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Space

Jodrell Bank May Close Down 53

Posted by kdawson from the not-just-pulsars dept.
Anonymous Astronomer writes "MERLIN, the UK's only radio astronomy facility, is facing closure following the results of a Programmatic Review carried out by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the results of which were announced on Monday. The review placed MERLIN and the upgraded telescope e-MERLIN, due to go online later this year following an investment of £8M, in the low-priority category under serious threat of funding cuts. The upgraded array of telescopes, situated across the UK, will be 30 times more sensitive than the current array and will be a unique facility for observing distant objects and helping us understand the universe. If these cuts go ahead however, not only MERLIN but the entire Observatory including the iconic Lovell telescope, based at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, will be under threat of closure."
Intel

One Laptop Per Child and Intel Join Forces 143

Posted by Zonk from the they-thought-of-the-children dept.
dan the person writes "A Wired piece informs us that Intel and the OLPC project have put their bickering behind them. They have joined forces to ensure 'the maximum number of laptops will reach children'. '"What happened in the past has happened," said Will Swope of Intel. "But going forward, this allows the two organisations to go do a better job and have better impact for what we are both very eager to do which is help kids around the world." "Intel joins the OLPC board as a world leader in technology, helping reach the world's children. Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child. The new agreement means that Intel will sit alongside companies such as Google and Red Hat as partners in the OLPC scheme.'"
Media

Submission + - History of the CD-ROM

Submitted by Gammu
Gammu writes: The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts.
Education

Submission + - Real Open Source Applications for Education?

Submitted by openeducation
openeducation writes: I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. http://os4ed.com/ This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of applications that are open source alternatives to the large and costly commercial alternatives. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for awhile, is part of the solution stack. http://www.miller-group.net/ They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes perfect sense for open source.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Cold fusion by US Navy breakthrough

Submitted by
Tjeerd
Tjeerd writes: "Gordon's plastic wafer is the product of the latest in a long line of "cold fusion" experiments conducted at the US navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California. What makes this one stand out is that it has been published in the respected peer-reviewed journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Konrad Lorenz among its eminent past authors (DOI: 10.1007/s00114-007-0221-7). More can be read at New Scientist."
Announcements

Submission + - Nano Light Bulbs for Your Shirt

Submitted by moscowde
moscowde writes: Craighead Research Group at Corenll University created a so-called "Nano-Lamp" — a microscopic collection of light-emitting fibers with dimensions of only a few hundred nanometers. The fibers are made of a polymer that is spiked with light-emitting molecules using technique called — electrospinning. The nanofiber glows bright orange when exposed to an electric field and can be seen in the dark by a naked eye. A professor at Princeton University called this "a breakthrough in the way nanosize light sources are made". Since the nanofibers are flexible they can be potentially used in clothing and flexible computer display.
United States

Submission + - Geologists discover world's largest fossil forest

Submitted by solitas
solitas writes: The St.Louis post-Dispatch says that geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface.

The four-square-mile fossil forest — the largest find ever — is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.

No photos; but a graphic about how they believe it happened.
Television

Submission + - Score one for the legality of ripping DVDs

Submitted by
Jim Buzbee
Jim Buzbee writes: "Ever wanted to rip all your DVDs to a big network server so that you could select and play them back to your TV? Up until now, manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they've been afraid a lawsuit. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, "nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs. Nothing requires that a DVD be present during playback." Start ripping boys..."

Feed IBM's BlueGene L supercomputer simulates half a mouse brain (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops

Efforts to model the human brain (on IBM's Blue Gene, ironically) haven't reached the point of finality just yet, but it looks like the supercomputer has already tackled a smaller, albeit similar task at the University of Nevada. The research team, which collaborated with gurus from the IBM Almaden Research Lab, have ran a "cortical simulator that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse's brain on the BlueGene L," and considering that it took about eight million neurons into consideration without totally crashing, it remains a fairly impressive achievement. Notably, the process was so intensive that it was only ran for ten seconds at a speed "ten times slower than real-time," and while the team is already looking forward to speeding things up and taking the whole mind into account, it was noted that the simulation (expectedly) "lacked some structures seen in an actual brain." Now, if only these guys could figure out how to mimic the brain and offer up external storage to aid our failing memories.

[Thanks, Richard L.]

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