32473993
submission
Lasrick writes:
Skip past the dry abstract to Jan Beyea's main article for a thorough exploration of what's wrong with current 'safe' levels of low-level radiation exposure. The Bulletin is just releasing its "Radiation Issue", which is available for free for 2 weeks. Explores how the NRC may be changing recommended safe dosages, and how the studies for prolonged exposure have, until recently, been based on one-time exposures (Hiroshima, etc New epidemiological studies on prolonged exposure (medical exposures, worker exposures, etc) are more accurate and tell a different tale. This is a long article, but reads well.
28815931
submission
smitty777 writes:
Two separate studies by the Taub Institute and Harvard have discovered the pathway used by Alzheimer's Disease to spread throught the brain. The studies indicate it's not a virus, but a distorted protien called Tau which moves from cell to cell. This article further explains that "The latest discovery, proving the latter, may now offer scientists a way to move forward and develop a way to block tau’s spread in Alzheimer’s patients, said Karen Duff, a researcher at Columbia’s Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s disease and co-author of one study published Wednesday in journal PLoS One.
“It’s enlightening for us because it now provides a whole other area for potential therapeutic impact,” said Duff. “It’s possible that you can identify the disease and intervene (with potential tau-blocking drugs) before the dementia actually sets in.”"
28815877
submission
hypnosec writes:
Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take.
28814563
submission
Qedward writes:
Two traders at Credit Suisse have pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsifying data after authorities said they had manipulated the bank's record systems, as the credit crunch approached, in order to help conceal over half a billion dollars' worth of losses.
The traders admitted to circumventing a mandatory real time reporting system introduced by Credit Suisse, manually entering false profit and loss (P&L) figures as the products they handled collapsed in value. They did so, according to the accusations, under heavy pressure from their manager, who has also been charged.
28814283
submission
ananyo writes:
One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published in the journal Science (abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542), also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce.
The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation', and shows that this is “uncomfortably common”. Perhaps the most striking finding of the survey was that although 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce.
However, figures from Thomson Reuters suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals.
28796291
submission
chrb writes:
Apple has failed to get a patent ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1N and the Nexus phone in Germany. Presiding Judge Andreas Mueller stated "Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection". The patent in question covered list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display. This news follows the recent Appeals court ruling that upheld the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 ban.
26169720
submission
ryzvonusef writes:
VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in these talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio.
However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers,½Â" it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become "a crucial part" of discussions.
Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't.
