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Power

AP Investigation Concludes US Nuke Regulators Weakening Safety Rules 199

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-the-worst-that-could-happen? dept.
Raenex writes "An investigation by the Associated Press has found a pattern of safety regulations being relaxed in order to keep aging nuclear power plants running. According to their investigation, when reactor parts fail or systems fall out of compliance with the rules, studies are conducted by the industry and government. The studies conclude that existing standards are 'unnecessarily conservative.' Regulations are loosened, and the reactors are back in compliance. From the article: 'Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards. Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes — all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP's yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.'"

Comment Re:Fukushima (Score 4, Informative) 537

by orangedan (#35609036) Attached to: Fukushima Radioactive Fallout Nears Chernobyl Levels
As for the levels in the water, they appear to have gone done quite quickly . Personally, I trust these guys because they give strict facts and no speculation. I have yet to see any reports of Hong Kong vegetables, but I admit I'm too lazy to google. That said, my (again, admittedly) knee-jerk reaction is to point out all the sketchy stuff in the past with China and other food products and ask if it might not be something else.

Things are slowly getting better. It wasn't the best two weeks, but life in Japan goes on as normal. That said, I'm down in Kyoto, which is pretty far from it all.

Comment Re:Imagine the sales conversation (Score 1) 276

by orangedan (#35487458) Attached to: Microsoft Reportedly Ends Zune Hardware Development
Personally, I like the zune interface. In my opinion it's better than the "cluttered desktop" UI that apple used and others have been copying. I like the UI in OS X, but thought apple could come up with something more clean for their touch-screen products.

Zune's UI is slick. Well, I have a Zune "HD". I really like navigating through the device. Anecdotal as this may be.

I find most interfaces are only "intuitive" because they're just like every one that's come before, so it's different and people don't like it. Microsoft's been using that to their advantage in the OS market, and get criticized. They do something different on their mobile devices, and get criticized. Developing a good UI is not as easy as it seems...

Comment Re:Another drive by hit piece (Score 1) 962

by orangedan (#35416194) Attached to: The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science

How much evidence will be enough?

When the data, methods, and code for analysis being used to make multi-billion dollar legislation world-wide is released publicly, so people can verify and repeat their analysis, I can say at least I will be convinced. That's really all I want. If I can run their simulations and get the same result, if scientists can go out and retrieve similar data with the same methods, then I'm good. I've done enough research work in my life to know that numbers and simulations are often run until a "good" result comes up so they can get published. Bad science, yes, but it happens.

I completely agree, however, that reducing our environmental impact is a great idea, AGW, GW, or whatever else we're talking about. It just makes sense. I'm just skeptical of things politicians say will kill us all. Governments have used fear to control people in the past. I just want to know that 2 + 2 still = 4, and not 5.
The Internet

Internet Groups To Stream Live IPv4/6 Announcement 185

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hey-thats-almost-now dept.
revealingheart writes "On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC/GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses. We invite all interested community members to view the webcast of this event."

Comment Re:Interesting uses... (Score 1) 244

by orangedan (#35027808) Attached to: Sony Reveals the Next Generation Portable Console
Gaming is actually helping fuel a lot of research by driving down prices on things that are normally quite expensive. For example, the robotics lab I work at is filled with Kinects just because, compared to the price of the laser range-finders we use, it's quite cheap considering its precision. Wii-motes as well. Granted, I too am surprised by the new PSP in the hospital. Goes to show that make a highly functional general purpose tool available for cheap, and people will use it in creative ways!
The Internet

Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet 487

Posted by CmdrTaco from the left-or-right dept.
Shareable writes "Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that."
Medicine

Team Use Stem Cells to Restore Mobility in Paralyzed Monkey 196

Posted by samzenpus from the we-can-rebuild-him dept.
interval1066 writes "From the article: 'Japanese researchers said Wednesday they had used stem cells to restore partial mobility in a small monkey that had been paralysed from the neck down by a spinal injury.' This is huge news in the world of stem cell research; restoring some muscular control to a simian is a huge step. This means that stem cell therapy is a demonstrably viable path to restoring motility for millions of accident victims, palsy and ms sufferers, the list just goes on."
Programming

Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 728

Posted by samzenpus from the fresh-design dept.
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"
United Kingdom

Two-Photon Walk a Giant Leap For Quantum Computing 112

Posted by timothy from the stochastically-awesome dept.
ElectricSteve writes "Research conducted at the University of Bristol means a number of quantum computing algorithms may soon be able to execute calculations of a complexity far beyond what today's computers allow us to do. The breakthrough involves the use of a specially designed optical chip to perform what's known as a 'quantum walk' with two particles ... and it suggests the era of quantum computing may be approaching faster than the scientific establishment had predicted. A random walk – a mathematical concept with useful applications in computer science – is the trajectory of an object taking successive steps in a random direction, be it over a line (with only two possible directions) or over a multi-dimensional space. A quantum walk is the same concept, but translated to the world of quantum computing, a field in which randomness plays a central role. Quantum walks form an essential part of many of the algorithms that make this new kind of computation so promising, including search algorithms that will perform exponentially faster than the ones we use today."
Science

Morphing Metals 121

Posted by samzenpus from the forge-ahead dept.
aarondubrow writes "Imagine a metal that 'remembers' its original, cold-forged shape, and can return to that shape when exposed to heat or a magnetic pulse. Like magic out of a Harry Potter novel, such a metal could contract on command, or swing back and forth like a pendulum. Believe it or not, such metals already exist. First discovered in 1931, they belong to a class of materials called 'shape memory alloys (SMA),' whose unique atomic make-up allows them to return to their initial form, or alternate between forms through a phase change."
Space

Aging Star System Leaves Strange Death Spiral 79

Posted by Soulskill from the tox-utaht-spotted dept.
jamie tips a post at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog about an extremely unusual astronomical phenomenon originating from a binary system about 3000 light years away. Quoting: "The name of this thing is AFGL 3068. It's been known as a bright infrared source for some time, but images just showed it as a dot. This Hubble image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys reveals an intricate, delicate and exceedingly faint spiral pattern. ... Red giants tend to blow a lot of their outer layers into space in an expanding spherical wind; think of it as a super-solar wind. The star surrounds itself with a cloud of this material, essentially enclosing it in a cocoon. In general the material isn't all that thick, but in some of these stars there is an overabundance of carbon in the outer layers which gets carried along in these winds. ... AFGL 3068 is a carbon star and most likely evolved just like this, but with a difference: it's a binary. As the two stars swing around each other, the wind from the carbon star doesn't expand in a sphere. Instead, we see a spiral pattern as the material expands."

Comment Re:Three drinks a day is "heavy"? (Score 1) 470

by orangedan (#33432950) Attached to: 3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

I don't know why the hell we let people who hate the idea of a good time dictate what's socially acceptable

Though I agree with you that it's difficult to put a number on "moderate" when the population differs so much, I would really like to point out that people who don't drink/drink lightly all "hate the idea of a good time".
Science

Israeli Scientists Freeze Water By Warming It 165

Posted by timothy from the you-must-become-the-frozen-water dept.
ccktech writes "As reported by NPR and Chemistry world, the journal Science has a paper by David Ehre, Etay Lavert, Meir Lahav, and Igor Lubomirsky [note: abstract online; payment required to read the full paper] of Israel's Weizmann Institute, who have figured out a way to freeze pure water by warming it up. The trick is that pure water has different freezing points depending on the electrical charge of the surface it resides on. They found out that a negatively charged surface causes water to freeze at a lower temperature than a positively charged surface. By putting water on the pyroelectric material Lithium Tantalate, which has a negative charge when cooler but a positive change when warmer; water would remain a liquid down to -17 degrees C., and then freeze when the substrate and water were warmed up and the charge changed to positive, where water freezes at -7 degrees C."

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