Slashdot Mirror

jd writes "I've been monitoring the progress of Bloodhound SSC (the car aiming for the 1,000 MPH record) and it looks like they're opting for some interesting tactics. In April, the car itself went partially open source, with a complete set of schematics and specifications and an invite for engineering bugfixes. According to them, it's the first time a racing team has done this. Sounds likely enough. The latest patches to be released were a tripling in fin size and a switch to steel brakes because carbon fibre would explode."

Coisiche writes "Despite recent events in Japan and the certain public outcry that it will generate, the UK government proposes to build new nuclear power stations. Well, earthquakes and tsunamis are very rare here."

maroberts writes "According to a research paper produced from a collaboration between the University of Texas and the Centre for European Economic Research, violent video games may induce aggressive behavior, but the incapacitation effect outweighs this and produces a genuine reduction in violent crime. This paper was referenced in a BBC news story giving reasons why the US crime rates are falling (at least outside the prisons!)"

chrb pointed out a story at BBC News about the discovery of a light-sensitive protein in the human eye that acts like a "compass" in a magnetic field. The molecule at the center of the study is called cryptochrome and is found in every animal on Earth. If removed from the eyes of flies, the flies lost the ability to respond to a magnetic field. From the article: "Despite much controversy, no conclusive evidence exists that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field, and the find may revive interest in the idea. Although humans, like migratory birds, are known to have cryptochrome in their eyes, the idea of human magnetoreception has remained largely unexplored since pioneering experiments by Robin Baker of the University of Manchester in the 1980s."

An anonymous reader writes "Bug Hunter Aaron Portnoy claims to have earned $60K in 3 months as a bug hunter when he was 19 years old. Pretty impressive. Tighter company budgets and increased pressure to get a product ready by its release date means code isn't checked so thoroughly and bug frequency rises. From the article: 'Mozilla — makers of the Firefox web browser — were first to start a bug bounty programme in 2004. Their top prize is currently $3,000 (£1,800) and they have paid out about $40,000 (£25,000) per year since then. Their top earner is a student in Germany who has bagged more than $30,000 (£18,000) from a series of discoveries.'"

sanzibar writes "Not satisfied with the legal conclusion of the DOJ, the Obama administration found other in-house lawyers willing to declare a bomb dropped from a drone is not 'hostile'. The strange conclusion has big implications in determining the President's compliance with the law. If drone strikes are in fact hostile and the Libyan campaign continues past Sunday, he may very well be breaking the law."

H3xx writes "Astronomers have observed a black hole shredding a star and sending a powerful beam of energy toward Earth. When it was first observed on March 28th by the Swift spacecraft, it was thought to be the implosion of an aging star, but is now believed to be the result of a star wandering too close to a black hole, imploding and converting 10% of the star's mass into gamma radiation. The energy burst is still visible by telescope more than two-and-a-half months later, the researchers report in the journal Science."

mdsolar writes "The Mafia has been involved with waste disposal for forever but they seem to be getting very interested in nuclear waste disposal these days. In Europe they scuttle ships containing nuclear waste in the sea. Now in Japan, their Asian counterparts are angling for disposal contracts resulting from the Fukushima nuclear disaster."

MancunianMaskMan writes "Sharks in the seas all around the world are interested in this story, though the less scientifically-minded will read the summary on the beeb web site about laser light produced by a living cell. The technique starts by engineering a cell that can produce a light-emitting protein that was first obtained from glowing jellyfish."

DotNM writes "CityNews and other media outlets are reporting that the International Monetary Fund has been hit by a 'cyber attack.' They are withholding most of the details; however, it is known that the World Bank has shut down a 'link' between them and the IMF." Adds reader Hugh Pickens, "A cyber security expert told Reuters the infiltration had been a targeted attack, which installed software designed to give a nation state a 'digital insider presence' at the IMF. 'The code was developed and released for this purpose,' said Tom Kellerman, who has worked for the Fund. Bloomberg quoted an unnamed security expert as saying the hackers were connected to a foreign government — however, such attacks are very difficult to trace."

