Slashdot Mirror

Sorry - money where my mouth is. I read a different article on this subject with more detail at New Scientist today which mentioned that. No permanent damage. There.

I remember reading about a guy who's redesigned the foot pedals. Instead of gas and brake pedals you have a single pivoted plate. push your toe forward to accelertate, push you heel down to brake. The swedish car safety board found it a good idea - since you don't have to move your foot, it cuts stopping distance etc. Volvo are looking at putting it into production... I reckon it sounds like you would pick it up quickly. Ah, found it, good old Google!

I recall some other tests suggesting that joysticks instead of steering wheels are better but very hard to get used to - except for people young enough to be video-game addicts, who prefer it!

Passengers on packed trains could unwittingly be exposed to electromagnetic fields far higher than those recommended under international guidelines. The problem? Hordes of commuters all using their mobile phones at the same time.

...

Passengers on packed trains could unwittingly be exposed to electromagnetic fields far higher than those recommended under international guidelines. The problem? Hordes of commuters all using their mobile phones at the same time.

...

Here.

The problem I see is: what about backlighting? LCD required backlighting to work doesn't it? If the colors (colours for you brits :-) are dense enough to reflect light realistically then perhaps that isn't a problem for some applicaitons: the invisibility application, however, presents a problem.

I read an article on eInk a while back on their full-color screens that do not emit light. In other words, you need an external light source to see the screen. Sounds like a perfect match for this technology.

This stuff is getting pretty heavy, but it seems the technology to break this type of cryptography is already in early stages of research. Check out this New Scientist article.

This article IceCubes would mean cool computing at New Scientist covered the technology.

New Scientist covered this story a while ago. See here.

I am an EverQuest addict. EverQuest is a subscription based MMORP-game which "updates" itself every time you start it, so all users can connect to the same server, no version conflicts, great. Late last year they updated the game engine to be full-featured DirectX8 woohoo. Well, before the graphics sucked because they were totally outdated, even Moorhuhn looked better. But now my GeForce 2 MX can hardly handle the data, and half a gig of RAM is just enough for the game not to crash.

My point is:

There are 300.000 subscribers to EverQuest, and with Star Wars Galaxies out there will probably be even more addicted folks. You'd risk all of our sanity (which would result in the collapse of the 77th wealthiest "state" in the world!) if there wouldn't be more, faster, cheaper graphics boards. Really. It's damn important!

Here is a possible explanation for homeopathy.

A note that I think should have gotten into today's Slashback -- the New Scientist is reporting that the IEEE has rescinded its decision to make all paper submitters agree not to violate the DMCA in their articles, amid a storm of protest.

"The plan is to remove the reference to the DCMA," says Bill Hagen, intellectual property rights manager for the IEEE. "It's controversial to say the least. We've been getting a lot of correspondence, comment and opinion and have been forced to reconsider it."

This is even better than preserving the status quo, because in this case the hooplah got the problems of the DMCA out in front of the IEEE membership, which is very large and includes some extremely influential people. Score one for the good guys.

A note that I think should have gotten into today's Slashback -- the New Scientist is reporting that the IEEE has rescinded its decision to make all paper submitters agree not to violate the DMCA in their articles, amid a storm of protest.

"The plan is to remove the reference to the DCMA," says Bill Hagen, intellectual property rights manager for the IEEE. "It's controversial to say the least. We've been getting a lot of correspondence, comment and opinion and have been forced to reconsider it."

This is even better than preserving the status quo, because in this case the hooplah got the problems of the DMCA out in front of the IEEE membership, which is very large and includes some extremely influential people. Score one for the good guys.

Interesting timing on the articles, isn't it?

neither, http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 92133

Check out this NewScientist feedback item. Or just jump straight to the google link they refer to. Can I get anyone a juice of lawyers?

First of all: I do not believe this is actually true. Antinori really isn't better at cloning then the Roslin Institute, and they usually have a few hundred miscarriages for every successful pregnancy. Presuming Antinori did not have a few hundred women standing by to be impregnated, he really is very lucky to have a 100% success rate.

But anyway: Let's just assume this is an actual clone. Evidence is now coming through showing that dolly isn't quite as healty as we first expected.
Apparently she ages a lot faster, and has a number of diseases. Now imagine that, when the baby is born ('prototype clone'), (s)he starts getting all types of horrible diseases, limbs missing and what have you. That is when Joe Schmoe will understand you just can't copy people like you can copy a CD. Too bad someone has to suffer for it.

it's from New Scientist - it tells you how it works

Heh I just submitted this story. Oh well.
Here's the link I used for the NewScientist version. I guess the most interesting thing about this is the theory of shrink-wrapping. I think most of the rest of it is just speculation.

A radio-frequency signal in the table coil induces a current in the coils in the glasses to keep the glasses powered up, even when they are raised a few inches above the table.

Oh great! Now in addition to worrying about my cell phone giving me a brain tumor I have to worry about sitting to close to the table and going sterile.

Yahoo is also running a similar story, based on a New Scientist article. In the New Scientist article, this technology makes sense: in a restaurant setting, waiters can make sure to keep people's glasses topped off, that way the customers stay happier. But in a pub setting, I dont see this technology working as well. I mean, how does the glass know when the drinker has drunk enough for the night? Obviously it doesn't....and because everyone is different, there's no algorithm that can tell you how much a person should be allowed to drink, and that'd be treading on the person's privacy anyway. But yeah, I'd love to see this used on restaurant soda and water glasses...

At least this one is interesting. Found the link on ArsTechnica.

