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Newscientist has an article about this too.

This is a very interesting part of the research and analysis. Interesting for me is that other studies have found that females tend to struggle when compared to males in a three dimensional environment.

(Sexist? Sure, but it ain't me claiming this.)

Could the relative perception of how the controls function in third-person vs first-person be the issue? Whatever it is, it probably has to do with something you would consider psycho-babble so you should take that minor and sign up. Looks like there are plenty of further meaningless studies to be done.

That's not that many cameras in Boston. There's something like TWO ORDERS of magnitude more public monitoring cameras in London!

London Underground subway ALONE is reported to have over 6000 monitoring cameras now, being increased to 9000 source link. When including CCTV cameras elsewhere, there's well OVER 10,000 CAMERAS monitoring you.

Although, apparently, most Londoners doesn't seem to mind. As long as they're only pointed to public areas.

A somewhat more informative article is
here

New Scientist has an article about this very subject.

Well, I've already replied a few times in this forum, so even though I have mod points, I can't mod this one up.

Finally, somebody wish some insight! Mod parent up!

The question of "To DRM or not to DRM" comes down to this one, simple question:

How do you compensate people to encourage them to produce intellectual works?

DRM is but one of many options. It's a choice, and choice in the marketplace should not be taken away.

What we need to focus on are the broken intellectual property laws. That's Copyright (life +70 years? That's NUTS!) and Patent (I can patent Swinging on a swing sideways? That's rediculous) law.

Do you often claim other's work as your own?

you stole from: new scientist

your comment is a verbatim rip off of the original post by Catherine , Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent,UK

Professors can talk out of their asses because everyone expects them to be right. Actually cats can survive falling from any height. Check out this New Scientist article

I took your advice, and searched Google like you said. The first page returned, in _New Scientist_ (citing an article in _Nature_) said "locally devastating impacts by small asteroids are likely only about once in a millennium". The investigating scientist, from the reknowned U of Western Ontario, in collaboration with Los Alamos National Lab, went on to clarify: "[s]omewhere in the hundreds of kilotons range you start getting effects on the ground, and certainly in the megaton range," using the exact satellite data you cited.

The evidence of meteorite damage justifies more research, like that in the study we're discussing. It's significant enough to justify an interplanetary network of sensors, which would enable a realtime model of whizzing objects, as well as advance all kinds of generally useful science and engineering. But it doesn't justify underwriting the premature budgets of "Star Wars" weapons makers peddling their same weapons systems in a new threat age, where "missile defense" irrationality no longer produces the budgets it used to. We've got higher priorities, although the low meteorite priority does justify some research, should that research turn up new evidence to raise its priority. Putting Chicken Little in charge of the budget will contribute to our demise, not defend from it.

Seems like the "limitations" of range and power to RFID tags that people kept saying would make them impractical for mass universal chipping are being overcome at a fast rate.

In a paper to be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, Guido Birk and Harald Lesch of the University of Munich, Germany, and Christian Konz of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching report an investigation of exactly what happens when the field is drastically reduced or vanishes altogether.

Their simulations show that the solar wind - the million-kilometre-an-hour stream of hydrogen and helium nuclei from the sun - wraps itself around the Earth in a way that induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere as strong as the original field.

"We were quite surprised about its effectiveness," Lesch says.

Then real fun with the flipping of the magnetic field is not that it moves uniformly from one pole to another over time, but that as it breaks down, tens or hundreds of "north" and "south" poles can develop which are spread all over the planet - see this article in New Scientist. With any luck, maybe my house might end up at one of these new "North Poles" for a while, so at least I can say I've been there :-)

Water is used as a coolant, but propane can be used to turn turbines, too.

The New Scientist recently did an article saying that when the Earth's magnetic field collapses the solar wind will generate a replacement magnetic field as it interacts with the upper atmosphere. Why didn't the same happen on Mars?

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is thought that men should try to conserve their semen as much as possible, as it is viewed as their source of vital energy. The more you ejaculate, the more it reduces your life expectancy.

... and beliefs like that are the reason that folk medicine, no matter how effective it may occasionally be, generally fails in comparison to "Western" (actually, just scientific, which is emphatically culture-neutral) medicine. The beliefs may happen to correspond with biological realities, but just as often they contradict them -- as in this case, since we now know that men who ejaculate frequently live longer.

Why do women live longer than men?

Oh, the things that are not known for certain... :)

While there is some new-ish research that might indicate otherwise, my understanding is that the research and its findings are not being very well received.

Still very interesting.

-John

But I did think that was one of the reasons for going to that big blob of methane in the first place.

Oh well ...