Unlike the CDC, a freedom of information request submitted to the Leicester City Council has revealed that the council is not prepared for an unexpected zombie invasion. From the article: "'We've had a few wacky ones before but this one did make us laugh,' said Lynn Wyeth, head of information governance. The Freedom of Information Act allows a right of access to recorded information held by public authorities. Ms Wyeth said she was unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan, however some elements of it could be applied if the situation arose."

Tasha26 writes "After the suicides and fatal explosion, the Taiwanese company Foxconn now faces losing its blue-chip status. Falling prices for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other gadgets and rising wages in China have undermined Foxconn's financial performance. The company lost $220m (£135m) in 2010. Foxconn International will be removed from Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng index and be replaced by insurer AIA and nappy maker Hengan. The two new entrants use China both as a source of cheap labour and as a market for their product, a switch which Foxconn is now considering."

Tasha26 writes "After the suicides and fatal explosion, the Taiwanese company Foxconn now faces losing its blue-chip status. Falling prices for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other gadgets and rising wages in China have undermined Foxconn's financial performance. The company lost $220m (£135m) in 2010. Foxconn International will be removed from Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng index and be replaced by insurer AIA and nappy maker Hengan. The two new entrants use China both as a source of cheap labour and as a market for their product, a switch which Foxconn is now considering."

Tasha26 writes "After the suicides and fatal explosion, the Taiwanese company Foxconn now faces losing its blue-chip status. Falling prices for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other gadgets and rising wages in China have undermined Foxconn's financial performance. The company lost $220m (£135m) in 2010. Foxconn International will be removed from Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng index and be replaced by insurer AIA and nappy maker Hengan. The two new entrants use China both as a source of cheap labour and as a market for their product, a switch which Foxconn is now considering."

rawagajah writes "World IPv6 Day this Wednesday will shake out any bugs for websites running on IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. However, cloud server provider ElasticHosts points out that IPv6-only websites are still a long way off — they only make sense after access is overwhelmingly IPv6 capable. In the meantime, the market in IPv4 space will presumably only grow, benefiting the IPv4 hogs..."

summerbreeze writes "Researchers at the University of Toronto have conducted a two-slit experiment, published in Science, that uses 'weak measurement' on photons to push back the boundaries of what can be known about them, given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Jason Palmer does a great job reporting this experiment to us mere mortals in a BBC article: 'The team allowed the photons to pass through a thin sliver of the mineral calcite which gave each photon a tiny nudge in its path, with the amount of deviation dependent on which slit it passed through. By averaging over a great many photons passing through the apparatus, and only measuring the light patterns on a camera, the team was able to infer what paths the photons had taken. While they were able to easily observe the interference pattern indicative of the wave nature of light, they were able also to see from which slits the photons had come, a sure sign of their particle nature."

Like so many, Russians are finding themselves unfulfilled by planking, and a few are now burying themselves alive. The practice has become so common that State newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta has even run a feature on it. Unfortunately, a Russian man has died after persuading a friend to bury him alive for a night, hoping it would bring him 'good luck.' Alexei Lubinsky, a senior aide to the region's chief investigator says, 'According to his friend, the man wanted to test his endurance and insistently asked his friend to help him spend the night buried. We know that the victim was a computer programmer and that he has a small child.'"

donberryman writes "Steven Moffat told the BBC 'There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe.'" And so, 400+ encounters later, both the Doctor and the daleks will take a break from each other.

iONiUM writes "Through a press release ahead of WWDC, Apple has revealed that it will be releasing its own cloud service to rival Google and Amazon's. In addition, they will unveil the new iOS, and the latest desktop OS." Apple also announced the release of the iWork suite for iOS devices.

