Riddleshome - Slashdot User

Submission + - First Extra-Galactic Planet Detected? (universetoday.com)

Submitted by

Nancy Atkinson

on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @08:55AM

Nancy Atkinson writes: "Using a technique called Pixel-lensing, a group of astronomers in Italy may have detected a planet orbiting another star. But this planet is unique among the 300-plus exoplanets discovered so far, as it and its parent star are in another galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy, to be exact. Technically, the star in M31 was found to have a companion about 6 times the mass of Jupiter, so it could be either a brown dwarf or a planet. But either way, this is a remarkable feat, to find an object of that size in another galaxy."

Submission + - One-fifth of us have lost sight of Milky Way (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @04:22AM

An anonymous reader writes: Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population — mostly in Europe, Britain and the U.S. — to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky. "The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way."

Managing Player-Created Content In City of Heroes 43

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 17, 2009 @06:21AM from the what's-your-favorite-naughty-word dept.

Superhero MMO City of Heroes recently went live with its 14th expansion (release notes), one of the main features of which is the Mission Architect, a system to allow players to create their own quest content and then submit it to be implemented into the game. Now, Joe Morrissey of the City of Heroes team has written an article about how they plan to manage the content that players create. "You have to decide how draconian you want to be. The more hardcore you are, the fewer people who will see inappropriate content, but you expose yourself to potential grief voting. Grief voting is when a player flags perfectly acceptable content as inappropriate just because it's fun. If it only takes a single vote to eliminate content from the game, clicking that button is going to be the game for a lot of players. You don't want perfectly good content getting pulled because someone's a jerk."

Submission + - Visualizing data inside the 30-ft Allosphere (ted.com)

Submitted by

TEDChris

on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @12:08PM

TEDChris writes: "The Allosphere, being created at USC Santa Barbara, is the most ambitious attempt yet at creating powerful 3d visualizations of raw scientific data, such as the structure of a crystal, or how quantum effects take place. Researchers watch from a bridge inside the 30 ft sphere, looking at data projected 360-degrees around them and listening to 3D sound. The first major public demo of the facility has just been posted at TED.com. Optimists wd argue that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs happened through a new visual way of imagining data. Penicillin and relativity come to mind. So this is either a killer new research vehicle, an incredible toy, or just an insanely expensive art project."

Submission + - Bionic Eye Telescope to Treat Macular Degeneration (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

Al

on Thursday April 02, 2009 @10:32AM

Al writes: "A miniature telescope that fits inside the eye of someone with macular degeneration and helps them regain normal vision has been developed by a start-up company called VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies. Macular degeneration affects the center of the retina, making it difficult to read, watch television and recognize faces. The new device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, works like a fixed telephoto lens within the eye, projecting a magnified image of whatever the wearer is looking at onto a large part of the peripheral retina. Magnifying the image on the eye allows the retinal cells outside the macula enables a patient to recognize details using their peripheral vision. Clinical trials suggest that the device could improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant."

Submission + - Google Reveals Once-Secret Server Design

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday April 02, 2009 @09:53AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems but Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. For the first time Google revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference this week about data center efficiency. Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. "This is much cheaper than huge centralized UPS," says Google server designer Ben Jai. "Therefore no wasted capacity." Efficiency is a major financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: "We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency." Google has patents on the built-in battery design, "but I think we'd be willing to license them to vendors," says Urs Hoelzle, Google's vice president of operations. Google has an obsessive focus on energy efficiency. "Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query," says Hoelzle. "We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.""

Submission + - What would it look like to fall into a black hole? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by

CNETNate

on Thursday April 02, 2009 @07:13AM

CNETNate writes: "A new video simulation developed by Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on New Scientist today, shows what you might see on your way towards a black hole's crushing central singularity. Hamilton and Polhemus built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the video produced allows the viewer to follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole."

Comment Where was this when I was networking the house?! (Score 4, Interesting) 430

by Riddleshome on Tuesday August 23, 2005 @06:49AM (#13378022) Attached to: Vietnam Medic Makes Homemade Endoscope

This would have be REALLY useful when I networked the house - there were a couple of snags that if I could have seen round the bend... Ah well, what's wrong with a few more holes in the walls...

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