When I was a kid and would ask aloud where something was, my mum would say, "Look where you put it." It annoyed me to no end, of course, but years later I find myself "putting things where they belong" and emptying my mind of everything else, much like putting phone numbers in a phone book so one doesn't have to clutter up one's my mind remembering any of them.

My own opinion is that there is no substitute for "putting things in folders." Boring, but true. Regular expressions and databases can go a long way (even for the average Joe), but it's as brainless as it is fast to look in an appropriately named folder. Not everyone agrees, of course:

Apple Unveils Faster Searching
Apple Throws Spotlight on Search

What the poster really wants is anti-sound.
Silence Machine Article 1

Silence> Machine Article 2

heh.. well spotted.. I was talking about data transfers and got a touch mixed up (I blame the late hour :S) Anyways.. My error might have had a minute grain of truth in it :P

Oh, and they have even started referencing opinion on /. every now and again!

Videogames: Edge
Science/Tech: New Scientist
The real news: adbusters

Maybe randy triceratops would fight over territory or a mate?

A recent article in Palaeontologica Electronica (vol 7, issue 1) suggests so. A brief summary in the New Scientist news article

Who cares about the scanners when the real problem lies in something entirely different?

You name it, we've got it.

see New Sci home page, article is:

• GIVE IT SOME GAS Ditch those flaky low-tech batteries: the miniature internal combustion engine is gearing up to power everything from laptops to cellphones p.26

though of course you'll need to have paid money to read it...

It does cover some useful stuff including the fact that any alternative to a bettery that produces even relatively small quantities of unpleasant exhaust won't be any fun in a small space - like an aeroplane cabin...

I wouldn't go, even if I had the bear proof suit.

with some additional info...
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 93749

In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.

In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.

It was reported in New Scientist 2 week ago.

The article I read said that astronomers detected a composition that more closely resembled a comet. Apparently, this was decided within the last 5 years. Given your link, I assume you spend more time with this than I do. Is the comet thing only a minority opinion of the Cassini project leader, or is it more prevalent?

2004-06-03 17:00:29 Solar wind to shield Earth during pole flip (science,science) (rejected)

They have only tested the moving version on a group of students.

"We have done this on a few research animals but it is not quite ready for prime-time," explains Butler. The technology appears to be working, but stimulus is not deterring the animals.

"There's clearly a difference between a picture of a woman casually naked (e.g., what you might find in National Geographic) and a picture of, for example, a woman in stockings and heels holding her vagina open and licking her lips, as one might find in your average softcore magazine (to the extent they haven't all gone out of business)."

Yes, there is difference, like you said: One she is casually naked and in the second she is in stockings and heals holding her vagina...etc. The question becomes, from this difference does any harm emerge because she is engaged in the second pose? If there is any harm, then I've yet to hear an argument for it as yet.

Outside of other factors I don't see any reason why children in National Geographic style nudity are harmed in any way. I'm not convinced the same is true for Penthouse style nudity. I haven't seen solid evidence so I can't claim statistical support for my concern, but I'll be a lot happier when CGI gets good/cheap enough to make this whole question moot.

No evidence is no evidence. Agreed, that doesn't mean there isn't any harm, but it does mean the onus is on people who say there is harm to back up their claims with evidence or argument.

"One other point. The age of puberty has been steadily declining (as a result of better nutrition, and yes it happens to people fed hormone-free meat too). The age at which one is emotionally mature has IMO been increasing as well (possibly because society has become more complex tho I'm guessing here), but that's harder to measure. What we're left with are people who become fertile at a much younger age (and much less mature) than when our behaviour evolved."

Your point about puberty steadily declining seems true, according to a few articles here, here, and here. However, the age of consent is not decreasing with this current reality. This only compounds the problem as individuals are being locked away, then branded as sex offenders for the rest of their life upon release, for having sex with sexually mature individuals that are below the official age of consent.

"Being attracted to a pubescent, but underage, person isn't technically pedophilia; there's another term for it (ephebophilia?)...It's not so understandable to be attracted to a four year old, and be aware that the children in softcore KP are frequently that young."

I disagree. It is hard to determine the mind of evolution. The Bonobo Chimps often have intergenerational sexual activity, so puberty is not always a de facto requirement, as in this case, for sexual behaviour. Another sexual behaviour that was until recently outlawed in America was that of homosexual anal sex. Homosexuality too does not seem, on the face of it, to have any evolutionary advantages. However, it stands to reason if homosexuality evolved with humans, and so many other animals, it likely plays, or played, a beneficial function. Pedophilia seems even more common then homosexuality in the population (statistics if you have them, they are so hard to find on this issue), and if its with us the question is why? One answer is that it serves or did serve some purpose. If it did not and was instead harmful, early human tribes that practiced pedophilia would have naturally been wiped out. They were not, so that is the conundrum.

