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Submission + - No, You Can't Observe A Single Photon As A Pure Particle and Wave Simultaneously (insidescience.org)

Submitted by benonemusic
benonemusic writes: Recent news stories implied that light was imaged simultaneously as a particle and wave. But what most of these stories did not make clear was that the experiment simultaneously captured data on many photons (or more precisely, hybrid objects known as surface plasmon polaritons), some which acted like waves and others which acted like particles. But is the whole concept of wave-particle duality an artificial one anyway?

Submission + - Recommendations Engines Coming of Age (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There are lots of companies that are working on using algorithms to suggest products, Hunch.com, FindTheBest.com and according to TechCrunch a new player, Snapsort which has launched algorithmic recommendation of cameras, cars (carsort.com) and mobile phones(geekaphone.com). Is faceted search on it's deathbed? Will these companies change the way consumers make decisions? The tools are definitely better than the crap used by every retailer site to help consumers pick things. There are lots of dirty categories where the spinsters and marketers make things hard, like politics — can tools like this help bring clarity to the consumer?
Science

Submission + - Hints of Higgs Boson Appear Weaker (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Last month, physicists working with the world's highest-energy atom-smasher reported possible evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece of scientists' standard model of fundamental particles and the key to physicists' explanation of how all particles get their mass. Today, however, the same two teams reported that, with more data, those signs appear slightly weaker, suggesting that they could be a statistical fluctuation in the "background" produced by decays of familiar particles. Still, the curious excess of possible Higgs bosons remains.
Firefox

Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars 203

Posted by timothy from the jake-the-explainer-steps-in-early dept.
Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."
Google

Submission + - Installing Android 2.2 "Froyo" on the Nexus One (gadgetopolis.com)

Submitted by gjt
gjt writes: I awoke this morning to see TechCrunch's MG Siegler post what appeared to be the first news of Froyo's availability. I frantically went to my phone's settings and tried to check for an update -oe but no luck. Then I went to xda-developers.com and sure enough there was a very long thread (now over 132 pages) of fellow eager beavers waiting for release (and trying to figure out how to get it). Several hours went by waiting for a semi-technical user to get the update and check the Android logs for the download location. It turns out you can get it straight from Google. With the information scattered around in different places I decided to consolidate the How-To into a single post over here.
Science

Submission + - Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by Laxori666
Laxori666 writes: Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.
The Courts

Submission + - Isohunt Gets a Permanent Injunction (newteevee.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District issued a permanent injunction ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/31719090/Isohunt-Permanent-Injunction ) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies.

The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all U.S. visitors. Fung could be held in contempt of court if he doesn’t comply with the injunction, and he could possibly be thrown into jail.

So what can Isohunt and Fung do to comply with the injunction? The verdict states that they have to cease “hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files” that can be used to download the studios’ movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours.

NewTeeVee: http://newteevee.com/2010/05/21/u-s-court-isohunt-has-to-shut-down/

Submission + - Economist calls for 'Open source' biology (economist.com)

Submitted by Socguy
Socguy writes: With the announcement that a team of researchers has created the first artificial life, the Economist has been pondering the implications of what this brave new frontier means when the power to build living organisms filters through to anyone with a laptop. Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology has more or less worked so far, but the Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released accidentally or otherwise.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16163154&source=features_box_main
Media

Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source 312

Posted by timothy from the long-term-vision dept.
SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.
Science

Submission + - Cheaper Hydrogen Production Catalyst Discovered (gizmag.com)

Submitted by ElectricSteve
ElectricSteve writes: The Hydrogen Economy that may one day replace the Hydrocarbon Economy came a step closer this week with the announcement that researchers have discovered an inexpensive new proton reduction catalyst — seventy times cheaper than the Platinum commonly used now — that can significantly reduce the costs of producing hydrogen using electrolysis to split water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen.
Canada

Climate Researchers Fight Back 641

Posted by Soulskill from the best-defense-is-a-good-offense dept.
tomduck writes "The Guardian reports that climate researcher Andrew Weaver is suing the National Post newspaper in Canada in a libel action for publishing 'grossly irresponsible falsehoods.' The Post claimed he cherrypicked data to support his climate research, and tried to blame the 'evil fossil fuel' industry for break-ins at his office in 2008 to divert attention from mistakes in the 2007 IPCC report. This comes fast on the heels of another Guardian article describing lessons learned from the exoneration of UEA scientists involved in the so-called Climategate affair. Are climate scientists finally fighting back against their critics, who they were previously more inclined to ignore?"
Data Storage

Submission + - The Hard Drive Death Watch Begins Now (gadgetopolis.com)

Submitted by gjt
gjt writes: When Intel and OCZ recently announced new "affordable" Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology.
Power

Toshiba Ends Incandescent Bulb Production After 120 Years 430

Posted by Soulskill from the bright-ideas dept.
angry tapir writes "Toshiba has stopped production of mass-market incandescent light bulbs, putting an end to a 120-year manufacturing history of the products. The company, which is one of Japan's largest makers of lighting products, had planned to halt production next year but brought up the date by a year. It will now focus on more energy efficient products, including LED (light-emitting diode) lights, which contain a handful of white LEDs and draw a fraction of the power of incandescent bulbs."

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