Comment Re: Rugrats Rule (Score 1) 43
Fwiw, Mark also did the music for Beakman's World, which is one of my favorites.
Comment Ripe for Biohackery... (Score 2) 333
By that I mean simply grow your own. :)
Aloe is a hardy plant and is perfectly content for you to leave it alone with just a bit of water now and then. It is also happy to give up a branch/frond/whateveryoucallit whenever you need a bit of the sap to soothe a burn.
~ T
Comment In school (Score 2) 320
5th grade. One of the students from an adjacent classroom ran in and breathlessly announced that the shuttle had blown up. Instant silence. My teacher walked to the other 5th grade classroom to confer with the teacher there, then they opened the partition between the two classrooms and wheeled in the TV-and-VCR-on-a-cart so we could all watch the news together. I just remember feeling like I had been kicked in the gut.
New Effort To Grant Legal Rights To Chimpanzees Fails 341
sciencehabit writes Advocates of "legal personhood" for chimpanzees have lost another battle. This morning, a New York appellate court rejected a lawsuit by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to free a chimp named Tommy from captivity. The group had argued that the chimpanzee deserved the human right of bodily liberty. Despite the loss, the NhRP is pursuing more cases in the hopes of conferring legal rights to a variety of animals, from elephants to dolphins.
Restoring Salmon To Their Original Habitat -- With a Cannon 147
StartsWithABang writes Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?
Comment Re:And it's just the first step! (Score 1) 83
I see what you did there.
Now go some paper towels and clean it up!
Facebook Wants Drones To Connect the Developing World 48
judgecorp writes "Facebook is reportedly hoping to buy drone specialist Titan Aerospace in order to provide airborne relays for Internet connectivity in developing countries, as part of its internet.org project. The solar-powered drones are classified as "atmospheric satellites" and can fly for five years. The rumoured project sounds quite similar to Google's Project Loon, which proposes using balloons for the same job." More coverage at SlashCloud, which notes that the purchase is rumored but not yet publicly confirmed.
Comment Re:bad summary (Score 1) 121
I've run it in MS-DOS many times. Got a nice rendering of The Ringworld system, complete with background stars and shadow squares. The last time was on a Vista machine. A NEW Vista machine, I made some springs or some such thing. Haven't been back since.
Just curious -- where did your Ringworld scene code come from? I wrote one up back in the mid-90's that had what you describe. ~ Terrin
Comment Re:bad summary (Score 1) 121
Three.
Three of your book covers.
I should know. ;)
~ Terrin
Systemd Ditches GNU C Library for Their Own 92
In his typical fashion of replacing perfectly working software with
useless broken-by-design crap, our dearest Lennart has decided that
the time has come for systemd to gain an email program. He determined
that the GNU libc was insufficient for the task of a dbus-enabled cpu
hogging email client, leading to the new systemd libc: "
Technically, this move makes perfectly sense, too. We are sick
of supporting unstable glibc APIs and ABIs, and we believe that we
greatly benefit from the fact that we now finally have everything the
OS userspace consists of in one single repository. Of course, this new
libc is not available to Ubuntu and other Linux distributions that
have not yet adopted systemd. However, after deliberately choosing a
home-grown display server (Wayland) over the generally accepted one
(Mir) we decided creating an incompatible libc would be the best
approach to create a strong platform following a strict release
cadence."
On the bright side "We also renamed the API call creat() to create()..."
Researchers Create Vomiting Robot To Analyze Contagions 65
iComp points out an interesting project in Derbyshire, northern England. "Bioboffins at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire, UK, have developed a robot that can projectile vomit on command as a tool for studying the spread of the highly infectious norovirus. Reuters reports that the hyperemetic droid has been dubbed 'Vomiting Larry' by its creator, researcher Catherine Makison, who describes it as a 'humanoid simulated vomiting system.' The goal of said vomiting system is to study the reach and dispersion of human vomitus, which is one of the primary ways that diseases such as norovirus can spread. Norovirus is a fairly common viral infection that is sometimes known as the 'winter vomiting bug' due to its increased prevalence in the colder months. Outbreaks are generally triggered when humans ingest contaminated food or water, but can continue when subsequent people come in contact with surfaces that have been contaminated by the initial patient's effluvium."
Comment Re:hmmm. I can just imagine the advice... (Score 1) 88
Or Death by Toblerone.
Weebots: Driveable Robots For Babies Who Need Them 72
toygeek writes "Babies, as you may have noticed if you own one, like to get into all sorts of mischief, and studies show that exploring and interacting with the world is important for cognitive development. Babies who can't move around as well may not develop at the same rate as babies who can, which is why researchers from Ithaca College in New York are working on a way to fuse babies with robots to give mobility to all babies, even those with conditions that may delay independent mobility, like Down syndrome, spina bifida, or cerebral palsy."
Kepler May Uncover Numerous Ring Worlds 75
astroengine writes "According to a new publication, NASA's Kepler exoplanet-hunting space telescope may soon start discovering Saturn-like ringed alien worlds. So far, none have been positively identified, as Kepler has only detected exoplanets orbiting close to their parent stars; if these exoplanets have rings, they are most likely to have rings facing edge-on to their orbits, making them nearly impossible to detect. As more distant-orbiting exoplanets are detected, there's more likelihood ringed worlds will be tilted, allowing Kepler to see them."
NASA Wants Revolutionary Radiation Shielding Tech 160
coondoggie writes "Long term exposure to radiation is one of the biggest challenges in long-duration human spaceflights, and NASA is now looking for what it calls 'revolutionary' technology that would help protect astronauts from harmful exposure. 'It is believed that the best strategy for radiation protection and shielding for long duration human missions is to use electrostatic active radiation shielding while, in concert, taking the full advantage of the state-of-the-art evolutionary passive (material) shielding technologies for the much reduced and weaken radiation that may escape and hit the spacecraft.'"
