Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found a eukaryote microbe that completely lacks mitochondria, which are the powerhouses inside eukaryotic cells, the type of cells that make up humans, animals, plants and fungi. All eukaryotic cells contain a nucleus, organelles and mitochondrion. Scientists believe they were once free-living bacteria that got engulfed by primitive, ancient cells that were evolving to become what they are today. Anna Karnkowska, a researcher in evolutionary biology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, found a gut microbe that contains no trace that it made any mitochondrial proteins at all. "That should theoretically kill the cell -- it shouldn't exist," she said. The researchers learned that these cells use a kind of machinery that is different than relying on mitochondria to assemble iron-sulfur clusters, which is thought to be a mitochondrial function. Michael Gray, biochemist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, calls the discovery of a eukaryote without any vestige of mitochondrion, "unprecedented." He adds, the results do not negate the idea that the acquisition of a mitochondrion was an important and perhaps defining event in the evolution of eukaryotic cells, because this organism's ancestors had mitochondria that were then lost after the cells acquired their non-mitochondrial system for making iron-sulfur clusters.

chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."

chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."

Slashdot Reader CanadianCrackPot decided to be adventurous and went and installed the latest offering from X.org's X-Server project. Below, you'll find "the basics" of his "first attempt to install [their] X Window Server on a system with a 450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset) graphics card, running Mandrake 10.0 Official (FTP download of everything but the RPMS.cooker dir)." To make a long story short, while he did have some luck with installing it, running it was...problematic. He asks: "I'm just wondering how other Slashdot readers are doing with the new X11R6 server, and more importantly, how did you install it?" "I decided to try installing X.org's X Server today while I had nothing to do here's the results:

• get a test bed system: check
• get sources: check
• ./configure: N/A...I'm worried
• make World: check
• make install; make install.man: check
• startx: crash
• xf86config: check
• startx, again: check -- now I need a manager
• startgnome: galeon not found (crash)
• startkde: crash"

If you've had any luck getting X.org's X-server running on your machine, what hurdles did you have to overcome before it worked?

Onnimikki writes "The Ambulatory Robotics Lab at McGill University has made a six-legged swimming cockroach robot as part of Project Aqua. The robot is a waterproof version of the RHex robot, whose inspiration is the biomimetic work by Bob Full of Gecko glue fame. Other cool stuff from the ARL page includes a waddling bipedal RHex, and the world's first galloping robot."

Irishman writes "ZDNet News has an interview with Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs about the upcoming Civ III. For any Civ fans, this is a must read. I am now having flashbacks of days without sleep, trying to capture that last city or win the game in a different way. "

Bill Phu asks: "I just had an idea for an interesting open source and/or freeware add-on (for a commercial package). While on the crappy bus ride to work this morning, I just realized that car-pooling would be a much better idea, but finding people to carpool with is a pain in the butt. But the chances of someone living near you increases if the organization (e.g. company or university) is larger. Wouldn't it be great if there was a tool to help you find people to carpool with?" Read on for the details on this idea and tell us what you think.

"My idea is to create a program (or a free web service?) that would help you find people to carpool with to/from work. Traditional bulletin boards are a pain. What would be better if there was a database of streets and people who want to carpool. People would (voluntarily) list themselves into the database, and if they have a car that they can carpool with or not. The program would sort out, geographically, a list of eveyrone else in the database that lives near other potential carpool users, or within a specified distance along the path to/from work.

E.g. If you are looking for a drive, you could list all potential drivers within, say, 1 km of where you live. People with cars can list people who need a drive within 1 km of where they live, or within 500 m of their path to work.

I know there are several packages available commercially that could do the hard calculations easily. They tend to be pricey GIS packages, although there are freeware ones out there e.g. GRASS; or cheap ones like Idrisi (although idrisi doesn't handle topology very well, I don't think..). What does not exist, at least not that I know of, is software to geo-encode addresses to geographic locations (e.g. so an address like 7071 Mumford Road could be translated into a reliable spot on a map). Also, I cannot think of a public streets database that is useable (I wonder if the HRM will license it free to students to work with?).

So would any of you guys know of a geo-encoding tool or any other software that can do this?"

jailbreakist writes "Zero-Knowledge Systems, a Montreal based privacy software company, has released the source code to their Linux client. The software in question provides anonymous web browsing, pseudonymous email, form filling, cookie management and more. You can get the source at opensource.zeroknowledge.com. The source is available under the MPL, and our clientshim and Yarrow (random number generation) implementations are under GPL." A while ago, we had covered Mike Shaver's move to ZK.

FOE writes "Picked up this story from Eurekalert. Describes disco-ball like reflector to help IR networks. I really like the name: "chaos mirror" (grin). " Fairly straight-forward device: Takes the incoming beam and spreads it out over a wider range - but it's all IrDA, which has terrible range. I'll keep my ZoomAir, thanks.

Sean Garagan writes "Well, it looks like MS is going to start using Linux to try and save itself. According to an article at PCWeek, MS will use Linux as an example of why it doesn't have a monopoly when it questions the gov'ts last witness, an MIT Economics prof. " If this is true, then I think it's a nice nail in their coffin- the only real threat to their monopoly is tens of thousands of programmers working for free? Great defense. We're not a monopoly, really.

Sean Garagan writes "The PCWeek labs reviewed the latest RedHat offering as a desktop alternative. They had the usual problems of GUI interface and hard to configure sound subsystems. I have to agree on one point though, the RedHat package install interface needs to be cleaned up somehow."