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Space

Submission + - NASA Snaps New Photo of Incoming Asteroid (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Wider than an aircraft carrier and darker than coal, asteroid 2005 YU55 is soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth and moon on its latest path through the inner solar system. This new radar image was acquired Nov. 7 by the 70-meter radio telescope at NASA's Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., and shows the approaching space rock in unprecedented detail."
Security

Submission + - Brazilian ISPs Hit with Massive DNS Attack (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Millions of people in Brazil have potentially been exposed to malware, as a result of a nationwide DNS attack. Additionally, several organizations in Brazil are reporting that network devices are also under attack. After being compromised remotely, scores of routers and modems had their DNS settings altered to redirect traffic.

Across the country, organizations are reporting that network devices were compromised and had their DNS settings changed to join the existing DNS attack. In those cases, when employees of the affected companies tried to open any website they were requested to execute a malicious Java applet, which would install malware presented as "Google Defence" software that tells the user is required to use the search engine, but instead is a trojan.

"These are typically not "classic" cache-poisoning attacks done with botnets in a Kaminsky-style attack," said one security expert.

While the DNS attacks rampaged, Brazil’s Federal Police arrested a 27-year-old who was an employee of a medium-sized ISP in the southern part of the country.

Submission + - SPAM: Survey Finds Cheating Among Students at All GPA Le

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

The researchers expected to find more cheating among the top-performing group — and at the minimum at least some students with excellent grades cheated.

Not so. As it turned out, the overall cheating rate was similar to that found in other studies, but the types of cheating and stated reasons for cheating were all over the map. Researchers uncovered one trend among the cheaters: the perception that teaching assistants either ignored or didn't care about cheating.
Link to Original Source
The Military

Submission + - The F-35 story (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by
phyzz
phyzz writes: "After 10 years in development and numerous cost and schedule overruns, the JSF program aimed at replacing several aircrafts from three major military services and partner nations with a fifth generation aircraft capable of STOVL as sustained supersonic flight in an affordable package finally gets some test points validated, yet faces an uphill fight against budget reductions. Bloomberg has this interesting story about the program's troubled past."
DRM

Submission + - Bell Labs Experimental System Enables 3D Rendering (phoronix.com)

Submitted by
billakay
billakay writes: "A recently open-sourced experimental Linux infrastructure created by Bell Labs researchers allows 3D rendering to be performed on a GPU and displayed on other devices, including DisplayLink dongles. The system accomplishes this by essentially creating "Virtual CRTCs", or virtual display output controllers, and allowing arbitrary devices to appear as extra ports on a graphics card.

The code and instructions to get the system running can be found here at GitHub."

Comment The kids these days! (Score 2) 532

by Jedimstr397 (#34552394) Attached to: Why Special Effects No Longer Impress
Moreover, the youth of this generation is completely desensitized to it, likened to a forensic investigator at a gory crime scene. Star Wars is saved due to it's 'cool' factor, but Toy Story 1 is shrugged off. Story and originality are very important, and it's great to see films that aren't remakes or sequels. But I will be at the Tron premiere tomorrow night, and that's because I connected with the original. The fact that it's in 3D is meaningless. The film makers of today are being forced to lure audiences in. It's a bit sad because who knows what's next? Holographic projection? It all boils down to the elusive "block-buster", and content is the unfortunate victim.
Communications

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tremble-in-something-something dept.
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
Graphics

Adobe Releases New 64-Bit Flash Plugin For Linux 240

Posted by samzenpus from the flash-in-the-pan dept.
TheDarkener writes "Adobe seems to have made an about face regarding their support for native 64-bit Linux support for Flash today, and released a new preview Flash plugin named 'Square.' This includes a native 64-bit version for Linux, which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins — with sound (which I was never able to figure out with running the 32-bit version with nspluginwrapper and pulseaudio)."
Medicine

Radiation Therapy Mistakes Cost Lives 215

Posted by kdawson from the feel-the-burn dept.
jmtpi recommends a long NY Times investigative report about how powerful medical linear accelerators have contributed to at least two deaths in the New York area. Although the mistakes were largely due to human error, buggy software also played a role. "...the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008... most were minor... The Times found that on 133 occasions, devices used to shape or modulate radiation beams... were left out, wrongly positioned, or otherwise misused. On 284 occasions, radiation missed all or part of its intended target or treated the wrong body part entirely. ... Another patient with stomach cancer was treated for prostate cancer. Fifty patients received radiation intended for someone else, including one brain cancer patient who received radiation intended for breast cancer."
Biotech

How Norway Fought Staph Infections 595

Posted by timothy from the they-fired-adrian-monk dept.
eldavojohn writes "Studies are showing that Norway's dirtiest hospitals are actually cleaner than most other countries', and the reason for this is that Norwegians stopped taking antibiotics. A number of factors like paid sick leave and now restrictions on advertising for drugs make Norway an anomaly when it comes to diseases like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). A Norwegian doctor explains, 'We don't throw antibiotics at every person with a fever. We tell them to hang on, wait and see, and we give them a Tylenol to feel better.' Norway is the most MRSA free country in the world. In a country like Japan, where 17,000 die from MRSA every year, 'doctors overprescribe antibiotics because they are given financial incentives to push drugs on patients.'"
Education

Submission + - Early Childhood Education Defying Moore's Law?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Four decades ago, the NSF-sponsored PLATO Elementary Reading Curriculum Project (pdf) provided Illinois schoolchildren with reading lessons and e-versions of beloved children's books that exploited networked, touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens, color images, and audio. Last week, the Today Show promoted the TeacherMate — a $100 gadget that's teaching Illinois schoolchildren to read and do math using its 2.5" screen and old-school U-D-L-R cursor keys — as a revolution in education. Has early childhood education managed to defy Moore's Law?

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