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Submission + - Australian Aboriginal Rock Art May Depict Giant Bi (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by grrlscientist
grrlscientist writes: An Australian Aboriginal rock art may depict a giant bird that is thought to have become extinct some 40,000 years ago, thereby making it the oldest rock painting on the island continent. The red ochre drawing was first discovered two years ago, but archaeologists were only able to confirm the finding two weeks ago, when they first visited the remote site on the Arnhem Land plateau in north Australia.
Idle

Submission + - New Hungarian government OMG's all gov sites

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages to a "disclaimer" webpage in several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is OMG which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites "lack any kind of uniform structure" and this is "unworty of Hungary".

Example: http://fvm.gov.hu/index_en.html

Today is the takeover day in most ministries for the new administration.
Science

Submission + - The fruit fly, "Drosophila", gets a new name (nature.com)

Submitted by G3ckoG33k
G3ckoG33k writes: The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the "type species" (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing inumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remembering the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset. What is more important here, scientific accuracy in the naming or the practical aspects of learning a new name?
Space

Submission + - 90% of the Universe found hiding in plain view (discovermagazine.com) 2

Submitted by
The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: "As much as 90% of previously hidden galaxies in the distant Universe have been found by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Previous surveys had looked for distant (10 billion light years away) galaxies by searching in a wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen atoms — distant young galaxies should be blasting out this light, but very few were detected. The problem is that the ultraviolet light never gets out of the galaxies, so we never see them. In this new study, astronomers searched a different wavelength emitted by hydrogen, and voila, ten times as many galaxies could be seen, meaning 90% of them had been missed before."
Math

Submission + - Math Skills For Programmers - Necessary Or Not? (skorks.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Currently the nature of most programming work is such that you don't really need math skills to get by or even to do well, after all linear algebra is no help when building database driven websites. However, Skorks contends that if you want to do truly interesting work in the software development field, math skills are essential and furthermore, will become increasingly important as we are forced to work with ever larger data sets (making math-intensive algorithm analysis skills a priority).
Portables

Submission + - Laptops Computers Detect and Monitor Earthquakes

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Live Science reports that 1,000 people from 61 countries have signed up with the Quake-Catcher Network to take advantage of built-in accelerometers in newer laptops that transmit data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Irvine and Stanford University. "It's providing additional data that can be fed into the seismic networks," says Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Irvine geoscientist. "It also allows us to record earthquakes at a scale that we haven't been able to before because of the cost." Cochran came up with the idea for the Quake-Catcher Network when she learned that most new laptops come equipped with accelerometers designed to switch off the hard drive if the laptop is dropped. "I figured that we could easily tap into this data and use it to record earthquakes." While traditional seismic monitors can detect earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 or less, the lowest magnitude the Quake-Catcher Network can detect is about 4.0, a moderate quake much like the one that hit LA on March 16. But what the network lacks in sensitivity, it makes up for in price as traditional seismic sensors cost $5,000 to $10,000 apiece. "Ideally we would have seismometers in every building, or at least on every block. And in tall buildings, we'd have multiple sensors [on different floors]," says Cochran. "That way, we would be able to actually get much higher detail, images of how the ground shakes during an earthquake.""
Space

Submission + - Helium rain on Jupiter makes for strange days (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: In the strange and mysterious world of Jupiter, scientists were looking for an explanation for why the massive orb's atmosphere contained little neon, a common gas found on many planets. Now researching say they have found solved the mystery: Helium rain. In the interior of Jupiter conditions are so strange that, according to predictions by University of California, Berkeley scientists, helium condenses into droplets and falls like rain. On Jupiter the scientists explain the only way neon could be removed from the upper atmosphere is to have it fall out with helium, since neon and helium mix easily, like alcohol and water.
Medicine

