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Submission + - Germany to End Nuclear Power by 2022 (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
dcollins
dcollins writes: ""Germany on Monday announced plans to become the first major industrialised power to shut down all its nuclear plants in the wake of the disaster in Japan, with a phase-out due to be wrapped up by 2022... Germany has 17 nuclear reactors on its territory, eight of which are currently off the electricity grid... Already Friday, the environment ministers from all 16 German regional states had called for the temporary order on the seven plants to be made permanent... Monday's decision is effectively a return to the timetable set by the previous Social Democrat-Green coalition government a decade ago. And it is a humbling U-turn for Merkel, who at the end of 2010 decided to extend the lifetime of Germany's 17 reactors by an average of 12 years, which would have kept them open until the mid-2030s.""
Classic Games (Games)

Super Mario Bros. 3 Level Design Lessons 95

Posted by Soulskill from the double-whistle-to-victory dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Significant Bits about how the early level design in Super Mario Bros. 3 gradually introduced players to the game without needing something as blatant and obtrusive as a tutorial: "Super Mario Bros. 3 contains many obvious design lessons that are also present in other games, e.g., the gradual layering of complexity that allows players to master a specific mechanic. What surprised me during my playthrough, though, was how some of these lessons were completely optional. The game doesn't have any forced hand-holding, and it isn't afraid of the player simply exploring it at his own pace (even if it means circumventing chunks of the experience)."
Robotics

Robot Actress Makes Stage Debut In Japan 140

Posted by timothy from the just-a-wee-bit-freaky dept.
Robotron23 writes "The BBC reports that a robot named Geminoid-F has made its acting debut (video) in Japan. The short play in which it appeared was a sellout with the Japanese public, who were curious to see the robot's performance. However an actress who co-starred pointed out that the lack of human presence made the droid difficult to act alongside."

Submission + - Iron Man is another step closer to a reality (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by arshadk
arshadk writes: "The suit moves as he moves and amplifies his strength 17-fold."
"Raytheon is seeking to develop the suits to help the U.S. military carry supplies, and claims that one operator in an exoskeleton suit can do the work of two to three soldiers. If all goes as planned, the company hopes to see "Iron Man" suits deployed in the field by 2015."
United States

An Anonymous, Verifiable E-Voting Tech 236

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-didn't-see-what-you-did-there dept.
Kilrah_il writes "After the recent news items about the obstacles facing E-voting systems, many of us feel it is not yet time for this technology. A recent TED talk by David Bismark unveiled a proposal for a new E-voting technology that is both anonymous and verifiable. I am not a cryptography expert, but it does seem interesting and possibly doable."
Earth

Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030 738

Posted by samzenpus from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-petroleum dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A recent report warns that humans are overusing the resources of the planet and will need two Earths by the year 2030. The Living Planet Report tells that the demands on natural resources have doubled in the past 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."

Comment Re:aww... (Score 1) 192

by ccheck (#33871860) Attached to: Of 1.2 Billion Twitter Posts, 71% Are Ignored
most people use twitter like a newspaper, I mean... there are also no conversations in my feed-reader. Twitter is not about communication, but about following and reading and finnaly pushing the most relevant of it out on the own timeline (often just to save it there, more like a rating). PPL who use twitter to communicate their coffee-breaks are a smaller (declining) part. Most regular Twitter-Users (mostly following and reading) are professionals from the media or content industry. Succsessfull tweeters are more like journalists, they dont aim for conversations but for having reach for their messages and adress the right people (those who follow them).
Classic Games (Games)

Interactive Text Adventures Come To the Kindle 84

Posted by Soulskill from the you-are-likely-to-eat-some-glue dept.
dotarray writes with news that Amazon's Kindle will now play text-based adventure games, such as Zork. From the article: "... And it makes a ridiculous amount of sense: text is gorgeous and easily-readable on the e-ink screens, the lack of color isn’t a problem, and – let’s face it – the sort of people who are likely to buy an e-reader are exactly the sort of people who are likely to love vintage games. ... The developers have also integrated a save-game feature so you can pick up where you left off, using Amazon’s Whispernet feature – and promise that they are looking to put more modern Z-machine games into the system, too. (Squee!) Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. The Zork family of games are notoriously frustrating (even when you’re not eaten by a Grue), and the Kindle’s text entry system doesn’t help with that, especially when entering numbers. A full keyboard would make things more fluid, but – really – if you want that, why not just play on your PC?"
Role Playing (Games)

Co-op Neverwinter RPG Announced For 2011 169

Posted by Soulskill from the taking-the-first-m-out-of-mmorpg dept.
Atari and Cryptic Studios are teaming up to make a new Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG called Neverwinter, planned for Q4 2011. Gameplay will center on five-person groups that can include other players and/or AI allies, and there will be an extensive content generation system. Gamespot spoke with Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert, who explained parts of the game in more depth: "I think there are two very unique gameplay elements in 4th Edition that we've done something interesting with: action points and healing surges. In the tabletop game, an action point lets a player perform a reroll or add an additional die to a roll. In our game, action points are earned through combat and spent to power special abilities called 'boons.' These boons give players special boosts, but only in certain circumstances. Healing surges represent the amount of times a player can heal himself before resting. In D&D and Neverwinter, various abilities let players use a surge immediately or perhaps replenish the number of surges available. It's a precious resource that players will need to husband as they adventure in the brave new world. Positioning, flanking, tactics, and using powers with your teammates are also all things that come from the 4th Edition that are interesting. Of course, we're using power names and trying to keep power behavior consistent with the pen-and-paper counterparts. Neverwinter will definitely feel familiar to anyone who has played the 4th Edition."
Space

Submission + - The Moon is Shrinking, Like a Wrinkled Apple (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "New observations by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have uncovered a number of previously unknown, recently formed lobate scarps over the lunar surface. These scarps form along thrust faults where compression forces the moon's crust to rise. Up until now it was thought these lobate scarps only occurred around the lunar equator, but the high resolution LRO imagery suggests they are ubiquitous, regardless of latitude. As the moon is geologically inactive, what could be creating these features? It would appear the moon's surface is acting like the skin of an apple surrounding the shrinking, dehydrated flesh of the fruit; the lunar crust (skin) is wrinkling as the body of the moon (the flesh) shrinks due to cooling contraction inside the moon's core. What's more, this phenomenon has been observed before on a totally different celestial body."

Submission + - Exploding Lake Provides Electricity for Rwanda (discovery.com)

Submitted by reillymj
reillymj writes: There are three known "exploding lakes" in the world, where volcanic gases build up near the lake bottom until they suddenly fizz over, suffocating people with huge amounts of carbon dioxide. But the lakes also hold methane and one of them, Rwanda's Lake Kivu, is being actively tapped as a source of natural gas to fuel a power plant on the lake's shores. The government hopes that within two years, the plant will be covering a third of the country's needs. By siphoning off the gas, engineers simultaneously defuse a ticking time bomb in the lake and provide power to local communities.
Social Networks

Could Open Source Render Facebook the Next AOL? 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-happen-fast-enough dept.
joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."
Space

A New Take On the Fermi Paradox 388

Posted by Soulskill from the drake's-game-of-life dept.
TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization. "In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."

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