Some scientists think the Earth's magnetic field is preparing to flip again, which it does every so often. Apparently when this occurs, it is preceded by a period of local variations - mini-poles showing up all over the planet. This system could be invaluable in tracking this process.

Also, according to this article and others, the field has decreased 10% over the last 150 years. This has left some satellites vulnerable to damaging radiation.

Other links:
Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip"
The Sun Does a Flip
Quick flip of Earth's magnetic field revealed

New Scientist has an article about some scientists who removed pretty huge chunks of a mouse's "junk DNA" and the mouse was just fine in every way they could measure.

So the moral is, we have a lot to learn about DNA.

Very recently, this was shown to be false, at least for mice. But everyone now confidently expects to find similar results in humans.

It's worth pointing out that the156 billion lyrs number is a minimum size for the universe. There's nothing in the data that tells us it's only this large.

It also doesn't tell us anything about the shape of the universe. Recent studies of the microwave background have proposed that the universe has a soccer ball or even a Picard (no relation to the TV character) shape. Neither of these have been ruled out, but the minimum size for either of these shapes in our region of space would be 156 billion lyrs. This new result doesn't even tell us if there is a boundary (no, don't ask me what happens at the edge, I don't know) or if the universe "wraps" like the Asteroids game.

Quite true. It only jumped out at me because it seemed odd to compare a 3-dimensional object to a two-dimensional one. If they had specified how deep under alaska to measure in the 3rd dimension to obtain a volume of the same size, it would have made more sense.

I also noticed it because the tendancy of science writers to compare large things with "the size of France" has become a running joke. In addition to the Olympus Mons example, you might be interested to know that the Ross Ice Shelf (the largest ice shelf of Antarctica)is about the size of France. And another volcano (on Io) spews out ash that covers
an area of (guess what...) the size of France!

And for those who now want to know how big France is, exactly - well, it's 1/3 the size of Quebec, and more to the point, about the same as the area covered by coral reef worldwide. :)

Not to mention that we smoked weed on a quite so daily basis.

If schizophrenia runs in your family, you might want to consider not smoking the weed.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s777336.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/marijuana/sc hizophrenia.jsp

> They haven't been able to extract nucleic acids from the structures.

Not true. The Mayo Clinic team paper (which this slashdot article was based on) claims that they've identified RNA and DNA from them.

This New Scientist article has more detail.

Nanobacteria have been known about for quite a few years, though as the above article points out their existence is still contraversial.

All this is particularly interesting to me since my doctor has tested me for nanobacteria using an ELIZA test (an antibody-based test). I came up positive and have been under treatment with antibiotics (doxycycline) for some months. Subsequent tests have shown decreasing levels of the critters, and I'm hoping to be clear of them in a few months. So I'm hoping that they really exist or I've wasted a lot of effort and money!

You might wonder why I'd subject myself to treatment for a thing that might not even exist. The answer is simple - I have chronic fatigue syndrome and anything which might cure it is worth trying. The latest research into chronic fatigue indicates that systemic infections of various bacteria (mycoplasma fermentans being one) and nanobacteria are implicated in many cases. But it's certainly not a conclusively proven remedy at this stage.

See also the article by John Cisar (a sceptic) An alternative interpretation of nanobacteria-induced biomineralization

Err, how about the fuel stations that have a Mobile phone company mast hidden in the sign showing prices New Scientist story - these pump out vastly more power than any handheld mobile and are allowed yet the hand held version isn't ...

You mean like this? Artficial Blood."

To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.

Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.

As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago

Wrong. (Not just because you're too lazy to provide any links. You know, like this or maybe this.)

No, you're actually wrong because you fail the reading (and understanding) the articles test - it didn't warm the earth up. It increased the temperature range for each day - that is, both the high and the low temperature - just like a clear day versus an overcast one.

Hafnium powered engine for this airplane.

The AFRL now has other ideas, though. Instead of a conventional fission reactor, it is focusing on a type of power generator called a quantum nucleonic reactor. This obtains energy by using X-rays to encourage particles in the nuclei of radioactive hafnium-178 to jump down several energy levels, liberating energy in the form of gamma rays. A nuclear UAV would generate thrust by using the energy of these gamma rays to produce a jet of heated air.

If people are working on making usable power-plants from hafnium, it's not as far off as you think it is. Remember how much easier it is to build a fusion bomb than a fusion power plant.

Just because the work's classified doesn't mean it's not out of the reach of terrorists (think the Anthrax attacks)

Speaking of nanotechnology - some chemists at NYU have made a walking DNA robot. Read about it here.