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Comment Did you know? (Score 0) 210

Sure of suicide? : Professor Jack Copeland (philosophy) has questioned various aspects of the coroner's historical verdict, suggesting the alternative explanation of the accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes from an apparatus for gold electroplating spoons, using potassium cyanide to dissolve the gold, which Turing had set up in his tiny spare room. Copeland notes that the autopsy findings were more consistent with inhalation than with ingestion of the poison. Turing also habitually ate an apple before bed, and it was not unusual for it to be discarded half-eaten.[103] In addition, Turing had reportedly borne his legal setbacks and hormone treatment (which had been discontinued a year previously) "with good humour" and had shown no sign of despondency prior to his death, in fact, setting down a list of tasks he intended to complete upon return to his office after the holiday weekend.[103] At the time, Turing's mother believed that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son's careless storage of laboratory chemicals From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
Science

Submission + - Car Makers Explore EEG Headrests (technologyreview.com) 1

mrtr writes: A number of car makers are looking at whether EEG devices built into headrests could prevent accidents by sensing when a driver is in danger of drifting off. The technology comes from Neurosky, which already makes commercial EEG units for use in gaming and market research. Other approaches, such as using cameras to spot drooping eyelids have proven too unreliable so far. From the story: "Fatigue causes more than 100,000 crashes and 40,000 injuries, and around 1,550 deaths, per year in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Some studies suggest drowsiness is involved in 20 to 25 percent of all crashes on monotonous stretches of road."
Programming

Submission + - C++ And The Return Of Native Code (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the new version of C++ signals renewed interest in old-fashioned native binaries. 'Modern programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-code environments such as Java and .Net, which shield them from some of the drudgery of memory management and input validation. Others are willing to sacrifice some performance for the syntactic comforts of dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. But C++11 arrives at an interesting time. There's a growing sentiment that the pendulum may have swung too far away from native code, and it might be time for it to swing back in the other direction. Thus, C++ may have found itself some unlikely allies.'"
Linux

Submission + - Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC (networkworld.com)

jbrodkin writes: "Linux and ARM developers have clashed over what's been described as a "United Nations-level complexity of the forks in the ARM section of the Linux kernel." Linus Torvalds addressed the issue at LinuxCon this week on the 20th anniversary of Linux, saying the ARM platform has a lot to learn from the PC. While Torvalds noted that "a lot of people love to hate the PC," the fact that Intel, AMD and hardware makers worked on building a common infrastructure "made it very efficient and easy to support." ARM, on the other hand, "is missing it completely," Torvalds said. "ARM is this hodgepodge of five or six major companies and tens of minor companies making random pieces of hardware, and it looks like they're taking hardware and throwing it at a wall and seeing where it sticks, and making a chip out of what's stuck on the wall.""
Hardware

Submission + - Organic semiconductor 30x faster than silicon (stanford.edu)

An anonymous reader writes: Creating a flexible display requires finding an organic material that's both durable and capable of carrying an electric signal fast enough. To create such a material requires choosing the right compound and combining it with an organic base material. It's a hit and miss affair that can take years of synthesis to get right, but even then the final material may not be good enough.

Standford and Harvard researchers have come up with a much faster solution: use computer prediction to decide on the best compound before synthesizing begins. They also proved it works by developing a new organic semiconductor material 30x faster than the amorphous silicon used in LCDs.

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