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Biotech

MIT Shows How to Shut Down Brain With Light 223

An anonymous reader writes "The MIT home-page story today is about a way to use light to shut down brain activity. "Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease."
Security

Submission + - Secure Programming Exams launched

An anonymous reader writes: The SANS Institute, in conjunction with organizations such as Siemens, Symantec, Juniper, OWASP, and Virginia Tech, has announced a program for testing whether programmers know how to write secure code. The Secure Programming Skills Assessment is split into separate language families (C/C++, Java/J2EE, Perl/PHP, and ASP/.NET). Director of research Alan Paller says "This assessment and certification program will help programmers learn what they don't know, and help organizations identify programmers who have solid security skills." The pilot exam will be held in Washington DC in August, followed by a "global rollout."

http://www.sans-ssi.org/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/03 /post_4.html
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Torvals "pretty pleased" With Latest GPL v

Novus Ordo Seclorum writes: "According to c|net, Linus Torvalds is "pretty pleased" with the current GPL v3 draft. After his earlier criticism, some had questioned whether such controversies would lead to rifts in the community, especially if the kernel ended up under a different license than the GNU tools. But now, thanks to the latest revisions, Linus will entertain moving the kernel over to the GPL v3."
Games

Mario and Sonic Make History in New Olympic Game 93

YokimaSun writes "SEGA. and Nintendo today made a historical announcement that two of the biggest icons in the entertainment industry, Mario and Sonic, are joining forces to star in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. 'In Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, players will compete in events that take place in environments based on the official venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Using a supporting cast of characters from the amazing worlds of both Mario and Sonic, gamers will be able to compete as or against a range of lovable personalities including Mario, Sonic, Luigi, Knuckles, Yoshi, Tails and more. Innovative usage of the Wii and DS control systems to maneuver a favourite character will allow players to race the likes of Mario and Sonic down the 100m track, engage in exhilarating rallies in table tennis and churn water in a swimming heat, all while competing for the much sought after gold medal.'" Has to be better than the usual Olympic Game titles, which have been categorically awful.

Comment Re:Punk (Score 5, Insightful) 585

Meh.

Linking music tastes and intelligence is really, really, wrong. What kind of music you like depends on so many factors, mostly environmental but... anyway.

Let's take a look at the article:

Mr Cadwallader then held an online discussion involving 19 members of the academy, 17 of whom were heavy metal fans.
Translation: Some psychologist asked some kids what kind of music they liked and they answered heavy metal. Oh and they also weren't complete idiots.
Since the sample was so big (almost 20 people!), obviously all "gifted" (definition?) children must listen to heavy metal. But since most of heavy metal is crap, he couldn't help but wonder why did these kids listen to this kind of crap.

One student said: "It helps me with stress. It's the general thrashiness of it. You can't really jump your anger into the floor and listen to your music at the same time with other types of music."
Ah! That makes sense, because smart people worry about society and stuff. The psychologist thought that his findings were so great he had to share them with the rest of the world, but he needed some statistics, so on his way home he asked some more kids about what kind of music they liked so he can make useless statistics that help make a research look all that much more professional:

The researchers surveyed 1,057 members of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth - a body whose 120,000 student members are within the top five per cent academically in the 11-19 age range. Asked for their favourite type of music, 39 per cent said rock, 18 per cent R&B and 14 per cent pop. Six per cent said heavy metal and a third rated it in their top five genres.
Okay so he found that from a group of supposedly smart kids (although I'm not sure that academia equals intelligence), SIX percent really likes bands like tool, slipknot and system of a down (which are very popular bands anyway) and about one third said "tool? they're cool, I used to listen to aenima a lot". Did that miniscule percentage surprise him that much that he had to go and tell the world?

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Would you people stop playing these stupid games?!?!?!!!!

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