Comment Flight to Heaven (or Hell) (Score 1) 453
Just consider it as a flight to heaven (or hell).
Submission + - South Korea surrenders to creationist demands (nature.com)
Med-trump writes: A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory in South Korea last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx.
Submission + - A LAMP Stack for Robotics (xconomy.com)
waderoush writes: "If you visit Menlo Park, CA-based Willow Garage, you'll meet a $400,000 humanoid robot called PR2 that has stereo vision, a pair of dextrous arms, and enough smarts to roam the building indepedently and even plug itself into the wall when it needs to recharge. But in a sense, PR2 is just a demo. The real action at Willow Garage is around ROS, the Robot Operating System, a free meta-operating system that's already being used by hundreds of roboticists around the world and may soon be handed over to an independent foundation analogous to the Apache Software Foundation. Brian Gerkey, Willow Garage's head of open source development, says 'What we need is a LAMP stack for robotics,' and hopes that ROS will jumpstart innovation in robotics in the same way Linux and other free software components provided the foundation for the Internet boom. Today’s roboticists 'have to come at the problem with a very deep expertise in all aspects of robotics, from state estimation to planning to perception, which automatically limits the number of people capable of building new things,' Gerkey says. 'But by providing a basic toolset analogous to the LAMP stack, we can get to a point where all you need to know is how to write code and what you want your robot to do.'"
Submission + - Genome of Controversial Arsenic Bacterium Sequence (sciencemag.org)
Med-trump writes: One year ago a media controversy was ignited when Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues held a press conference to announce the discovery of a bacterium that not only survived high levels of arsenic in its environment but also seemed to use that element in its DNA. Last week, the genome of the bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for "Give Felisa a Job." (No joke!), was posted in Genbank, the public repository of DNA sequences for all who care to take a look. But it doesn't settle the debate over whether arsenic is used in DNA.
Comment Tissue barrier (Score 1) 307
Without accounting for the tissue barrier, the study may not reflect real life situation.
Submission + - Failing carbon-cutting program (nature.com)
Med-trump writes: Alberta's Can$60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: "the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question."
Comment Attach a three atom knife to it (Score 1) 51
Attach a three atom knife to it with a suture gadget and send right into the heart for a by-pass
Submission + - Molecular Pentafoil knot
Med-trump writes: Scientists now report that they have made a non-DNA molecular knot.
They created a 160-atom-loop with five crossing points, a molecular pentafoil knot. The researchers used a technique known as "self-assembly" to prepare the knot in a chemical reaction. Apparently 85% of the elasticity of natural rubber is due to knot-like entanglements in the rubber molecules chains.
They created a 160-atom-loop with five crossing points, a molecular pentafoil knot. The researchers used a technique known as "self-assembly" to prepare the knot in a chemical reaction. Apparently 85% of the elasticity of natural rubber is due to knot-like entanglements in the rubber molecules chains.
Comment Partial study results (Score 2) 147
There are couple of issues with the paper. 1. effect on young patients have not been analyzed. 2. The participants received exceptional medical care and therefore there was no difference between control and experimental group in terms of mortality. 3. Protection is partial unlike other vaccines. 4. It is not clear why did they publish the partial results. The associated editorial in the issue by Nicholas J. White is thought-provoking.
Submission + - Stem cells from cloned human embryo (nature.com)
Med-trump writes: Scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory have reprogrammed an adult human egg cell to an embryonic state using cloning technology and created a self-reproducing line of embryonic stem cells from the developing embryo.
Comment Reposting every few months (Score 1) 158
This story is running over and over for quite some time. Each instance it is publicized as a new story. I have seen in in the past year at least two other times.
Submission + - Tevatron has come to the end of its run (arstechnica.com)
Med-trump writes: The US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time.
Journal Journal: Don't you just *hate* it when ... 3
Submission + - Google Drops Cloud Lawsuit Against US Gov't (itworld.com)
jfruhlinger writes: "A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government's request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing."
Submission + - "Scrolls" lawsuit going ahead (1up.com)
person46 writes: Bethesda's lawsuit against Mojang, developers of Minecraft, is going to court. Bethesda is claiming copyright infringement over the title of Mojang's upcoming CCG/board game Scrolls. Bethesda claims that the name and game concept are too similar to their well-known RPG franchise The Elder Scrolls. Mojang founder Notch had offered to settle the dispute with a friendly game of Quake 3, but perhaps Bethesda also took issue with Quake's use of the number three.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. - Andy Finkel, computer guy
