4325893
submission
MeatBag PussRocket writes:
An article from Marketplace.org ( http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/04/28/pm_hairmats/ ) reports:
"A Florida company has developed an all-natural product that it says could revolutionize how food is grown in the U.S. It's called Smart Grow, but it might be a tough sell. It's inexpensive. It eliminates the need for pesticides, so it's environmentally friendly, but its human hair... Plant pathologists at the University of Florida have found the mats eliminate weeds better than leading herbicides... University of Florida researchers have found that hair mats can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger."
437648
submission
slick_shoes writes:
Researchers working on the 'Blue Brain' project have developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column — the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains — of a two-week-old rat, and it behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. The machine that simulates this column is an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer. Project director Henry Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain.
436878
submission
Richard Pritches writes:
MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS).
Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link
http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf
I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit.
Richard
205143
submission
Pisces writes:
Over the past several days, Microsoft flip-flopped on virtualization in Vista, with one ascribing the change in policy to concerns over DRM. A piece at Ars Technica raises another, more likely possiblity: fear of Apple. Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price. 'All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM. The latter is absolutely crucial; telling users that they need to reboot into their Windows OS isn't nearly as sexy as, say, Coherence in Parallels. If you've never seen Coherence, it's quite amazing. You don't need to run Windows apps in a VM window of Vista. Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away. VMWare also has similar technology, dubbed Unity.' Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?
