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Books

For Texas Textbooks, a Victory For Evolution 626

Posted by timothy from the evolving-attitude dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In an 8-0 vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers — and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC."
Graphics

Upscaling Retro 8-Bit Pixel Art To Vector Graphics 325

Posted by timothy from the awesomeness-defined dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Two researchers — Johannes Kopf from Microsoft, and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University — have successfully created an algorithm that depixelizes and upscales low-resolution 8-bit 'pixel art' into lush vector graphics. The algorithm identifies pixel-level details (original paper — PDF) to accurately shade the new image — but more importantly, the algorithm can create smooth, curved contour lines from only-connected-on-the-diagonal single pixels. At long last, we might be able to play Super Mario Bros. on a big screen without stretching our beloved plumber's pixels to breaking point. You really must look at the sample images." Scroll down in the paper to see how their technique stacks up against some others, including Adobe's Live Trace.
Biotech

Scientists Work To Grow Meat In a Lab 376

Posted by Soulskill from the sounds-delicious dept.
codeman07 writes "In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat. It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way... on the hoof. Growth of 'in-vitro' or cultured meat is also underway in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand."
Media

Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life 509

Posted by timothy from the less-frantic-scrambling dept.
The lack of Flash in the new MacBook Air may annoy some users, but it has a big upside, too. According to Wired's report (citing Ars Technica) passed on by an anonymous reader, "Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions."
Image

AMD Offers Women Geek Dating Advice 269

Posted by samzenpus from the power-of-love dept.
Blacklaw writes "It appears AMD has decided to branch out from integrated circuits and enter the romance market with a handy guide for girls to land themselves a geeky guy. From the article: 'In a blog post written by Leslie Sobon, the company's vice president of marketing, Sobon describes her life in the largely male-dominated world of technology as being "mostly surrounded by guys all day," but says: "I can tell you that — in general — technical guys are pretty cool," and offers advice on how girls can land a geek guy. Although clearly meant in a lighthearted way, Sobon's missive serves to patronize both her company's customers — who, we learn, are socially inept and bad dressers — and women, who apparently can't understand technology and need to find a nice man who can "fix the TV, your PC, and the sprinkler system" along with other magical item s far too complex for the poor female brain to comprehend.'"

Comment Re:Teach 'em the basics (Score 1) 462

by The Solitaire (#33413220) Attached to: What 'IT' Stuff Should We Teach Ninth-Graders?

people need to understand the concepts of bits, bytes, words, longwords, binary/octal/hex numbers, thinking sequentially and logically, what an operating system actually does, what an IO system is and does, how a computer actually does math, etc., etc., etc.

No, they don't. Especially not at age 14. I live in a first world country, and none of those topics were covered before the final year of highschool (age 18) or the first few years of university. There's a good reason for that - most of those topics are completely useless unless you have something to actually apply them to. Having something to apply them to would require trying to teach C/C++ or assembler to your average 14 year old. That's just not going to end well.
Linux Business

Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers 131

Posted by Soulskill from the more-than-a-little-less-than-a-lot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post." A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.
Earth

First Photos From the European Solar Decathlon 26

Posted by timothy from the cool-little-houses dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe kicked off today in Madrid, Spain, with a stunning array of solar-powered prefab homes. Seventeen teams from around the globe are battling it out in the center of the city to see who has the most efficient solar-powered and eco-friendly house. Just as in the competition in Washington DC, the teams will be graded on minimal energy use, innovative architecture and engineering, sustainability, and more. Check out these exclusive photos from the event for a first look at the most exciting houses in this year's competition."
Science

Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass? 405

Posted by Soulskill from the what-an-interesting-mass-effect dept.
CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog: "The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."
Image

Oil Leak Could Be Stopped With a Nuke 799

Posted by samzenpus from the lesser-of-two-disasters dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel.' It's so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."

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