plastiqueman - Slashdot User

Pristine Big Bang Gas Found 220

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 11, 2011 @01:27PM from the drill-baby-drill dept.

New submitter cekerr sends this quote from Discovery News: "U.S. scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which contain only original elements created moments after the universe's birth (abstract). Unlike everything else in the universe, the gas clouds have never mingled with elements forged later in stars. The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion, some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed."

Comment Accumulate Naturally? (Score 1) 59

by plastiqueman on Wednesday July 27, 2011 @03:02PM (#36899720) Attached to: X-rays For Stargazing Turn Into Cancer Treatment

As a PhD candidate who works with noble metal nanoparticles on a daily basis, I have some issues with their work.

1. How do they plan to get the particles to "naturally" accumulate in tumors without some sort of surface coating; specifically one incorporating some sort of tumor sensing molecule?

2. If the nanoparticle is coated with some other molecule, do they still expect "low-energy" electrons to punch through without trouble? How low is "low-energy" anyway? In my experience, when dodecanethiol is attached to a nanoparticle surface (which is very common as a generic molecule for the synthesis work) 200 KeV electrons have no problem punching through, but this coating is much less transparent to a 40-80 KeV electron beam.

3. How well do these particles absorb x-rays anyway? The surface plasmon resonance peak (i.e. the wavelength of EM radiation that it preferentially absorbs) typically occurs in the 300-800 nm range for these (noble metal) nanoparticles. If there isn't a great absorption peak here, how much adjacent tissue are we cooking?

It just seems preliminary to elevate this to "treatment" status when the article really doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the work.

X-rays For Stargazing Turn Into Cancer Treatment 59

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @03:10PM from the as-above-so-below dept.

derGoldstein writes "Discovery posted an interesting story of how X-rays that are used by astronomers for determining the various chemical abundances inside stars could also potentially be used for more effective radiation therapy: 'Radiation treatment is a coarse instrument at best, since it destroys surrounding healthy cells as well as cancerous tumors. Much research is underway for targeted methods to reduce the collateral damage and attack just the cancer cells, including embedding nanoparticles inside tumors ... Nahar and Pradham envision a prototype device capable of generating x-rays (gzipped PDF) at the key frequencies to trigger a flood of low-energy electrons in platinum and gold, based on their computer simulations. Gold or platinum nanoparticles would amass naturally in cancerous tumors in the body, and could then be zapped with the focused x-ray beam.'"

Apple Plans New Spaceship-like Campus 279

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @10:46AM from the spend-spend-spend dept.

itwbennett has a story that might answer the question of what Apple is doing with the billions they have in the bank. "Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday presented plans for a new Apple campus to the Cupertino City Council. The office building will look 'a little like a spaceship landed,' said Jobs. It will also be just 4 stories tall, is big enough to house all 12,000 Apple employees (with room for growth), and will generate its own energy." Keep reading to see the riveting town council meeting.

Submission + - Osama's Death Sets Twitter Record (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by

gabbo529

on Monday May 02, 2011 @05:27PM

gabbo529 writes: "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second,"

Submission + - VMware causes 2nd outage while recovering from 1st (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

jbrodkin

on Monday May 02, 2011 @04:58PM

jbrodkin writes: "VMware's new Cloud Foundry service was online for just two weeks when it suffered its first outage, caused by a power failure. Things got really interesting the next day, when a VMware employee accidentally caused a second, more serious outage while a VMware team was writing up a plan of action to recover from future power loss incidents. An inadvertent press of a key on a keyboard led to "a full outage of the network infrastructure [that] took out all load balancers, routers, and firewalls ... and resulted in a complete external loss of connectivity to Cloud Foundry." Clearly, human error is still a major factor in cloud networks."

Submission + - Google wants your voice data (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP on Monday May 02, 2011 @04:50PM

00_NOP writes: Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has told New Scientist that one of the reasons the search engine launched Google Voice is that it needs more human voice data to perfect the sort of "big data, simple algorithm" probabilistic approach to translating voices to text that drives Google Translate. Norvig says that no one is listening to your calls on Google Voice — it is simply their servers trying to the translation right.

Submission + - OS X Crimeware Kit Emerges (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Monday May 02, 2011 @03:47PM

Trailrunner7 writes: Crimeware kits have become a ubiquitous part of the malware scene in the last few years, but they have mainly been confined to the Windows platform. Now, reports are surfacing that the first such kit targeting Apple's Mac OS X operating system has appeared.

The kit is being compared to the Zeus kit, which has been one of the more popular and pervasive crimeware kits for several years now. A report by CSIS, a Danish security firm, said that the OS X kit uses a template that's quite similar to the Zeus construction and has the ability to steal forms from Firefox.

