debackerl - Slashdot User

New Nanotech Fabric Never Gets Wet 231

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @11:08AM from the good-for-lining-lunchboxes dept.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a simple coating for polyester that renders it unwettable — even after two months underwater it emerges dry to the touch. Water cannot attach to the new fabric thanks to nanostructured filaments and a structure that traps a constant air layer. One potential use is for low-drag swim wear."

Major Advances In Knot Theory 230

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 01, 2008 @03:31PM from the if-it's-not-theory-then-it-must-be-practice dept.

An anonymous reader sends us to Science News, which is running a survey of recent strides in finding an answer to the age-old question: How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? "Mathematicians have been puzzling over that question for a century or two, and the main thing they've discovered is that the question is really, really hard. In the last decade, though, they've developed some powerful new tools inspired by physics that have pried a few answers from the universe's clutches. Even more exciting is that the new tools seem to be the tip of a much larger theory that mathematicians are just beginning to uncover. That larger mathematical theory, if it exists, may help crack some of the hardest mathematical questions there are, questions about the mathematical structure of the three- and four-dimensional space where we live. ... Revealing the full ... superstructure may be the work of a generation."

Comment Re:Um, my browser doesn't support Ruby (Score 1) 409

by debackerl on Saturday June 07, 2008 @04:24AM (#23691901) Attached to: Move Over AJAX, Make Room for ARAX

Ruby looks a lot more like Smalltalk, and Smalltalk has almost nothing to do with Java. But of course, if you have never been a Smalltalk developer it might be difficult to understand... In addition, Ruby is a scripting language, Java is not. Consequently, you get a lot more possibilities, (and more slowness too).

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