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NASA

Submission + - The future of NASA (reuters.com)

Submitted by Amiralul
Amiralul writes: In the current climate, as the new US budget plan forces the Constellation project to shut down and handle the LEO space business to private sector, what is the purpose of NASA in the foreseeable future? For the first time, NASA doesn't have even a planned vehicle to allow astronauts to reach Earth's orbit (since space shuttles are scheduled for retirement this year), nor does it have any future manned exploration plans for Moon, Mars and beyond. As manned spaceflight will probably fade-out soon, as private corporates lacks the resources and reasons to fund a mission to the Moon or Mars, what is the purpose of NASA, as a standalone agency? US Army could take over existing satellites maintenance and future launches, since Obama administration doesn't think beyond LEO. No launch vehicle for human missions, no new rockets planned, no roadmap for returning crews on the Moon, no planned Mars expedition for the foreseeable future, so why what's the purpose of NASA these days?
Biotech

Submission + - Scientists Discover How Rotifers Survive Asexually 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Asexual organisms are extremely rare but bdelloid rotifers reproduce asexually and seem to have speciated as extensively as sexually reproducing organisms. Now, NPR reports that researchers say they can explain how the tiny freshwater invertebrates have been able to reproduce without sex for over 100 million years. Bdelloids dwell in the most ephemeral of freshwater habitats. Not just in small puddles, but in the transient layer of moisture sometimes found on moss or lichens—even on mushrooms where dessication is a routine occurrence providing the key to how bdelloids evade the constraints of the Red Queen Hypothesis — the theory that asexual lineages are quickly ended by coevolving parasites and pathogens. The researchers raised populations of the rotifers in a lab, and observed that the asexual invertebrates could rid themselves of a deadly fungal parasite by drying themselves up completely and blowing away with the wind to new territory. By doing so, the rotifers became so desiccated that their parasites could not survive the punishing conditions. The bdelloids were then able to ride the breeze and start afresh in new, presumably parasite-free pastures proving that there can be advantages to reproducing without sex: "You don't have to find a mate," says Johns Logsdon, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Iowa. "If you find a mate you don't have to worry about things like venereal disease, you don't have to worry about getting attacked in the process of a sex act.""
Space

Submission + - Astronomers Discover the Coolest Sub-Stellar Body

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Science Daily Headlines reports that using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system. Too small to be stars and with insufficient mass to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, "brown dwarfs" have masses smaller than stars but larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter with an upper limit is between 75 and 80 Jupiter masses. "This looks like being the fourth time in three years that the UKIRT has made a record breaking discovery of the coolest known brown dwarf, with an estimated temperature not far above 200 degrees Celsius," says Dr. Philip Lucas at the University of Hertfordshire. Due to their low temperature these objects are very faint in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths. The object known as SDSS1416+13B is in a wide orbit around a somewhat brighter and warmer brown dwarf, SDSS1416+13A and the pair is located between 15 and 50 light years from the solar system, which is quite close in astronomical terms. "The fact that it is a binary companion to a warmer brown dwarf that also has an unusual spectrum is helping us to fill in some gaps in our understanding," says Dr. Ben Burningham. "It seems likely that both brown dwarfs are somewhat poor in heavy elements. This can be explained if they are very old, which also fits with the very low temperature of the faint companion.""
Science

Submission + - Evolving robots learn to prey on each other (plosbiology.org)

Submitted by quaith
quaith writes: Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead
be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive.

Submission + - Firefox in Parallel - A Pre-Release Version (myoutsourcedbrain.com)

Submitted by clickbanklib
clickbanklib writes: While Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 support multi-threading (running on different processors), Firefox still lacks it in the official version. Support for multiple processors in Firefox is in the works and the author tested a pre-release version of Firefox that loads different tabs in parallel. In this post he show some of the results. Among his conclusions is that the javascript engine is much faster than in previous version.
Power

Submission + - Top 10 Free Energy Stories of 2009 and Beyond (examiner.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sterling Allan gives a review of the fringe free energy news world — far outside the box of conventional renewables like solar, wind, geothermal, tide, wave. Did you know that TUV Rhineland certified a working all-magnet motor this last year — a motor that turned out to be a hoax, costing investors nearly 1 million U.S.? Another inventor found a Verichip implanted in his shoulder, probably by a guy who commercialized a non-working version of his mileage booster hydroxy technology. But not all news was scandalous, though all of it is controversial by its very nature of being far outside the box.

