Slashdot Mirror

sycodon writes with news of research into how nearby supernovae affected the development of life on Earth. "[Professor Henrik Svensmark] found that the changing frequency of nearby supernovae seems to have strongly shaped the conditions for life on Earth. Whenever the Sun and its planets have visited regions of enhanced star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, where exploding stars are most common, life has prospered. Prof. Svensmark remarks in the paper, "The biosphere seems to contain a reflection of the sky, in that the evolution of life mirrors the evolution of the Galaxy.' ... The data also support the idea of a long-term link between cosmic rays and climate, with these climatic changes underlying the biological effects. And compared with the temperature variations seen on short timescales as a consequence of the Sun's influence on the influx of cosmic rays, the heating and cooling of the Earth due to cosmic rays varying with the prevailing supernova rate have been far larger.""

Freshly Exhumed writes "An article, with mpeg and avi movies, in Chemical and Engineering News describes how researchers from Danish high-tech firm Haldor Topsoe and the Danish Technical University have made a groundbreaking discovery in the field of nano-research. With the help of a specially designed microscope, researchers can now directly observe carbon nano-fibre formation. This is a prelude to actually controlling the growth of the fibres, which up until now has been very problematic. The new microscope's impact is expected to have tremendous significance for the development of future electronic components, energy extraction, and environmental technology."

Mikkel Blanné writes "Today Denmark put a superconducting power cable to use , beating Detroit to it! (Be careful though, it's in danish). We're talking 3 cables, each 30 metres in length and produced in cooperation between Nordic Superconductor Technologies, NKT Research and DTU. This makes it the first superconducting cable in actual use, ie. not in a laboratory. The purpose of this project is of course still research, but I am right now typing this on a computer running on power that came through those cables ;-) Further descriptions are here and in this rather old RISØ newsletter. Sorry about everything being in danish, but apparently this hasn't come to the world's attention yet..."

Matthias Tichy writes "A free lemmings clone with little nice penguins is developed on this site. It is developed with clanlib so it compiles under x and should also compilable under win32. The screenshots look really nice. " How many hours of high school did I lose to lemmings? Spooky.