Some have compared them to kamikazes, but the more than 200 elderly volunteers who want clean up the Fukushima power station say they are just being practical. 72-year-old retired engineer Yasuteru Yamada says: "I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live. Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer." So far the government is hesitant to let the volunteers into the power station but Yamada and the others have been lobbying for the right to aid in the clean up. He says: "At this moment I can say that I am talking with many key government and Tepco people. But I am sorry I can't say any more at this moment. It is on the way but it is a very, very sensitive issue politically."

krou writes "A new technique dubbed 'space archeology' using satellites and infra-red imaging has helped uncover 17 new pyramids in Egypt, as well as some 1,000 tombs, and 3,000 ancient settlements. The mud bricks used to build Egyptian structures means it has a different density to the surrounding soil, and thus shows up in the images. Dr Sarah Parcak, who pioneered the technique, said that 'Indiana Jones is old school, we've moved on from Indy, sorry Harrison Ford.'"

gbjbaanb writes "A revolutionary UK spaceplane concept has been boosted by the conclusions of an important technical review. Skylon is a design for a spaceplane that uses engines that work as normal jets near the ground and switch to rocket propulsion in the upper atmosphere. The concept means the plane will not have to carry as much fuel and so will not need disposable stages. It is estimated (by its developers) that the Skylon will drop the cost of delivering payloads to orbit from $15,000 per kilo to $1000."

MasterPatricko writes "Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany have published a technique to push optical data transfer rates to new levels. The article says, 'The trick is to use what is known as a "fast Fourier transform" to unpick more than 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, each encoded with its own string of information.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Much has been made of graphene's potential. It can be used for anything from composite materials — like how carbon-fiber is used currently — to electronics. 'Our research establishes Graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,' mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, said in a statement. If graphene can be compared to the way plastic is used today, everything from crisp packets to clothing could be digitized once the technology is established. The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."

Andy Smith writes "Slashdot has already covered the super-injunctions furore in the UK, with one famous footballer going after an anonymous Twitter user who broke a court order and revealed his extra-marital affair. Now another footballer has asked the attorney general to prosecute a well-known journalist and TV personality, who went against another super-injunction and wrote about this footballer, again on Twitter. Meanwhile, going back to the first footballer, it looks like he's got Twitter running scared, as the site is apparently blocking his name from appearing on the trend list, despite him being one of the most tweeted-about people."

Reports are coming in that a volcano in Iceland called Grimsvotn has erupted, sending plumes of smoke 15km into the air. It was accompanied by a series of earthquakes, but all of them have been minor so far, and scientists don't believe the eruption will cause problems for air travel like 2010's Eyjafjallajokull event. Local coverage in Icelandic is available, as well as early pictures of the eruption.

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Last year, Patrick, a 24-year-old Austrian, decided to have his dysfunctional hand amputated and replaced with a bionic hand. He lost the use of his left hand after being electrocuted at work. Here he demonstrates the extra movement his new bionic hand has given him, opening a bottle and tying his shoelaces, and tests a prototype hand which will give him additional wrist movement."

digitaldc writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Last year, Patrick, a 24-year-old Austrian, decided to have his dysfunctional hand amputated and replaced with a bionic hand. He lost the use of his left hand after being electrocuted at work. Here he demonstrates the extra movement his new bionic hand has given him, opening a bottle and tying his shoelaces, and tests a prototype hand which will give him additional wrist movement."

KPexEA writes with this excerpt from geek.com: "[Game developer David] Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has an HDMI port on one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into an HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port, giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? $25. The hardware being offered is no slouch either. It uses a 700MHz ARM11 processor coupled with 128MB of RAM and runs OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing for decent graphics performance with 1080p output confirmed. ... We can expect it to run a range of Linux distributions, but it looks like Ubuntu may be the distro it ships with. That means it will handle web browsing, run office applications, and give the user a fully functional computer to play with as soon as it's plugged in. All that and it can be carried in your pocket or on a key chain."

arkenian writes "The BBC reports on a farm in the UK to be run by online subscribers to the MyFarm website voting on which crops to grow and livestock to rear. For a £30 annual fee, 10,000 farm followers will help manage Wimpole Home Farm, in Cambridgeshire. They will be asked to make 12 major monthly decisions during the course of the year as well as other choices. The National Trust says its MyFarm project aims to reconnect people with where their food comes from."

