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Discovery Brings Us One Step Closer To "Milking" Pigeons 190

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-what's-for-breakfast dept.
Are you tired of boring old milk in your cereal? Is the half and half in your coffee leaving you flat? If so, the recent discovery of the gene responsible for pigeon crop "lactation" might be the good news you've been waiting for. While mammals are the only animals that produce true milk, a number of birds produce a nutritious, liquid "crop milk" for their chicks. From the article: "The idea of drinking pigeon milk may bring a shudder to every sane and rational person in the world, but it's actually quite nutritious. Although it's high in fat, to help the young squabs develop fast, it's also packed full of antioxidants and immune-system-boosting proteins."
Quake

Notch Asks For Trial By Combat 205

Posted by Soulskill from the how-all-trademark-claims-should-be-settled dept.
Vrallis writes "As reported recently, Mojang AB, the creators of Minecraft, have been sued by Bethesda over the name of their latest project, Scrolls, citing a trademark infringement with their Elder Scrolls games. In his latest blog post, Notch, the founder of Mojang, has challenged Bethesda to a trial by combat. Specifically, a frag match in Quake 3."
Image

CmdrTaco Watches Atlantis Liftoff 130

Posted by CmdrTaco from the here-we-go-again dept.
When someone offers you the once in a lifetime chance to see something as historic as the final Space Shuttle Flight: You go. As a child I assembled a puzzle of the Challenger illuminated by those bright xenon lights, and dreamt of space flight. And last week I went to see the last launch the world will ever see of a Space Shuttle. Atlantis. STS-135. What follows is the story of my brief stay at the Kennedy Space Center.
Supercomputing

The Problem With the Top500 Supercomputer List 175

Posted by Soulskill from the nobody-cares-about-the-bottom-490-or-so dept.
angry tapir writes "The Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence. Many question the use of a single metric — Linpack — to rank the performance of something as mind-bogglingly complex as a supercomputer. During a panel at the SC2010 conference this week in New Orleans, one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get the largest Linpack number, thereby revealing the 'stupidity' of Linpack. While grumbling about Linpack is nothing new, the discontent was pronounced this year as more systems, such as the Tianhe-1A, used GPUs to boost Linpack ratings, in effect gaming the Top500 list." Fortunately, Sandia National Laboratories is heading an effort to develop a new set of benchmarks. In other supercomputer news, it turns out the Windows-based cluster that lost out to Linux stumbled because of a bug in Microsoft's software package. Several readers have also pointed out that IBM's Blue Gene/Q has taken the top spot in the Green500 for energy efficient supercomputing, while a team of students built the third-place system.
Image

AMD Offers Women Geek Dating Advice 269

Posted by samzenpus from the power-of-love dept.
Blacklaw writes "It appears AMD has decided to branch out from integrated circuits and enter the romance market with a handy guide for girls to land themselves a geeky guy. From the article: 'In a blog post written by Leslie Sobon, the company's vice president of marketing, Sobon describes her life in the largely male-dominated world of technology as being "mostly surrounded by guys all day," but says: "I can tell you that — in general — technical guys are pretty cool," and offers advice on how girls can land a geek guy. Although clearly meant in a lighthearted way, Sobon's missive serves to patronize both her company's customers — who, we learn, are socially inept and bad dressers — and women, who apparently can't understand technology and need to find a nice man who can "fix the TV, your PC, and the sprinkler system" along with other magical item s far too complex for the poor female brain to comprehend.'"

Comment Re:Needs a caption (Score 2, Informative) 154

by jdgreen7 (#33381910) Attached to: Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries

Double-click on the video to reach the YouTube page. To the right of the summary (left of the number of views) is a down-chevron icon. Click on that for the full description.

Or, just copy and paste that description here:

View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.

Earth Crossers are Red

Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow

All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects.
Wikipedia

A $20 8-Bit Wikipedia Reader For Your TV 167

Posted by timothy from the thought-experiments-welcome dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired about another entry in the ongoing quest for low-tech-high-tech educational tools to take advantage of distributed knowledge: "The Humane Reader, a device designed by computer consultant Braddock Gaskill, takes two 8-bit microcontrollers and packages them in a 'classic style console' that connects to a TV. The device includes an optional keyboard, a micro-SD Card reader and a composite video output. It uses a standard micro-USB cellphone charger for power. In all, it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books, including an offline version of Wikipedia, and requires no internet connection. The Reader will cost $20 when 10,000 or more of it are manufactured. Without that kind of volume, each Reader will cost about $35."

