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Comment I guess 'Giant' is relative (Score 2) 98

From the article :

Modern-day scientists on their own Moby Dick-style search used a submersible to get them into the dark and cold depths of the northern Pacific Ocean, where at around 630 meters they managed to film a three-meter specimen.

Though it also says that the squid was missing it's two longest arms and would have been eight meters long if it was whole...

IBM

Landmark Calculation Clears the Way To Answering How Matter Is Formed 205

First time accepted submitter smazsyr writes "An international collaboration of scientists is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors. 'This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,' says a co-author of the paper."

Comment "Reel-to-reel" for real (Score 4, Interesting) 650

I thought for sure the 'reel-to-reel' in the summary was a joke, but here's a quote from TFA :

And while Mr. Strachmans movies were given to soldiers as a form of charity, studios do send military bases reel-to-reel films, which are much harder to copy, and projectors for the troops overseas.

Comment 10 Second Advantage (Score 1) 199

The 'Science of Sport' blog wrote about this in 2009 : http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/11/oscar-pistorius-gets-10-second.html Back then, two scientists hired to look at the case found that the artificial limbs would take 10 or more seconds off his 400 meter time. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/smu-opa111709.php

Comment Re:solar & wind power (Score 1) 405

I used to dry all my clothes outside on a line. Then I measured how much electricity my electric dryer is using and found it cost around $0.20 to dry my clothes. Now we only use the clothesline for drying sheets. It's not worth my time to hang up an entire load of clothes on the line for $0.20. Raise the cost of electricity and I'll change my mind, until then I'm using the dryer.
The Internet

Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine" 133

Khuffie writes "Adobe, along with the University of Washington, are developing Zoetrope, an application that will offer a dynamic new view of the web. It is hard to explain on paper, but you can see a brilliant video of the application in action. Essentially, Zoetrope will allow users to travel back in time through a website, and see how the website gets changed. A user can create lenses on the website, for example, focusing on the price of a DVD at Amazon, and see how the price went up and down over the coming months. More interestingly, you can link lenses together across different websites, and for example, see how the price of gas was affected by say, the aggregated google news result of 'war.'"
Desktops (Apple)

Journal Journal: OpenMac: A high-end Mac for a quarter of the price?

The OpenMac is a whitebox computer built to run an unmodified OS X Leopard kernel. Made by the Psystar Corporation, it would be substantially cheaper than any upgrade-capable Apple Mac.

The base model OpenMac with Intel GMA graphics sells for $399. It remains to be seen how long Psystar survive under the onslaught of Apple's legal team.

Comment Cipher Challenge Site (Score 5, Informative) 95

More details on the challenge (and Colussus) can be found here : http://www.tnmoc.co.uk/cipher1.htm

At the same time as the international team receives the enciphered messages, radio amateurs around the world will be able to receive the same radio broadcasts and try their hand at decrypting it. It will be fascinating to see who completes the job first!

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