Submission + - Child Receives Trachea Grown From Own Stem Cells (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Doctors at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) along with colleagues at the University College London, the Royal Free Hospital, and Careggi University Hospital in Florence have successfully transplanted a trachea into a 10 year old boy using his own stem cells. A donor trachea was taken, stripped of its cells into a collagen-like scaffold, and then infused with the boy’s stem cells. The trachea was surgically placed into the boy and allowed to develop in place. Because his own cells were used, there was little to no risk of rejection. This was the first time a child had received such a stem cell augmented transplant and the first time that a complete trachea had been used.
Games

Submission + - Research lets you type words by thought alone (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How about typing on a computer just by thinking about it? The downside is you have to wear a skull cap with electrodes that capture your brain waves like an EEG machine. According to this EE Times story a team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with movement disabilities. The system does rely on a lot of processing on a remote computer but it is a wireless system. And these thought-to-computer systems have wider applicability than medical support. One of the research groups involved in this development has already looked at wireless electroencephalography (EEG) to enable measures of emotion to be fed back into computer games (see IMEC has a brain wave: feed EEG emotion back into games).

Feed Ars Technica: Hands-on: Ubuntu One music store will rock in Lucid Lynx (arstechnica.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the official launch of the Ubuntu One music store. Integrated into the Rhythmbox music player in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, the store allows users to purchase downloadable songs and albums.

The music store is powered by 7digital, an online music distributor that offers over 4 million songs in the MP3 format without DRM. Canonical partnered with 7digital and developed the software that allows the music store to integrate with Rythmbox and Ubuntu One, the cloud service that Canonical launched last year.

Read the comments on this post



Games

Feed Engadget: TiltFX from Codejunkies makes a PSP respond to your every move (video) (engadget.com)

From feed by feedfeeder
We all lean when playing racing games and sit up in our seats when jumping in action games, but so far most PSP games have stoutly ignored all that nonsense. The TiltFX from Codejunkies might finally make those uppity consoles a little more responsive with a "G Sensor" -- a three-axis MEMS gyro that clips onto the lower-left of a PSP 1000, 2000, or 3000-series console. (Sorry, Goers, left out again.) Once plugged in you can simply tilt the console in the direction you want your character to go, something that we could definitely see enhancing the experience of games like Archer McLean's Mercury or or Loco Roco. And, for just £14.99/$19.99, it's certainly a better value than some other PSP accessories we've sampled in the past. Video demonstration after the break.

Continue reading TiltFX from Codejunkies makes a PSP respond to your every move (video)

TiltFX from Codejunkies makes a PSP respond to your every move (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Codejunkies |Email this|Comments
Medicine

Submission + - Iron Alloy Could Create Earthquake-Proof Buildings (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by separsons
separsons writes: Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University designed a new shape memory metal alloy. The super elastic iron alloy can endure serious stretching and still return to its original shape. The scientists say that once optimized, the material could be used in everything from braces to medical stents to earthquake-proof buildings!

Submission + - Oracle/Sun enforces pay-for-security-updates plan (google.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures.

What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licencing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications.

Feed Engadget: Dell Aero is 'the lightest' Android phone yet, poses for pictures (engadget.com)

From feed by feedfeeder
AT&T's teaser site for the Dell Aero has gone live and we can now fill in a few more gaps in our knowledge about this forthcoming handset. It's looking every bit the renamed Mini 3 we thought it was, so click here and here to get a closer look at the body of the device. The official web mouthpiece confirms a 3.5-inch screen with nHD resolution -- which may or may not signify the same 640 x 480 as on the Brazilian and Chinese versions -- and one definite point of departure, a 5 (rather than 3) megapixel camera on the back. Claimed to be the lightest Android smartphone yet, the Aero will also come with WiFi and GPS built in, though its biggest attraction will undoubtedly be the thoroughly tricked out Android UI, which promises Picassa, Flick, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitpic integration right out of the box. Check out the gallery below for some hints of what that willl look like.

[Thanks, Chilko]

Dell Aero is 'the lightest' Android phone yet, poses for pictures originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | AT&T |Email this|Comments

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