Comment Re:I'd rather have a netbook. iPad is a pain to ho (Score 1) 198

by jdgreen7 (#32418148) Attached to: Rent an iPad For Inflight Entertainment

Its a great machine and all, but I can't imagine trying to use it on a plane for any real length of time.

That's why I bought a folio-style case with adjustable stand for mine so you can leave it propped up at a reasonable angle, making it a nice hands-free device while watching a movie or reading a book. The popular response to that is "Why not just get a netbook, since that stands up on its own already?!" Well, the iPad just does a lot of things very well that I want it to do, and with a 10+ hour battery life (generally much longer if just reading an ebook), I haven't found a better device yet. Plus, it comfortably fits on the fold-out tray on planes when the person in front of you leans back, unlike my 15" laptop.
Science

Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus 205

Posted by timothy from the concealed-carry-in-australian-waters dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"
Government

Broadband Rights & the Killer App of 1900 565

Posted by CmdrTaco from the same-song-different-name dept.
newscloud writes "Tech writer Glenn Fleishman compares the arguments against affordable, high speed, broadband Internet access in each home to arguments made against providing for common access to electricity in 1900 e.g. '...electric light is not a necessity for every member of the community. It is not the business of any one to see that I use electricity, or gas, or oil in my house, or even that I use any form of artificial light at all.' Says Fleishman, 'Electricity should go to people who had money, not hooked up willy-nilly to everyone ... Like electricity, the notion of whether broadband is an inherent right and necessity of every citizen is up for grabs in the US. Sweden and Finland have already answered the question: It's a birthright.'"

Comment Re:Screw them ALL! (Score 1) 116

by jdgreen7 (#28515247) Attached to: Boxee vs. Zinc vs. Hulu
I run Boxee on a 3 year old Mac Mini, though it's Intel-based, and it works just fine. If you feel like hiring someone to update the code that's necessary for decoding everything on PPC, then feel free. I'm sure they'd be happy to help you out once you provide the resources to get someone "off of his/her non-collective butt". But, once you start wanting to view HD content that's heavily compressed, good luck using that old PPC system without massive stuttering.
Power

US House May Pass "Cap & Trade" Bill 874

Posted by kdawson from the make-everybody-mad-and-you-must-be-doing-something-right dept.
jamie found this roundup on the status of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which is about to be voted on by the US House of Representatives. (The article notes that if the majority Democrats can't see the 218 votes needed for passage, they will probably put off the vote.) The AP has put together a FAQ that says, "[The bill, if passed,] fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home." The odds-makers are giving the bill a marginal chance of passing in the House, with tougher going expected in the Senate.
Space

Submission + - Revived microbe may hold clues for ET lifeforms

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Science Daily is reporting that a microbe, Herminiimonas glaciei, buried some 3kms under glacial ice in Greenland, and believed to have been frozen for some 120,000 years, has been brought back to life. The microbe, some ten to fifty times smaller than E. coli, was brought back over several months by slowly incubating it at slightly-increasing temperatures. After 11.5 months, the microbe began to replicate. Scientists believe that it could help us understand how life may exist on other planets. Dr. Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, who headed up the team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University, said: "These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats. The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for even millions of years. H. glaciei is one of just a handful of officially described ultra-small species and the only one so far from the Greenland ice sheet; studying these bacteria can provide insights into how cells can survive and even grow under extremely harsh conditions, such as temperatures down to -56C, little oxygen, low nutrients, high pressure and limited space." She also added that it "isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans, but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals. If there are other ultra-small bacteria that are pathogens, then they could be present in solutions presumed to be sterile. In a clear solution very tiny cells might grow but not create the density sufficient to make the solution cloudy."

Comment Re:Federal overreaching their powers (Score 1) 780

by jdgreen7 (#27835517) Attached to: Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon

My point is, this is a FEDERAL crime they're speaking of. This is definitely something that can be handled and prosecuted at the state level. This has zero effect on national security or interstate commerce...

I'll have to disagree here. This does affect interstate commerce. Let's say that I live in Maryland, and I log into myspace.com, which is a server that's hosted by a commercial entity in Los Angeles. If I then proceed to use their commercial service to harass a person who lives in Texas, that certainly qualifies as "interstate commerce".

Not that I agree with the premise of this bill, but I would have to say that this is within the scope of the federal government's designated powers.

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