doperative writes with this quote from a speculative piece at Business Insider about Apple's real motive behind its recent lawsuit against Samsung's Galaxy devices: "Android is free. In some cases, it's even cheaper than free, with Google sharing some revenue from Google searches on Android phones with partners. This is hugely disruptive to both Microsoft and Apple's business models; Microsoft because they make money on software licenses, and Apple on hardware. And this disruptive approach is winning: Android is surging past iOS in marketshare. A lawsuit from a big company, even if doomed, still takes a lot of time, energy and money to fight off. So Samsung or someone else might settle, accepting to pay some form of license. If that happens, Apple can go around to the other manufacturers asking for the same license and have a much stronger claim. And now OEMs have to factor that cost into the decision to choose Android. And all of a sudden, Android has a price." Samsung has fired back with a lawsuit of its own.

Spurred on by Utah's love of the Browning M1911, the Arizona legislature has named the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the state's official gun. The 32-25 vote approving the measure makes Arizona only the second state to officially recognize a state firearm. From the article: "'Anytime you see a Western movie, the revolver in John Wayne's hand is a Colt single action,' Arizona state Sen. Ron Gould (R) told Reuters. 'This is a historic firearm and it fits well with the story of Arizona.'"

Doofus writes "NPR reports that Elisabeth Sladen, who played the Doctor's assistant Sarah Jane, has died at 63. Sladen played opposite Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker, and eventually earned her own show. BBC stories here, including a picture with K9, and here."

Doofus writes "NPR reports that Elisabeth Sladen, who played the Doctor's assistant Sarah Jane, has died at 63. Sladen played opposite Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker, and eventually earned her own show. BBC stories here, including a picture with K9, and here."

NotSanguine writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "The neutrons are shot between two parallel plates, one above another and separated by about 25 micrometres — half a hair's width. The upper plate absorbs neutrons, and the lower plate reflects them. As they pass through, they trace out an arc, just like a thrown ball falling due to gravity. ... The new work by the ILL team has added what is known as a piezoelectric resonator to the bottom plate; its purpose is to jiggle the bottom plate at a very particular frequency. The researchers found that as they changed the bottom plate's vibration frequency, there were distinct dips in the number of neutrons detected outside the plates — particular, well-spaced 'resonant' frequencies that the neutrons were inclined to absorb. These frequencies, then, are the gravitational quantum states of neutrons, essentially having energy bounced into them by the bottom plate, and the researchers were able for the first time to force the neutrons from one quantum state to another. The differences in the frequencies — which are proportional to energy — of each of these transitions will be an incredibly sensitive test of gravity at the microscopic scale."

guanxi writes "Huawei, a large Chinese telecom and IT company with close ties to the Chinese military has faced obstacles doing business in other countries, because governments are concerned about giving them access to critical infrastructure. Huawei Symantec is a joint venture with one of the world's largest IT security companies which sells security products in the US. Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?"

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the Johnson Space Center have shown that the effectiveness of drugs declines more rapidly in space. Engineers are working on a project which could bring space travel to the general public but experiments suggest that the health hazards facing astronauts may be greater than previously thought. Astronauts on long space missions may not be able to take paracetamol to treat a headache or antibiotics to fight infection, a study has found. I wonder if diseases are also affected?"

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the Johnson Space Center have shown that the effectiveness of drugs declines more rapidly in space. Engineers are working on a project which could bring space travel to the general public but experiments suggest that the health hazards facing astronauts may be greater than previously thought. Astronauts on long space missions may not be able to take paracetamol to treat a headache or antibiotics to fight infection, a study has found. I wonder if diseases are also affected?"

