bossvader - Slashdot User

8-Year-Old Receives Patent 142

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 30, 2010 @11:54AM from the young-inventor-society dept.

Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

Posted by kdawson on Friday June 25, 2010 @11:20AM from the do-not-look-directly-into-the-quasar dept.

KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."

NASA's Space Balloon Smashes Car In Australia 174

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 29, 2010 @10:19AM from the wrong-turn dept.

Humunculus writes "Of more worldly issues, NASA's latest multimillion-dollar stratosphere-bound balloon launch has gone horribly wrong and crashed into a car, turning it over and narrowly missing two elderly people who were observing the launch. The payload fared worse, reportedly being smashed into a 'thousand pieces.'"

Comment It Takes The Right Combination of Events (Score 3, Interesting) 547

by bossvader on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @04:59PM (#31849872) Attached to: How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?

In the right environment on the right projects with the right team....I could easily design, develop, and test for 40+ hours a week and feel energized. Unfortunately that right environment, project and team is very rare.

Flash Builder 4 — Defective By Design? 66

Posted by timothy on Friday April 02, 2010 @06:46PM from the mote-in-your-eye dept.

ApolloX writes "Adobe has released its new version of the Flex Builder, now renamed Flash Builder 4. This version is radically different from previous versions of Flex, introducing the new Spark architecture and theme support. While I am pleased Adobe has finally added support for Eclipse 3.5, I am disappointed with some of the new architecture changes that make doing simple things, such as skinning a button, now quite cumbersome."

Comment Personal Experience.. (Score 2, Interesting) 716

by bossvader on Monday June 08, 2009 @02:26PM (#28253801) Attached to: Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades

Right or Wrong my nieces grades have started to climb as soon as I started a "Grade Bounty". It has brought focus, and there is more motivation other than just Mom hounding her. I am slowing ratcheting up the bar, sort of got her hooked as a freshman in High School and going to make Sophomore bar a little higher and so on. Far as I am concerned money well spent. Cracked me up when she asked Mom if I was really Uncle was really going to pay up...I said you get the grades...I will pay up.

Submission + - Testing Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance'

Submitted by smooth wombat on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @03:14PM

smooth wombat writes: Travelling to a time in the past is, as far as we know, not possible. However, Einstein postulated a faster-than-light effect known as 'spooky action at a distance'. The problem is, how do you test for such an effect? That test may now be here. If all goes well, hopefully by September 15th, John Cramer will have experimented with a beam of laser light which has been split in two to test Einstein's idea.

While he is only testing the quantum entanglement portion, changing one light beam and having the same change made in the other beam, his experiment might show that a change made in one beam shows up in the other beam before he actually makes the change.

An interesting sidenote is that the money for this project was raised not from the scientific community but from the public at large. His fans have sent him the money necessary to purchase the equipment to test Einstein's idea.

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