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Talking of the "f-word", scientists now say that doing it on your own may help to prevent cancer.

Good news in the fight against prostate cancer.

Sensors detecting radiation. A nuclear bomb is a gamma source that can be detected at a distance unless heavily shielded. See also here. Chemical weapons also may leak signature compounds, which can be detected with the appropriate equipment--though not quite as sensitively.

IANA law enforcement official, but I would be very surprised if there were not already radiation monitors (fixed and mobile) in all of the largest U.S. cities. (Have another article.) They are definitely already installed--and catching innocent people--in New York, and I'm sure that they are in the D.C., too.

And here's the New Scientist article about why the sail might fail...

The most accurate estimation of the age of the universe has been recently carried out by the WMAP mission, which measured the cosmic microwave background with 35 times the resolution of the previous COBE mission. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 200 million years.

A bit more info from a previously submitted post:

New Jupiter-like Planet Discovered in Sol-like system

A new Jupiter-like planet has been discovered in a circular orbit around a Sun-like star 90 light-years away in the constellation Pupis. What is remarkable about the discovery is that this system is the most like our own solar system discovered to-date. This development lends credence to the theory that systems with small, rocky Earth-like planets are out there. ''This is the closest we have yet got to a real Solar System-like planet and advances our search for systems that are even more like our own,'' said UK team leader Hugh Jones of Liverpool John Moores University. Jones went on to say that, ''Jupiter's position is probably crucial to the distribution of other planets in the Solar System.'' Current thinking on planet-formation indicates a large, Jupiter-like planet in a circular orbit would allow the relatively undisturbed formation of an inner system of smaller Earth-like planets. The newly discovered planet is about twice the mass of Jupiter with an orbit equivalent to the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

New Scientist is where it's at.

I've (almost) stopped reading it after too many "digital - where the signal is converted into a stream of ones and zeros" type articles.

I will also often learn that males have XY sex chromosomes, and females XX, and that a light year is the time taken for light to travel in a year.

Still, the Last Word is often interesting and feedback is always +5 Funny.

New Scientist is where it's at.

I've (almost) stopped reading it after too many "digital - where the signal is converted into a stream of ones and zeros" type articles.

I will also often learn that males have XY sex chromosomes, and females XX, and that a light year is the time taken for light to travel in a year.

Still, the Last Word is often interesting and feedback is always +5 Funny.

People who hack will do it no matter what you say

So what happens if you hack the system so that the plane thinks there are soft walls all around except for your "chosen target"?

...bendable interfaces
Otherwise we will all be standing around shaking our phones like cans of spray paint to scroll through selection menus. That will look silly, although in Japan they will probably make popular dance games for cell phones(mobile maraca madness?). Accelerometer controls are cool, unless you're like most Americans who go offroading every day in their giant SUVs on the way to the office.

Looks like this is just what is needed to make Sony's flexable pda described in this
New Scientist Article to become practical much sooner.

I've broken too many PDAs from rough pocket treatment. It's about time that this is remedied.

Check :
Tissue engineers grow penis in the lab

Wonderful science.

On a related note, check this older article.
It is about printing tissues with modified inkjet printers, a prospect which seems even more fascinating than artificial bone replacements.

Alright, I don't care how I get modded for this. People like you just really piss me off.

Please realize that these are the same people who are denying the Bible by saying that James was not the brother of Jesus and that there is little evidence that Jesus even existed.

1) There are actually people who don't believe that Jesus was the messiah. Don't get in a huff about this, I'm just saying that there's a lot of other religions out there that you seem to be forgetting.

2) Nowhere in the article that you linked to does it say, as you put it "that James was not the brother of Jesus". Nor does the article say "that there is little evidence that Jesus even existed".

The simple fact that a piece of evidence was proven to be a fake does not prove the conclusions to be false.

Go take a course on simple logic

Don't bother reading the article, just look at this diagram. Enjoy!

RTA. It comes with a neat picture that explains it pretty well. The credit card one on the right seems to be the most practical reason to use bending. While viewing a map, you bend it to scroll left or right, or zoom in or out. Makes sense to me.

Please realize that these are the same people who are denying the Bible by saying that James was not the brother of Jesus and that there is little evidence that Jesus even existed.

The US is certainly very good at hypocrisy, I suppose that comes with diversity and arrogance ;)

Here is an excerpt :-
THE founding myth of the dominant nations is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They are being conned. Almost every rich nation has industrialised with the help of one of two mechanisms now prohibited by the rules of global trade. The first is "infant industry protection": defending new industries from foreign competition until they are big enough to compete on equal terms. The second is the theft of intellectual property. History suggests that technological development may be impossible without one or both.

It seems the US and Britain were quite ruthless in their "infant industry protection".

Shame the article is locked up in the closed New Scientist archive. Great resource, well worth the subscription cost.

