jodirren - Slashdot User

Aftermath of Distant Planetary Collision? 97

Posted by Zonk on Saturday January 19, 2008 @02:33PM from the two-plus-two-equals-weird dept.

gazurtoid writes "Astrobiology Magazine is reporting that astronomers have announced a mystery object orbiting the 8-million-year-old brown dwarf 2M1207 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from the collision and merger of two protoplanets. The object, known as 2M1207B, has puzzled astronomers since its discovery because it seems to fall outside the spectrum of physical possibility. Its combination of temperature, luminosity, and age do not match up with any theory. 'Hot, post-collision planets might be a whole new class of objects we will see with the Giant Magellan Telescope', said Eric Mamajek of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."

World of Warcraft Gold Limit Reached, It's 2^31 479

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday January 19, 2008 @10:27AM from the and-i-thought-my-life-was-void dept.

Mitch writes "Blizzard apparently used signed integers for their World of Warcraft gold values as some people have recently hit the limit of 2^31. "Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means." I guess Blizzard didn't expect anyone to ever get close to that much gold in game."

Teleportation — Fact and Fiction 348

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:22PM from the there-and-back-again dept.

jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"

Bizarre Self-Destructing Palm Tree Found 190

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 18, 2008 @02:01PM from the this-message-will-self-destruct-in-100-years dept.

Smivs writes "A giant self-destructing palm tree has been discovered in Madagascar. The palm is 20m (60ft) high with leaves 5m (16ft) long, the tallest tree of its type in the country, but for most of its life — around 100 years — it appears fairly unremarkable apart from its size. However, when it flowers, it puts so much energy into an impressive flower-spike, that it eventually collapses and dies. Dr John Dransfield, who announced the tree in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, is baffled as to how it came to be in the country. It bears a resemblance to a species of palm found in regions of Asia; 6,000km away. It is thought that the palm has gone through a remarkable evolution since Madagascar split with India some 80m years ago."

Comment Re:Not quite there yet! (Score 1) 194

by jodirren on Wednesday July 11, 2007 @06:13PM (#19831441) Attached to: John Knoll on CGI, Tron And 25 Years of Change

I mean, are they even using earth's gravity acceleration of 9.8 m/s2????

Of course they are. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting the dynamics of the body correct. Modeling gravity is easy, but modeling all the tendons, ligaments, and muscles of humans (or almost any species for that matter) is extremely complicated. Biomechanics is a huge area of research exactly because it's so complicated and we're only just reaching a point where we can think about simulating the human body on computers, be it for entertainment or scientific/medical research.

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