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Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas 559

Posted by kdawson from the three-steps-back dept.
Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."
Graphics

POV-Ray Short Code Animation Winners 80

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 512-bytes-is-plenty dept.
Paul Bourke writes "Every year the POVRay rendering community run a short code competition. The challenge is create an image using a limited number of bytes, normally just 256. This year the competition required the artist to create an animation rather than just an image. The winning entries are now online where you can see what can be created for a meager 512 bytes."
Education

A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider 191

Posted by Zonk from the big-science dept.
davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."
Science

The Blackest Material 299

Posted by kdawson from the reflect-on-this dept.
QuantumCrypto writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created 'the world's first material that reflects virtually no light.' This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and 'smarter' light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."

New Molecules for a Faster Internet 94

Posted by Zonk from the just-think-all-of-the-internets-could-benefit dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of researchers has discovered a new generation of optical molecules which interact 50% more strongly with light than any molecules ever tested. These organic molecules, known as chromophores, have been theorized by physicists at Washington State University, synthesized by chemists in China and tested for their actual optical properties by chemists in Belgium. But if they're excellent candidates for being used in optical technologies such as optical switches and Internet connections, these new materials should not be used before several years — if ever. Read more for additional details and a picture of the physicist who broke a law he established in 1999."
Biotech

Computer Simulation of Cancer Growth 70

Posted by kdawson from the uncontrolled-growth-on-a-math-matrix dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "For a long time now, researchers and scientists have used computer simulations in the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, and engineering. But what about biology? An international team of U.S. and Scottish mathematicians and biologists has built a math model to predict tumor behavior. The researchers say their approach is similar to the one used by weather forecasters. So far, this approach is entirely theoretical. But the scientists see their effort as the beginning of a new era in cancer research — 'a sea change in how biology is being done,' as the lead researcher described it. Read more for additional references and illustrations about this use of computer simulation to predict a cancer evolution."

Deciphering the DNA Code of Neanderthal Man 188

Posted by Zonk from the hey-good-buddy dept.
smooth wombat writes "U.S. and German scientists have embarked on a two-year long project to map the genetic code of Neanderthal man. Their hope is to gain a greater understanding of how modern human brains evolved. This study comes after last years completion of mapping the DNA of chimpanzees, our closest living relative." From the article: "Over two years, the scientists aim to reconstruct a draft of the 3 billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome -- working with fossil samples from several individuals. They face the complication of working with 40,000-year-old samples, and of filtering out microbial DNA that contaminated them after death. Only about 5 percent of the DNA in the samples is actually Neanderthal DNA, Egholm estimated, but he and Rothberg said pilot experiments had convinced them that the decoding was feasible."

Virus Trackers Find Malware With Google 113

Posted by Zonk from the bug-hunters dept.
Casper the Angry Ghost writes "Malware hunters have figured out a way to use the freely available Google SOAP Search API, as well as WDSL, to find dangerous .exe files sitting on thousands of Web servers around the world. Queries can be written to examine the internals of web-accessible binaries, thus allowing the hunters to identify malicious code from across the internet." From the article: "We're finding literally thousands of sites with malicious code executables. From hacker forums, newsgroups to mailing list archives, they're all full of executables that Google is indexing. About 15 percent of the results came back from legitimate Web sites hijacked by malicious hackers and seeded with executables."

First Look at Sony's Tiny Vaio UX180p 178

Posted by timothy from the weentsy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MobileTechReview has posted a first look at the Sony Vaio UX180P Micro PC and comparison of it with UMPC and OQO. "When I first heard about the Sony UX series, I nearly dismissed it because I just couldn't imagine that 1024 x 600 on a 4.5" screen could ever be readable. Yes, the price is certainly another issue-- consumers don't flock to spend twice as much on a "notebook" that's less than half the size of a standard ultralight. At least not in the SUV-lovin' US. Well, happily I was wrong. That tiny XBRITE display is easily readable, despite the number of pixels squeezed into close company""

Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail? 411

Posted by Roblimo from the a-zero-sum-game-in-the-games-industry dept.
Grimwell writes NPD reports that the video games industry isn't doing so hot in 2006. Information on a report found at GameSpot indicates that consoles are down, but PC titles are up, led by MMORPG sales. From the article: "Do MMORPG's benefit the industry by bringing in more actively involved gamers? Or do they bleed money away from other companies in the industry as MMORPG players spend their money on subscriptions and skip out on trying other games that hit the shelf because they already have something to go home to?"

Mobile Phones and Lightning a Lethal Mix 374

Posted by CowboyNeal from the shocking-outcomes dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In a letter to the British Medical Journal, doctors wrote that people should not use mobile phones outdoors during thunderstorms because of the risk of being struck by lightning. Usually 'when someone is struck by lightning, the high resistance of the skin conducts the flash over the body in what is known as a flashover, but if a metal object, such as a phone, is in contact with the skin it disrupts the flashover and increases the odds of internal injuries and death.'"

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