tx413 - Slashdot User

Signs of Water Found On Saturnian Moon Enceladus 79

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @12:23PM from the moon-names-that-make-me-hungry dept.

Matt_dk writes "Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Enceladus. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 and reported in the journal Icarus, provide evidence for the presence of liquid water, which suggests the ingredients for life inside the icy moon. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons."

Comment Humans? (Score 2, Funny) 289

by tx413 on Monday June 01, 2009 @01:28PM (#28170239) Attached to: Rumors Flying About New iPhone Capabilities

"... including a complete human translation on the MacRumors forum" What are you saying about the Chinese?

Comment Blockbuster was FIRST (Score 1) 57

by tx413 on Thursday March 26, 2009 @02:22PM (#27345435) Attached to: Blockbuster OnDemand Comes To TiVo

Blockbuster was actually FIRST to try streaming video to the masses.

Does anybody remember the Enron / Blockbuster deal from 1999? I was working at Enron Broadband back then and we had a deal with Blockbuster to deliver streaming movies to people's homes via a custom set-top box. And yes it was part of *that* Enron.

Way way ahead of its time. Consumer broadband was in the DSL stage. I of course had 6Mb cable modem at home but most of America was asking "why do I need 6Mb?" And DSL would barely keep up with the bandwidth needed for an MPEG4 movie. Yes we were going to use MPEG4. There was talk of having it only for condo and apartment complexes where you could install a higher bandwidth dedicated link and a server of some sort to cache the video. I don't remember too many other technical details.

We had some cool test sites, many many of the set top boxes made, and I thought we were good to go. But the deal eventually fell through because BB couldn't get enough movie rights from Warner Bros, other movie companies, and there were doubts about the practicality of it all. And Enron was about to topple anyway.

Comment Re:Backup ? Never (Score 1) 393

by tx413 on Thursday December 11, 2008 @07:28PM (#26083577) Attached to: I Backup My Personal Data..

... and if your hard drive fails, submit a FOIA request for the data. If DOHS is in a good mood that day they might actually give you a copy.

Safe Stem Cells Produced From Adult Cells 207

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 28, 2008 @11:51AM from the spare-parts dept.

hackingbear writes "Wired, citing a paper published in Science magazine, reports that Harvard scientists may have found a safer way of giving a flake of skin the biologically alchemical powers of embryonic stem cells by turning adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage. The technique involves 'adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA.' Four-month trials on mice demonstrated that the resulting stem cells are free from unpredictable cancer-inducing mutations. This is definitely a breakthrough in stem cell research." Additional coverage is available at Yahoo, and Science hosts the research paper, although you'll need a subscription to see more than the abstract.

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