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Biotech

How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You? 300

pegr writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, Reverse Engineer, XBox hacker, and generally smart guy, muses over the H1N1/swine flu virus as only a reverse engineer can: 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' Not that he would, of course. bunnie has consistently made the esoteric available to us mere mortals, and his overview of the H1N1 virus is a fascinating read from a unique perspective." (Seen today also at the top of Schneier on Security.)

Comment Grace period (Score 5, Insightful) 379

Switching your intake to a low-carb-high-fat diet involves a grace period a week or so. This is to allow the body to "reshape" itself to use the fat as an energy source instead of the previous intake of carbonhydrates.

Symptoms of switching away from carbs to fat include; fatigue, dizzyness, high irritability and headache.

"After only a few days on the high-fat diet, the rats performed 30 percent worse on the treadmill. After five days of testing, the treadmill performance of the rats eating fatty foods had declined by half."

Any bells? So, nothing previously unknown to the lowcarbers here.

Personally, I tried the lowcarb-highfat diet about half a year ago, and actually did lose a few kilos, but the most interesting change for me was that I felt more awake, my stomach stopped producing funny amounts of gas, and never ever felt hungry. I got tired of it after a while though - I kinda missed the occasional potato and pasta - so I've taken back the lost kilos again. These days I just don't shun fat and avoid sugary stuff. Both me and my previously upset stomach feels great now.

Comment Re:libraries (Score 2, Insightful) 255

Actually, it's using it's own soft synth to generate the sounds along with the textures at startup. This is commonplace in 4K and 64K intros today. After the sounds have been generated, it's just about triggering the notes. If you listen again, you'll notice that the soundtrack doesn't contain that many instrument "hits", or notes if you say. The drums and bass are probably short repeated sequences, triggered by start and stop flags. This is me guessing though. And also, when you have the note sequences, it's no biggie to sync the flashes in the sky to one particular instrument hit.
Earth

Scientists Reconstruct Millennium's Coldest Winter 290

Ponca City, We love you writes "In England they called it the Great Frost, while in France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that fell over Europe in 1709 ushering in a year of famine and food riots. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travelers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years with temperatures as much as 7 degrees C below the average for 20th-century Europe. Now as part of the European Union's Millennium Project, Scientists are aiming to reconstruct the past 1000 years of Europe's climate using a combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents."

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