matt_sinclair - Slashdot User

Evolution Battle Brews In Texas 916

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday May 08, 2011 @02:18AM from the extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-evidence dept.

oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."

Breaking the Squid Barrier 126

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 14, 2010 @09:33PM from the calimari-for-the-5000 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Steve O'Shea of Auckland, New Zealand is attempting to break the record for keeping deep sea squid alive in captivity, with the goal of being able to raise a giant squid one day. Right now, he's raising the broad squid, sepioteuthis australis, from egg masses found in seaweed. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because the squid he's studying grow rapidly and eat only live prey, making it hard for them to keep the squid from becoming prey themselves. If his research works out, you might one day be able to visit an aquarium and see giant squid."

Pluto — a Complex and Changing World 191

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 04, 2010 @09:57PM from the can-imagine-quite-a-bit dept.

astroengine writes "After 4 years of processing the highest resolution photographs the Hubble Space Telescope could muster, we now have the highest resolution view of Pluto's surface ever produced. Most excitingly, these new observations show an active world with seasonal changes altering the dwarf planet's surface. It turns out that this far-flung world has more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @12:27PM from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.

longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Fighting With Your Fingers — A Canceled Indie Game Concept For Natal 45

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 23, 2010 @12:51AM from the at-least-they're-thinking dept.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Though Microsoft's Project Natal won't be released until later this year, indie studio Arkedo has already revealed a canceled project for the peripheral. Called 2 Finger Heroes, it was to be a beat 'em up where your fingers do the fighting. 'Characters would be controlled by moving your fingers, while special moves could be done by incorporating your whole hand. The environment could even be affected by moving your arms folded at your chest.' On why it was canceled, one of the developers said, 'One of the design flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities...'"

Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE 142

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @05:40PM from the you-saw-this-coming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."

Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS 419

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 27, 2008 @09:24PM from the do-you-feel-azure-after-use dept.

snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."

Comment Is transparent sync the next killer mobile app? (Score 2, Interesting) 804

by matt_sinclair on Monday June 09, 2008 @07:30PM (#23717425) Attached to: WWDC '08 Sees Slimmer, Improved, 3G iPhone

I blogged about the idea of 'transparent synchronisation' today.

I think it's interesting that the next killer mobile application may not be a mobile application at all, but rather, an application that makes it completely irrelevant and transparent that I am mobile. Regardless of whether I sit down at my desktop at home, my laptop in the airport lounge, or my phone on the go, I get the same, live, consistent view of all of my electronic stuff. This is a hard problem, that's been done quite poorly for the most part. I wonder if Apple has cracked it with Mobile Me?

M@

Slashdot Top Deals