The US is certainly very good at hypocrisy, I suppose that comes with diversity and arrogance ;)

Here is an excerpt :-
THE founding myth of the dominant nations is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They are being conned. Almost every rich nation has industrialised with the help of one of two mechanisms now prohibited by the rules of global trade. The first is "infant industry protection": defending new industries from foreign competition until they are big enough to compete on equal terms. The second is the theft of intellectual property. History suggests that technological development may be impossible without one or both.

It seems the US and Britain were quite ruthless in their "infant industry protection".

Shame the article is locked up in the closed New Scientist archive. Great resource, well worth the subscription cost.

or you could have done on New Scientist a week ago - and they give you the straight dope

GM often seems to introduce 'alien' dna into the host - i.e. there no way on earth crossing a pig and with spinach that you'll get offspring.

spinach and pigs

on a similar note...
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 93829

it's time to get much more serious about restrictions on fishing.

Will someone please get to work on a small battery with incredible storage capacity and quick charging? Or make a fuel cell....

Yes. Follow the stories about mass production of carbon nanotubes. In particular, the holy grail is making them conductive. As soon as you get a bag of reliably conductive nanotubes, you can store hydrogen at energy densities far exceeding that of fossil fuels -- which is difficult with even liquid hydrogen storage tanks, for a number of technical reasons (you need a double-walled thermos with an internal revacumation pump; that's expensive, and even then the hydrogen embrittles most inexenssive metals and leaks through inexpensive composites.)

The World's population will not rise over 11 or 12 Billion people.

The article in New Scientist has some more details, but still no information on false positives.

However, the point of Maxwell's thought experiment was that what if you could make something that would separate out the hot and cold particles it could potentially break the second law of thermodynamics which says that the entropy (essentially randomness) of a closed system must increase. Well, interestingly enough this has already happened. Australian researchers have measured entropy decreasing over short periods of time (~0.1s) for a system composed of latex beads trapped in a laser beam. For longer periods (>2s) the entropy will increase. You can read the New Scientist article here.

The point I was trying to make is, that there's really no need for such huge cars, as far as I know they don't transport any more people, and at the end of the day they're costing us all.

If you need confirmation check out here and here

quote " Every eight months, nearly 11 million gallons of oil run off our streets and driveways into our waters - the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill "

without further technical details, this sounds like the sort of technical mumbo-jumbo that snake-oil salesmen were peddling back in the dot-com era.

The New Scientist makes it quite clear on how the Fast TCP is done, if you know anything about how TCP works (and how the window size halves in the event of packet losses)

shame on a relatively low-ID user making such trollish comments...

He says a more immediate use of the key gene would be to enable the medical profession to grow "millions and billions" of ESCs from existing samples. These could then more safely be used in humans, as they would not have been exposed to the "cocktail" of chemicals currently needed.

And was posted on May 30 Link follows: Here

Apparently, theres good eatings on cats, just be careful during the breeding not too breathe in too deeply.

On a related note, anyone care to enlighten me as to what the most desirable quality an eating cat should have, these ones seems to have been bred into a form most unlike any feline I've encountered. Oh, and what the hell is a Chinese ferret badger?

Amazing how useless information suddenly becomes useful.

If you read this, you'll see that the analysis is based on 97 'critical' genes where a difference in a single base will produce a change in the amino acid coded for, and hence a change in the protein.

If the 'junk' DNA is included, there is more likelihood of variation between humans and chimps, but there is a corresponding rise in the variability within the human population which tends to lessen the overall significance of the inter-species variation.

Other than the fact that evolution would tend to favour the stability of these 97 'critical' genes, I see no problem with this analysis, but think that putting humans and chimps in the same genus is pushing matters slightly.

I'm surprised they got a patent on this, the military has been studying this for years. Edelman's recent work uses inverse functions to counter multipath interference in sonar with security applications. The only difference here is application as far as I can tell, the technique appears similar.

But Richard Sullivan, head of clinical programmes for the charity Cancer Research UK, is sceptical. "Smell is very important for detecting disease and this is an interesting twist," he says. "But this study is much too small to mean anything."

Sullivan adds that even an extremely sensitive nose could only ever detect tumours on the surface of the lungs, so it could never replace the blood tests or scans needed to alert doctors to the onset of secondary tumours.

There are several stable lead isotopes, so I'm sure someone can come up with a pair of reactions that turn one of those isotopes into 197Au, although getting rid of three protons is decidedly inconvenient - far harder than getting rid of two or four. But you'd probably lose most of the lead to other reactions, and it would indeed be a ridiculous waste of money. Gold is cheap.

Yes, I mean that. It's all relative, of course. That gold is expensive is 'common knowledge'. Still, many people realise that platinum and iridium are more expensive. Some fraction of them realise the value of other rare, useful elements - such as tantalum.