Comment Great contributor or "climate doctor" (Score 0) 14

by rackeer (#30500160) Attached to: Climategate spreads to Wikipedia

According to this article, this is not the first time, William Connolley is in the news. If anyone wants to check out his contributions at wikipedia, they are here.

Who is the author of TFA? Lawrence Solomon is author of the book The Deniers. Summary at amazon:

Global warming is a question for citizens, not just scientists. We must decide how serious the threat is and what to do about it. But how can we settle the fiercely complicated scientific issues involved? Al Gore?s answer is to rely on the argument from authority. Accept the word of the great scientists who really know, who say that global warming is real, caused primarily by humans and will lead to catastrophe if unchecked. The science is settled, and those who dissent are either crackpots or crooks. Eminent environmentalist Lawrence Solomon was not satisfied with Gore's answer. He decided to find out whether any real scientists dissent from the Gore/U.N. line. What he found shocked him. Not only were there serious scientists who dissented on every headline global warming issue, but the dissenters were by far the more accomplished and eminent scientists.

Other articles by Lawrence Solomon about wikipedia and climate change: Wikipedia's Zealots and Wikipropaganda.
Software

Submission + - WordPress 2.9 Released (wordpress.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Version 2.9 of the WordPress blogging system is out with these new features: recycle bin for deleted posts, builtin image editor, batch plugin updates, easier video embedding, canonical page URLs, automatic database optimization, post thumbnails, an update to the TinyMCE HTML editor,

Submission + - Climategate spreads to Wikipedia (nationalpost.com) 14

Submitted by sparkydevil
sparkydevil writes: Some catnip to those who have long argued about administrator bias and groupthink in Wikipedia.

Canada's National Post reports here and here that one of the objectives of those promoting Climate alarm was to control Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003 U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley, one of nine Realclimate.org team members, rewrote Wikipedia'½Â½Â(TM)s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling as well as working to erase the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period and infamous hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the team.

According to the article Connolly created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles, removed more than 500 articles as an administrator and barred over 2000 Wikipedia contributors while rewarding those who supported his views. "In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement."
Idle

Submission + - PhD Speaks out on Physics of Space Battles (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by darthvader100
darthvader100 writes: Gizmodo has run an article with some predictions on what future space battles will be like.
The author brings up several theories on propulsion(and orbits), weapons(explosives, kinetic and laser), and design.
Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the recent Hitchhiker's Guide move.

Submission + - Good semester-long advanced C++ project?

Submitted by Hallmarc
Hallmarc writes: In Spring 2010, I am set to teach a class on object-oriented design. The course aims to cover the juicy bits of the latter half of many good books on C++, such as polymorphism, multiple inheritance, virtual functions, the STL, etc. I also want to leave the students with a reasonable understanding of when and where to use the most common design patterns. I don't have a whole lot of time in which to develop the course. Would anyone have a good suggestion for a semester-long project that could be developed piecemeal to highlight the practical application of many of the previously mentioned aspects? I have briefly scanned the web as well as several intermediate/advanced books on C++ and/or design patterns, but I have not found a project that is properly scoped. Might I be asking for too much? If so, would people go for a book that tried to achieve this?

Comment Re:Just for fun (Score 1) 242

by rackeer (#30456802) Attached to: Judge Orders Permanent Injunction Against Psystar

Is Windows sold or licensed?

From November's ruling:

[MacOS...] are covered by software license
2 agreements that provided that the software is “licensed, not sold to [the user] by Apple Inc.
3 (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License” (Chung Exh. 26 at 1). Apple’s license
4 agreements restricted the use of Mac OS X to Apple computers, and specifically prohibited
5 customers from installing the operating system on non-Apple computers.

Submission + - Poll Submission: Have you read the GNU GPL? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Poll Submission: Have you read the GNU GPL?
possible responses:

I read a few paragraphs and got bored
I read it once
I read it a few times
I know what changed between v2.0 and v2.1
I apply its teachings to my daily life
I never read it, but always pretend I did
What's a "guh-noo gupple"?

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