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Comment Separate cyclists from cars (Score 2) 696

When I (dutch guy) visited Florida this year, I was surprised that the bike lanes were a small strip at this side of the road.
So we have cars going at 60 mph next to bicycles going 15-20 mph. Notice the difference in speed?
That is why there are sidewalks, that are clearly separated from the road.

In the Netherlands bike lanes next to highways are separated by a strip of land, barrier, etc. or the maximum speed is 20-30 mph when cyclists and cars share the road.
If the number of cyclists in the US increase dramatically, the only way to reduce the number of accidents is to separate the two.
The Netherlands is there already, so the infrastructure is now in place. It just took a couple of decades + dead cyclists to get there.

Science

Invisibility Cloak Created In 3-D 113

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions. The 'cloak,' described in the journal Science (abstract; full text requires login), hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans. Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible. This is a very early but significant step towards a true invisibility cloak." The "object" hidden in this work was a bump one micrometer high. The light used was just longer than the wavelengths our eyes detect. To get a visible-light cloak, the features of the cloaking metamaterial would need to be reduced in size from 300 nm to 10 nm.
OS X

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.

Comment Re:Prototype in article doesn't seem very practica (Score 1) 245

I was not very clear in my original post. The image projected on the retina must be in focus, right?

Ergo the system must somehow do a continuous auto-focus on the changing properties of the lens of your eye as you are automatically adapting your lens to the distance of the object you intend to see. If that isn't the case, your one eye will continuously try to focus on the projected image and the other eye will try to focus on the outside world. I can tell you that that is arduous.

Comment Prototype in article doesn't seem very practical (Score 2, Informative) 245

I mean the thing is right in front of one of your eyes. This means the other eye is free to look at the environment. This leaves the brain the arduous task to merge the two images into something useful.

Also the retina isn't that big. You are practically forced to look just right into the display to see something at all.

I'm working at a device to make pictures of the retina and it's pretty hard to make good images of the retina. These guys projects something on it that must be sharp enough to be useful. Kudos if they pull it off, but I'm skeptical. Show me the goods. This is just marketing blabla.

Comment What about someone who is deaf? (Score 1) 154

I know for certain that otoacoustic emissions are a method to detect that someone is deaf. It is used in the Netherlands and other countries to detect deaf or hard of hearing children when they are only a couple of weeks old. If there is hardly any emission there is a strong indication that the child has hearing problems. I assume that low levels of emissions will also make it hard to perform identification (SNR issues etc.).

I guess you will have the same problem with other biometric systems too. There will always be a small part of the population that misses the human body part that is used for a specific method of identification.

Education

Dead Birds Do Tell Tales 21

grrlscientist writes "While many natural history museum study skin collections have specimens that are more than 100 years old, most museum tissue collections are very recent — in fact, many were initiated during the 1980s. Due to the perishable nature of tissues, they are expensive to maintain and must be carefully managed and continually replenished. Unfortunately, funding shortages and other considerations have made it more difficult for museums to collect animals as often as they did in the past. Therefore, tissues from both wild and captive animals are limited, particularly those from rare and difficult-to-collect animals, such as lories."

Comment Cannot reproduce results (Score 5, Informative) 532

After reading the original report I tried to reproduce a simple test for the adobe home page. I used Firefox 3.0.7 and pre-loaded the adobe home page (as suggested in the report), I closed the tab and opened a new one and reloaded the adobe home page. It loaded in 2 or 3 seconds instead of the 9 seconds in the report. I am not sure what to make of this report if a simple experiment to reproduce the measurements fails on the first try. I ran the test on Windows XP Professional SP3.

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