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that ad-supported music service Spotify is bringing strict limits to its service, allowing users ten hours listening time per month and a lifetime total of five plays per track. Rory Cellan-Jones discusses how much their hand was forced by the labels, and how much it was down to their own desire to move more than the current 15% of users to their paid subscriptions. The overwhelming reaction from users seems to be straightforward disappointment at the loss of a service which managed to bridge the commercial radio business model and modern listening habits. As the first response to the announcement said: 'So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that ad-supported music service Spotify is bringing strict limits to its service, allowing users ten hours listening time per month and a lifetime total of five plays per track. Rory Cellan-Jones discusses how much their hand was forced by the labels, and how much it was down to their own desire to move more than the current 15% of users to their paid subscriptions. The overwhelming reaction from users seems to be straightforward disappointment at the loss of a service which managed to bridge the commercial radio business model and modern listening habits. As the first response to the announcement said: 'So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then.'"

Old Wolf writes "A New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created a scientific sensation by claiming to have discovered the mother of all mother tongues. 'Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance between the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world (abstract). The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa, and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root." Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language than cultural evolution.

bulled writes "When asked about letting governments in Asia and the Middle East into the 'secure' message service used by their BlackBerry devices, Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executive of RIM, walked out of the interview and said, 'We've dealt with this, the question is no fair.' By 'dealt with,' we can only assume he meant: 'been paid handsomely to let governments read what they wish.'"

IndigoDarkwolf writes "The sometimes confused media coverage around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant left me wanting for a good summary. Apparently the BBC felt the same way, and now delivers an overview starting from the earthquake and concluding with the current state of the troubled reactors."

An anonymous reader writes "Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, '[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.' If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely."

An anonymous reader writes "China is set to overtake America in scientific output as soon as 2013 — far earlier than expected. Chinese research spending has grown by 20% per year since 1999, now reaching over $100bn, and as many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006. 'I think this is positive, of great benefit, though some might see it as a threat and it does serve as a wake-up call for us not to become complacent,' said Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith. However, the report points out that a growing volume of research publications does not necessarily mean an increase in quality."

cf18 writes "The French chess federation has suspended three top players for violating sporting ethics at a chess olympiad in Siberia last September. The allegation claims while the first member was playing, a second member would watch the game via internet, use software to find the best move, and send it to the third member via SMS. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."

maliamnon writes "US, French, and British forces began enforcing a UN resolution (1973/2011) to defend civilians in Libya today. French aircraft are attacking tanks, while the US and possibly UK are supporting the operation with cruise missiles from sea." Update: 03/19 22:34 GMT by T : Adds reader bloggerkg: "More than 110 Tomahawk missiles fired from American and British ships and submarines hit about 20 Libyan air and missile defense targets in western portions of the country, US Vice Adm. William Gortney said at a Pentagon briefing. The US will conduct a damage assessment of the sites, which include SA-5 missiles and communications facilities. A senior US military official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the missiles landed near Misrata and Tripoli, the capital and Gadhafi's stronghold."

mage7 writes "While the world's attention seems to be focused on the events unfolding in Japan and the Middle-east, Indian headlines are being dominated by the latest WikiLeaks' revelations. The newly leaked cable (dated 17 July 2008) suggests that India's ruling Congress party bribed MPs in order to secure their votes for a controversial nuclear deal between India and the US. Among other details, it describes how a senior Congress aide showed a US embassy official 'chests of cash' allegedly containing about $25 million to pay off MPs ahead of the vote. Another Congress insider told a US official about how the Minister of Commerce and Industry formerly 'could only offer small planes as bribes ... now he can pay for votes with jets.'"

chielk writes "The UN Security Council has backed a no-fly zone over Libya and 'all necessary measures' short of an invasion 'to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas.' The UK, France and Lebanon proposed the council resolution, with US support."

Tasha26 writes "A former town Mayor, Colin Elsbury, made legal history by being the first Brit to pay damages for libel on Twitter. His tweet on polling day said 'It's not in our nature to deride our opponents however Eddie Talbot had to be removed by the Police from a polling station' [and was held to amount] to pure election slur. The Twitter libel was settled at Cardiff High Court with total bill hitting £53,000 (£3,000 compensation + £50,000 legal fees). The fine works out at more than £2,400 per word. After Courtney Love's recent £260k settlement in a Twibel case, this case reaffirms that anything posted in the public domain is subject to libel laws."