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Submission + - NASA Accidentally Broadcasts Simulation of Distressed Astronauts On ISS (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA accidentally broadcast a simulation of astronauts being treated for decompression sickness on the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, prompting speculation of an emergency in posts on social media. About 5:28 p.m. U.S. Central Time (2228 GMT), The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) live YouTube channel broadcast audio that indicated a crew member was experiencing the effects of decompression sickness (DCS), NASA said on its official ISS X account.

A female voice asks crew members to "get commander back in his suit", check his pulse and provide him with oxygen, later saying his prognosis was "tenuous", according to copies of the audio posted on social media. NASA did not verify the recordings or republish the audio. Several space enthusiasts posted a link to the audio on X with warnings that there was a serious emergency on the ISS. "This audio was inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real emergency," the ISS account post said. "There is no emergency situation going on aboard the International Space Station," it added.

Crew members on the ISS were in their sleep period at the time of the audio broadcast as they prepared for a spacewalk at 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday, the ISS post said. NASA's ISS YouTube channel — at the time the audio was accidentally broadcast — now shows an error message saying the feed has been interrupted.
Businesses

Bullet-Proof Sheets of Carbon Nanotubes 206

Posted by kdawson from the general-products-hull dept.
An anonymous reader notes a CNN.com report on Nanocomp Technologies, the first in the world to make sheets of carbon nanotubes. "In April, [CEO] Lashmore had a mechanical multicaliber gun shoot bullets at different versions of his sheet, each less than a fifth of an inch thick. ... Army tests show the material works as well as Kevlar. The military also hopes to replace copper wiring in planes and satellites with highly conductive nanotubes, saving millions of dollars in fuel costs."
Biotech

Universal "Death Stench" Repels Bugs of All Types 248

Posted by kdawson from the was-it-something-i-said dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Wired reports that scientists have discovered that insects from cockroaches to caterpillars all emit the same stinky blend of fatty acids when they die and that the death mix may represent a universal, ancient warning signal to avoid their dead or injured. 'Recognizing and avoiding the dead could reduce the chances of catching the disease,' says Biologist David Rollo of McMaster University 'or allow you to get away with just enough exposure to activate your immunity.' Researchers isolated unsaturated fatty acids containing oleic and linoleic acids from the corpses of dead cockroaches and found that their concoction repelled not just cockroaches, but ants and caterpillars. 'It was amazing to find that the cockroaches avoided places treated with these extracts like the plague,' says Rollo. Even crustaceans like woodlice and pillbugs, which diverged from insects 400 million years ago, were repelled leading scientists to think the death mix represents a universal warning signal. Scientists hope the right concoction of death smells might protect crops. Thankfully, human noses can't detect the fatty acid extracts. 'I've tried smelling papers treated with them and don't smell anything strong and certainly not repellent,' writes Rollo in an e-mail. 'Not like the rotting of corpses that occurs later and is detectable from great distances.'"
Education

Submission + - New York's Video-Game-Based Public School (popsci.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In Manhattan this fall, a batch of lucky sixth-graders will start at Quest To Learn, the first public school in the U.S. with a curriculum built around playing games. They'll play Spore and Civilization, board games such as Settlers of Catan, and learn 3D modeling in Maya and Google Earth as well. Each semester concludes with a two-week "Boss Level."
Linux

Submission + - Google releases the SDK for version 1.6 of Android (android.com)

Submitted by Qwavel
Qwavel writes: This release includes improvements to the Android Market, the Search Framework, and Text-to-Speech. It now has support for more screen resolutions and CDMA phones. Android 1.6 is based on v2.6.29 of the Linux kernel and is expected in phones that will be available next month. The mystery of Android 1.6, however, is Google's continued unwilling to commit to a Bluetooth API and any Bluetooth functionality beyond the basic audio functions.
Science

Submission + - Gene Therapy Cures Color-Blind Monkeys (wired.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time.

Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible.

