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Comment un-mine it! (Score 3, Interesting) 394

by LSDelirious (#40636299) Attached to: A Million-Year Hard Disk
uranium comes from ore dug out of the ground, at something like 0.1%-1.0% uranium oxide concentrations, so why not just take the radioactive waste and mix it with filler to dilute it down to ore concentrations (suspended in concrete, glass, whatever, something cheap and relatively durable) and drill some really deep holes, deep enough it won't affect any ground water tables, and away from oil fields - ideally near a subduction zone trench where over time the waste would get carried down further into the crust as the waste impregnated plate dives downward. Far out of reach from civilization and in concentrations no more dangerous than already exist in nature. Surely that has to be more cost effective in the long run than maintaining highly guarded secret storage bunkers indefinitely....
Idle

Submission + - Israeli company grows medical marijuana which doesn't get you high (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Situated in an undisclosed location near Tzfat, northern Israel, is a government-approved medical marijuana plantation which was founded in 2004 by a retired biology teacher. Named Tikun Olam, the plantation has created a new cannabis strain which contains very low traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main constituent in cannabis responsible for making people feel "stoned". By virtually eliminating THC in the new strain, Tikun Olam can now offer the drug's medicinal benefits to those patients who wish to keep a clear head.
Australia

Submission + - Fake On-Line Job Ad Riles Aussie CEO (theage.com.au)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: A fake advertisement for the chief executive's position with a Melbourne, Australia-based charity was posted on seek.com.au over the weekend, saying the well-known organisation was in "desperate need" of a new CEO. It went on to list the attributes not wanted in a new CEO, implying that the current CEO was, among other things, sulky, self-centred, dishonourable and disrespectful of staff.

Revenge is a dish best served on-line?
Programming

Submission + - Objective-C Overtakes C++ but C is Number One! (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Although the TIOBE Index has its shortcomings, the finding that Objective-C has overtaken C++ is reiterated in the open source Transparent Language Popularity Index. The reason is, of course, that Objective-C is the language you have to use to create iOS applications and as iPads and iPhones have risen in popularity so has Objective-C.
If you look at the raw charts then you can see that C++ has been in decline since about 2005 and Objective-C has shot up to overtake it with amazing growth. But the two charts are on different scales — if you plot both on the same chart you can see that rather than rocketing up Objective-C has just crawled its way passed and it is as much to do with the decline of C++. It simply hasn't reached the popularity of C++ in its heydays before 2005.
However the real story is that C, a raw machine independent assembler like language, with no pretense to be object oriented or sophisticated has beaten all three of the object oriented heavy weights — Java, C++ and Objective C.
Yes C is number one (and a close second in the transparent index).
Now this is something to think about...
Science

Submission + - South Korea to revisit decision on banning evolution from textbooks (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by openfrog
openfrog writes: The South Korean government is poised to appoint a new committee that will revisit a controversial plan to drop two examples of evolutionary theory from high school textbooks. The committee, to be led by insect taxonomist Byoung-Hoon Lee, a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, has been asked to re-evaluate requests from a Korean creationist group to drop references to bird and horse evolution that they argue promote "atheist materialism."

At the same time, about 50 prominent Korean scientists are preparing to present government officials with a petition, organized by the Korean Association of Biological Sciences, which calls for rejecting the proposed changes.

"When these things are done, I think it will turn out that after all Korean science will not surrender to religion" says Jae Choe, an evolutionary biologist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul who helped organize the petition.
Technology

Submission + - It's Full of Eyes: Drones at Home Coming Soon (patexia.com)

Submitted by
ericjones12398
ericjones12398 writes: "When the boys came home from World War II, the US changed forever. An economic boom, a baby boom, new technology, new ideas, new ways of looking at the world and our place in it. Something similar is about to happen, once the boys come back from Afghanistan... "boys" meaning Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), known by most of us as drones.
Drones aren't likely to inspire the next baby boom, but they're a perfect example of a classic route of technological innovation — namely, from the research labs and hobbyists to the military and thence to commercial and mainstream usage (a development path similar to some other quirky experiments over the years, such as the Internet). Already, the drone market is worth nearly $6 billion, and expected to double over the next ten years."
Science

Submission + - Cat parasite may increase risk of suicide in humans 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of Maryland analyzing meticulous data collected by Danish authorities have identified a positive correlation between suicides among women with infection with the fairly common parasite T. gondii. Carriers were 53 percent more likely to commit suicide in a sample of 45,000 Danish women monitored for over a decade (researchers believe that the same correlation likely exists for men). Increased susceptibility to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder was also discovered. The physiological mechanism has not been determined, although some speculation centers around changes to dopamine levels. Two intriguing aspects were noted: 1) human infection often (but not always) begins by exposure to cats carrying the parasite, for example, by changing an infected animal's litter; and 2) the parasite spreads itself by infecting the nervous system of rodents, causing them to become suicidally attracted to feline odors which will increase the likelihood of their hosts being eaten by cats, whose digestive tracts provide the preferred environment for parasite reproduction.
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - When you can't get the source code...

Submitted by
MarcQuadra
MarcQuadra writes: "A recent Ask Slashdot wondered how to get vendors to release the source for old-but-important applications, like our favorite games from the 1990s and earlier. Seeing as how many of the vendors show absolutely no inclination to open-source such goodies as SimCity 2000, A-10 Attack, or the original StarCraft, many of us are left to either keeping ancient hardware (which won't last forever) or running emulators, many of which are unpolished or starting to not compile on modern systems. As an avid retro-gamer who can't code, what can people like me do to attract developers to important emulation projects like BasiliskII or SheepShaver that let us run old operating systems and programs on today's desktops?"

Submission + - Why Your Brain is Extremely Good at Detecting Fake Laughs (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Those who think they've perfected the art of fake laughter are in for a surprise: You're not fooling anyone.

In a new study, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists found that even our most realistic efforts to feign amusement fool no one.

Researchers found that people are actually "extremely good" at detecting even the most realistic sounding of phony giggles.

Submission + - Tevatron scientists announce their final results on the Higgs particle (phys.org)

Submitted by techtech
techtech writes: After more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Tevatron collider, scientists from the CDF and DZero experiments have found their strongest indication to date for the long-sought Higgs particle. The Tevatron results indicate that the Higgs particle, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c2, or about 130 times the mass of the proton.
Wine

Submission + - Wine Users banned from Diablo 3 (battle.net) 2

Submitted by caranha
caranha writes: Wine users have reported being banned from the Diablo 3 game, by being flagged as "using cheating programs". Replies from blizzard support so far have upheld these bans.

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