What's really expensive is isotopically enriched or pure material. (Weapons-grade uranium is a (cheap) example of an enriched material.) Such as the 196Hg that the previous poster mentioned. My PhD work required 176Lu, which we purchased 4 milligrams of stuff enriched to 50%, at about US$1600 per milligram (From memory of four years ago.) It's not the most expensive out there, either ... What price does Gold fetch per ounce (30 grams?) There is only one isotope of gold, and it's relatively easy to chemically purify, and relatively common on the earth's crust. We make targets of it all the time - it's great for calibrations - the lab occasionally sends visitors home with a few cents worth of gold foil on their thumbnails.

Possibly the most valuable batch of nuclei in the world is a target made of the 16+ isomeric form of 178Hf - a truly microscopic quantity of material made by herculean effort at a big laboratory. The enrichment is something tiny like 3%.

Other materials that make gold look cheap are things like carbon nanotubes. Bucky-balls extended into pipes. There have been massive improvements in manufacturing processes - I think the cost of bucky-tubes is now comparable with that 176Lutetium I was talking about. As for the programmable materials the article refers to - they're going to start out vastly more expensive still, and it'll take a long time before the cost drops to near modern silicon technology - and you don't build your walls from RAM, do you? Don't expect to replace bricks with programmable materials, at least in your lifetime. Be impressed if artificial-atom materials get cheap enough to be used in common consumer goods.

Rachel

apply light and you get an explosion...

apply light and you get an explosion...

Having a system combine both symbolic logic systems and sensory systems is mentioned in the article as a major focus of research today, but I wonder why this has been split so specifically...maybe someone can help me to understand.

The point at which an understanding of body position is integrated with an overall structure of behavior leading towards a goal seems a mirage, since this isn't necessarily the way animal systems work. The best recreation of natures flexibility in "simple" systems that I've heard of comes from Mark Tilden's analog systems that are controled by tight-loops of feedback that very closely model reflex circuits, but that are capable of recovering from intense deformations of "perfect positioning".

Now, obivously, reflex systems can only go so far, when you have a bot that you want to decide path across a room, there has to be a symbolic understanding of its environment. But it seems to me, from my (albeit very limited) understanding of insect / lower-animal inteligence, that most insects don't actually work up a full symbolic understanding of their surroundings, they just have some sort of sense of direction towards a goal (think moths to light) and then they start the reflex circuits firing to move towards it. I can understand having an end goal of having a full cognitive system comparable to human understanding of the world, but it seems like people might be overshooting the process a bit. We need a greater understanding of the simple systems before we can hope to frog-leap to the big stuff.

To dispute my own point though, I feel its fair to say that the "simple" systems of the animal brain are already currently being modeled to the point that prosthesis for the brain might just be within reach. The success of an artificial hipocampus will prove that modeling the brain isn't necessarily understanding the brain, but it might be easier to learn the systems from our artificial models than the real ones.

New Scientist also has the latest.

Take an army of the recently-described feral hunting robots . To each robot, add a GPS chip and wireless mesh networking .

Give the people and dogs smart name tags , and have your dogs exchange your "business card" with the other smart name tags. Publish the FOAF url in it, so you can immediately check for compatibility and give the new information to the dogs.

Study the discovered FOAF files , each describing individual traits ("attributes").

Instruct the feral robots to find other people with compatible personalities , but to stay near you. They'll roam around, seeking people whose interests relate to yours.

For bonus points, add solar panels to generate power as it roams around, and electronic boundaries to keep it in safe areas, away from motor traffic.

It was reported that in a conversation between George Bush and James Watson, the topic of modifying genes to improve intelligence came up. President Bush wanted to know if the genes would come in a boot cut.

Michael.
Let's do a 25% split between funny, troll, offtopic, and informative, shall we?

Maybe with Genetic Engineering we'll be able to eliminate the stupid gene. (That statement may set off a firestorm.)

It already did -- James Watson, one of the orgininal discoverers of DNA, said what basically boils down to exactly that earlier this year, and it was quite controversial. See http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 93451

It's like an executive summary of all the above links.

We've been over this already back in March. Granted, that article was looking in New Scientist, and this one is looking at MIT Tech Review, but they both refer to the same work done by Shelley Minteer at St Louis University in Missouri
--

Not an April Fool's link, but it is rather impractical.

Try this

heres a revised version of the article:

Now you can get atomic clock precision out of your grandma pendulum clocks. Here is how it works: There is a camcorder fitted inside the clock which monitors the pendulum swing. It has an atomic clock signal receiver. It compares the pendulum swings with the atomic signal hearbeat. The camcorder also has an arm. If the pendulum clock drifts, then it uses its arm to push or pull the pendulum to make correction. " It's not an April Fool's joke, but it is rather impractical.

It would be nice if the submitter placed a working link to the article in question.

Yet another april fools. The pictures taken from this article. Yesterday was completely ludicruous, and it seems that today will be only marginally better. *sigh*

Been there. Done that. These types of algorithms are not exactly new, and what this paper describes is no more "self-assembling" than any other distributed routing/discovery protocol - examples of which have existed for over twenty years. Of course, lots of things are new to the Slashdot editors that are old to the rest of us.

Beer might not be strong enough but...