Wayfarer - Slashdot User

Ultrasound As a Male Contraceptive 599

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @07:24PM from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

TeslaBoy writes "The BBC has an article about using ultrasound aimed at the testicles as a reversible male contraceptive. This can last for six months. With a grant of $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers at the University of North Carolina will push ahead with more clinical trials, fine tuning, and safety tests."

TSA Wants You To Keep Your Seat, and Your Hands In Sight 888

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 27, 2009 @03:30AM from the ex-post-facto dept.

An anonymous reader excerpts from an AP story as carried by Yahoo News about changes stemming from yesterday's foiled bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight: "Some airlines were telling passengers on Saturday that new government security regulations prohibit them from leaving their seats beginning an hour before landing. The regulations are a response to a suspected terrorism incident on Christmas Day. Air Canada said in a statement that new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in US airspace. ... Flight attendants on some domestic flights are informing passengers of similar rules. Passengers on a flight from New York to Tampa Saturday morning were also told they must remain in their seats and couldn't have items in their laps, including laptops and pillows." The TSA's list of prohibited items doesn't seem to have changed in the last day, though.

Tyler Bell On Yahoo's Open Location API 76

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @09:05PM from the where-two-point-oh dept.

blackbearnh writes "Yahoo! has been working for a while to promote a unified system for referring to places, through their Where On Earth IDs. Using a WOEID, you can query Yahoo's publicly available APIs to find out things like what cities are in a county, or what counties border each other. In an interview for O'Reilly Radar, Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, talks about their Open Location program (not to be confused with openlocation.org, a different group altogether). He also talks about how privacy concerns interact with the increasing use of personal geotracking, and the troublesome problem of what to call places. 'I'm not even going to tell you about the problems we had when we accidentally called Constantinople Byzantium, just slipping back about 800 years there accidentally. That's a very sensitive issue. Any company dealing with geography is going to have to address it somehow. So I'll be very candid in how Yahoo addresses this. I mean first, our stated goal is to capture the world's geography as it is used by the world's people. We don't see ourselves as the definitive authority on how a place should be called.'"

Springy Nanotubes Could Make Artificial Muscles 70

Posted by kdawson on Monday July 16, 2007 @05:40AM from the strong-like-bull dept.

moon_monkey writes "Scientists have discovered that carbon nanotubes have remarkable springy properties, which could make them ideal for use in artificial muscles. Currently, electroactive polymers are most commonly used to make artificial muscles, but these lack mechanical robustness. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute tested the nanotubes by repeatedly squashing them between metal plates. The work is reported in Nature Nanotechnology."

Comment Re:it used to be annoying... (Score 1) 884

by Wayfarer on Saturday April 03, 2004 @03:19AM (#8754254) Attached to: Daylight Savings Time?

I used to get confused when to move the clock back or forward. Till I heard the following

Fall back, Spring forward

Y'see, I used to rely on that sort of mnemonic until I accidentally mixed it up like so:

Fall ahead, spring back!

And now, I'm twice as confused as before. So I'm solving my dilemma once and for all by moving to a state without Daylight Saving Time.

By the way, you're welcome. ^_^

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