"We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I talked to said, absolutely not," said study co-author Jay Neitz, a University of Washington ophthalmologist. "And almost every unsolved vision defect out there has this component in one way or another, where the ability to translate light into a gene signal is involved."

The full-spectrum supplementation of the squirrel monkeys' sight, described Wednesday in Nature, comes just less than a year after researchers used gene therapy to restore light perception in people afflicted by Leber Congenital Amaurosis, a rare and untreatable form of blindness.
Communications

Submission + - N.S. garlic farm wards off high-speed internet (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by
DocVM
DocVM writes: "A Nova Scotia farmer is opposing the construction of a microwave tower for fear it will eventually mutate his organic garlic crop. "Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred metres from his farm.""

Submission + - In Britain, better not call it bogus science (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: In Britain, libel laws are censoring the ability of journalists to write stories about bogus science.

Simon Singh, a Ph.D. physicist and author of several best-selling popular-science books, is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for saying that there is no evidence for claims that visiting a chiropractor has health benefits. A year earlier, writer Ben Goldacre for an article critical of Matthias Rath, who claimed that vitamin supplements can treat HIV and AIDS in place of conventional drugs like anti-retrovirals.

In Britain, libel laws don't have any presumption of innocence-- any statement made is assumed to be false unless you prove it's true. Journalist are running scared.

Submission + - Rome was built in a day (washington.edu)

Submitted by spmallick
spmallick writes: Researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with Microsoft, have recreated the city of Rome in 3D using images obtained from Flickr [ Press Release . The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags "Rome" or "Roma", and it took 21 hours on 496 compute cores to create a 3D digital model. Unlike Photosynth / Photo Tourism, the goal was to reconstruct an entire city and not just individual landmarks. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process... A million photos would take more than a decade! The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts.

The project website is at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

DISCLAIMER: The primary author of the work Dr. Sameer Agarwal is a co-author and a close friend.
Linux

Submission + - Best Backup Server Option for University TV statio 2

Submitted by idk07002
idk07002 writes: I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in office file server (a Drobo) in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these 2 systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get max life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?
Transportation

Submission + - Transforming Waste Plastic into $10/Barrel Fuel (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Today Washington D.C. based company Envion opened a $5 million dollar facility that they claim will be able to efficiently transform plastic waste into a source of oil-like fuel. The technology uses infra-red energy to remove hydrocarbons from plastic without the use of a catalyst, transforming 82% of the original plastic material into fuel. According to Envion, the resulting fuel can then be blended with other components, providing a source for gasoline or diesel at as low as $10 per barrel."

Submission + - Sun sets for Oracle - HP partnership (reuters.com)

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: As detailed in the Reuters article found here, http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE58E80D20090916, Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP in light of their anticipated acquisition of Sun. With Sun servers in house, Oracle apparently feels no need to work with HP, any more. Will HP respond, say by underwriting Postgre development and implementation?
Power

$2 Million NASA Power Beaming Challenge Heating Up 98

Posted by timothy from the when-moving-target-is-not-figurative dept.
carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."
Windows

Amazon UK Refunds Windows License Fee, With Little Hassle 194

Posted by timothy from the obey-lord-good-idea dept.
christian.einfeldt writes "Alan Lord, a FOSS computer consultant based in the UK, has announced that Amazon UK honored his request for a refund of the Microsoft license fee portion of the cost of a new Asus netbook PC that came with Microsoft Windows XP. Lord details the steps that he took to obtain a refund of 40.00 GBP for the cost of the EULA, complete with links to click to request a refund. Lord's refund comes 10 years after the initial flurry of activity surrounding EULA discounts, started by a blog post by Australian computer consultant Geoffrey Bennett which appeared on Slashdot on 18 January 1999. That Slashdot story led to mainstream press coverage, such as stories in CNN, the New York Times Online, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name just a few. The issue quieted down for a few years, but has started to gain some momentum again in recent years, with judges in France, Italy, and Israel awarding refunds. But if Lord's experience is any indication, getting a refund through Amazon might be as easy as filling out a few forms, at least in the UK, without any need to go to court."

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