Submission + - Murder Trial May Turn on Missing Internet Router (wral.com)

Submitted by

bgood

on Monday May 02, 2011 @02:18PM

bgood writes: "The outcome of a murder trial taking place in Charlotte, NC, may turn on a missing router. State prosecutors believe that Brad Cooper may have used the router (never recovered by investigators) to make it appear his wife made a phone call from the house the day she disappeared. The trial is in its 8th week."

Ask Slashdot: Do I Give IT a Login On Our Dept. Server? 1307

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 18, 2011 @12:18PM from the would-they-give-one-to-you dept.

jddorian writes "I am head of a clinical division at an academic hospital (not Radiology, but similarly tech oriented). My fellow faculty (a dozen or so) want to switch from a paper calendar to electronic (night and weekend on-call schedule). Most have an iPhone or similar, so I envisaged a CalDAV server. The Hospital IT department doesn't offer any iPhone compatible calendar tool, so I bought (with my cash) a tiny server, installed BSD and OpenLDAP for accounts, and installed and configured DAViCal. After I tested it out, I emailed IT to ask to allow port 8443 through the hospital firewall to this server. The tech (after asking what port 8443 was for), said he would unblock the port after I provide him with a login account on the machine (though 'I don't need root access'). I was taken aback, and after considering it, I am still leaning toward opposing this request, possibly taking this up the chain. I'm happy to allow any scan, to ensure it has no security issues, but I'd rather not let anyone else have a login account. What do the readers of Slashdot think? Should I give IT a login account on a server that is not owned or managed by them?"

Internet Blacklist Back In Congress 278

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @04:04PM from the nobody-talks-about-my-orange-list dept.

Adrian Lopez writes "A bill giving the government the power to shut down Web sites that host materials that infringe copyright is making its way quietly through the lame-duck session of Congress, raising the ire of free-speech groups and prompting a group of academics to lobby against the effort. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced in Congress this fall by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). It would grant the federal government the power to block access to any Web domain that is found to host copyrighted material without permission."

YouTube Gets a Vuvuzela Button (Seriously) 305

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 24, 2010 @08:45AM from the just-stop-watching-sports dept.

teh31337one writes "YouTube always has had a way with pranks. Some time in the last hour, the world's largest video portal activated a new button on some videos that looks like a tiny soccer ball. Clicking it will activate an endless, incredibly annoying sound that sounds vaguely like a swarm of insects. Or, for anyone who has been watching the World Cup, like the dreaded vuvuzela — an instrument commonly played in South Africa at football (soccer) games. South Africa is, of course, the host country for this year's World Cup, and fans watching the games have been subjected to the vuvuzela's mindless drone for hours on end. The noise is so annoying that television networks have taken measures to filter it out, and guides have popped up showing viewers how to block it from their TV sets and computers. I'm not seeing the button show up on all videos, but it is definitely appearing on some clips that aren't soccer-related."

Might Shatner Boldly Lead Canada As Governor? 318

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 22, 2010 @10:34AM from the universal-healthcare-and-captain-kirk dept.

just fiddling around writes "Now that Michaëlle Jean is approaching the end of her customary five-year post as Governor General of Canada, the rumor mill has started on who Prime Minister Steven Harper will propose to the Queen in her stead. According to the CBC, the short list includes Captain Kirk, actor William Shatner. It seems that acting can lead to the highest offices in places other than California."

Win7 Can Delete All System Restore Points On Reboot 449

Posted by kdawson on Saturday May 01, 2010 @11:15PM from the yes-we-have-no-recovery dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Astonishingly, the so-called system restore feature in Windows 7 deletes restore points without warning when the system is rebooted. This forum thread on answers.microsoft.com shows some of the users who have experienced the problem. Today I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (no dual boot), and noticed that whenever the machine rebooted after installing an application or driver, the disk churned for several minutes on the 'starting Windows' screen. Turns out that churning was the sound of my diligently created system restore points being deleted. Unfortunately I only found this out when Windows barfed at a USB dongle and I wanted to restore the system to an earlier state. This is an extraordinarily bad bug, which I suspect most Windows 7 users won't realise is affecting them until it's too late."

Japanese Consortium Projects a Humanoid Robot On the Moon By 2015 151

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 29, 2010 @04:03PM from the why-can't-they-send-them-all? dept.

JoshuaInNippon writes "A Japanese manufacturing cooperative named Astro-Technology SOHLA announced on April 27th that they are planning to create and send a two-legged humanoid robot to the moon, have it draw the Japanese flag on the surface, and hopefully then get it to return to the Earth, all by the year 2015. The group wants to inspire people, particularly in Japan, about space and generate confidence among SMEs to create low-cost space technology. While the idea may seem far-fetched to some, SOHLA had success in building a small low-cost satellite named Maido-1, which was launched into space aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket in early 2009. The group also commented that they want to have their future humanoid robot hitch a ride to the moon with a surveying rover that JAXA is building."

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