my evil version would be terrorizing loved ones back on my Earth, maybe getting into a low-speed chase with the police, or even more terrifying — writing SciAm blogs celebrating the Creationist Museum. Thankfully, I was in the right universe but just witnessing the new digitally remastered version of the original series. This is an as yet unfinished project being produced by CBS Digital that plans to revamp all 79 original episodes."

Submission + - Does Caffeine Perk Up Memory? (sciam.com)

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Raver32

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @11:15AM

Raver32 writes: "Trying to cut down on your coffee consumption, ladies? Well if you're of a certain age, you might want to reconsider. A new study from France found that women — especially those 65 and over — who reported drinking three-plus cups of java daily did better on memory tests than compeers who drank one or fewer cups a day. "Caffeine is a psychostimulant which appears to reduce cognitive decline in women," study author Karen Ritchie of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, France, said in a statement."

Submission + - Astronomers Witness Whopper Galaxy Collision (space.com)

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Raver32

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @07:50AM

Raver32 writes: "A major cosmic pileup involving four large galaxies could give rise to one of the largest galaxies the universe has ever known, scientists say. Each of the four galaxies is at least the size of the Milky Way, and each is home to billions of stars. The galaxies will eventually merge into a single, colossal galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. "When this merger is complete, this will be one of the biggest galaxies in the universe," said study team member Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, gives scientists their first real glimpse into a galaxy merger involving multiple big galaxies. "Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing together," Rines said. "What we have here is like four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.""

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

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Raver32

on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:12PM

Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."

Submission + - Nursing Home Cat Can Sense Death (yahoo.com) 1

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Raver32

on Thursday July 26, 2007 @08:06AM

Raver32 writes: "When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jump into action — Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die. In his two years living in Steere's end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence. He wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine. "It's not that the cat is consistently there first," Dr. Joan Teno, a professor of community health at Brown University, who sees patients in the unit. "But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours.""

Submission + - Democrats prepare for YouTube debate (thestar.com)

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Raver32

on Monday July 23, 2007 @02:49PM

Raver32 writes: "Campaigning by Democratic candidates was limited to brief photo opportunities Monday as their focus shifted to preparing for the first presidential debate in which the questions are posed by members of public via Internet videos. The two-hour debate, which begins at 7 p.m. EDT, is sponsored by YouTube, Google and CNN and is the first presidential debate of the 2008 race sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. CNN editors will select questions from personal videos delivered to YouTube, where some of the submitted videos were already posted."

Submission + - University probes online security threats (theglobeandmail.com)

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Raver32

on Monday July 23, 2007 @02:28PM

Raver32 writes: "The e-mail appeared to be a routine correspondence between two friends. "Check this out!" it read, then listed a Web address. But the note was fake, part of an online ruse called phishing that has become a scammer's favourite way to get sensitive information from unsuspecting computer users. The catch? The scammers were Indiana University researchers, the e-mail an experiment. "I didn't know I was being used," said Kevin McGrath, 25, a doctoral student at Indiana University whose e-mail address was one of hundreds used as "passive participants" for an experiment to study who gets duped by phishing."

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