Actually, quantum physics protects key distribution from retransmission. One of the fundamental benefits of quantum cryptography is the reliance on the principle that measurement affcts that which is being measured. In short: it is possible for the sender / receiver to determine if their key was intercepted by using unsecure communication of other information that doesn't benefit anyone else that may happen to see it. For a great explanation of how to protect your key distribution in this way, see this article in the New Scientist.

This article talks about the experiments where people do things like wear mirrored goggles that reverse vision, or flip vision upside down. All the experimentation done so far says people can adjust in about one month. And vision is something that we have done every day, all day, since early life. If we can fix that kind of stuff, catching a ball seems easy as well.

Curious George

New Scientist special bulletin (8th March)

check out this
article at new scientist. A little more balanced about what this might mean. Two things I noticed right away. a) The Larson A Ice Shelf, which is nearly as big as this one dropped off in 95. b) this ice shelf is only 1800 years old. Where I am sitting now was under a mile of ice 15,000 years ago. Perhaps the Ice shelf's existence is the abnormality, not the fact that it has dropped off! These are MODELS people. Models can be wrong. Until these guys can predict the weather accurately one month from now, I'll save my money betting either way. Watching these guys "predict" events is like watching Jack Ryan predict Crazy Ivans. Its a guess, but you might just get it right some time...

I'm surprised this one hasn't been mentioned yet(heck, its worthy of a front page story)...

But what about The Creativity Machine? From the article:

The Creativity Machine's basic design can be used for myriad purposes, says Thaler. One weekend, for example, he showed the machine a smattering of popular songs - actually just short phrases of about 10 notes without any accompanying harmonies - then turned it loose to imagine some new ones. The filtering network selected 11 000 of the best themes and Thaler sent them to the US Library of Congress to be copyrighted. "That makes me technically the most prolific songwriter of all time," he boasts.

1. Money. China, if it creates new stem cell lines, would be eyed by major research companies and the pharmaceutical industry as holding the potential for millions of dollars in revenue.

2. No opposition. In a country where an individual and the individual's family are severely punished for having more than one child, and the government jails its people for religious expression, who is going to oppose this. In China, the government can effectively say "Throw all inhibitions to the wind. No one will oppose us."

That being said, though, China is headed in the wrong direction. Embryonic stem cell research, while showing "potential," has produced no results.

In fact, Chinese medical officials, in another case of jumping the gun, injected stem cells into a suffering Parkinson's patient. The results were horrific. Because we don't yet know how to control stem cells, they grew wildly and developed into one of the most primitive and terrifying cancers, a "teratoma." When finally autopsied -- the cure killed the poor soul -- they found at the brain site of the injection a tumor full of hair, bone and skin.

On the other hand, research conducted in the US has shown much more promise as a result of adult stem cells .

Adult stem cells were shown to be able to turn into every single tissue in the body. This would eliminate the need for therapeutic cloning and ESCR, as adult stem cells could be taken from the afflicted person and turned into needed tissues without concern for rejection.

And in doing so, they have provided incentive for obtaining stem cells from elsewhere. Using adult stem cells harvested from the same person who will receive them has obvious advantage, not the least of which is the immune system factor. Score one for democracy.

Reminded me of HUD technologies (with AWACS support), where when a plane's radar picks up another plane, the HUD shows its location with a square, and various other information appears, generated from the AWACS feed, or other embedded signals in the radar (for friend/foe recognition etc.)

There's an interesting article in New Scientist about similar technology, used to "supplement" what your eyes can see. A guy from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Rostock has come up with a "Virtual Showcase" that has the target artefact in, and then with the aid of special goggles the wearer sees a superimposed image, with a likely representation of what the artefact may have looked like originally.

You can find the link here
(http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/tech/arti cl e.jsp?id=99991959&sub=Hot%20Stories)

There was a story just the other day here about a healthy "multi-generational space travel" needing only 160 people. Do you really think that that genetic diversity is going to be threatened by a few billion people designing babies??

I also find it funny that people who use evolution as a reason NOT to have "designer" babies. News flash: Evolution doesn't go away just because we have brains, it just changes. If human's "over-design" themselves, nature will take care of it's own. We are and always will be part of nature.

I don't understand this at all..

for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself.

But the polyphosphazene polymers you provide a link to could easily be chiral...

I'm following Prof. Robert D. Minard (Penn State Astrobiology Research Center) who says they aren't chiral.

But why do we need a mathematical definition of life, or indeed any definition of life at all?

I was playing here with the previous post's idea that life might be more fundamental than its chemistry. There's a hint of this idea in Stephen Wolfram's theories. Coming up with a precise definition of life would only be pointless if it's impossible. The point would be that a mathematical description of life might give it the same standing as a natural law like gravity or entropy: The Law of Life.

We are certainly not at a point in our understanding where we are ready to let any of this stuff out of the lab yet (although much of it has been released into the wild and has now contaminated other crops which were supposed to be safe).

One problem is that the more arrogant scientists out there believe that they can learn to avoid major screwups while committing them.

Take the mission critical computer programming analogy. You do not test out a new bake of software on a machine which is performing life support on a patient, or operating part of the power grid. You make absolutely sure that the software is going to behave as expected in an isolated environment before installing it in an environment where it is capable of killing people if it fails.

The fact that synthetic DNA codes have propagated in the wild in ways which the GE scientists never expected is very strong evidence that at least some of those scientists failed to complete the testing process.

DNA is the ultimate mission critical system in the sense that if it suffers total failure, all life on Earth bites the dust. It only takes one sloppy engineer/scientist shortcutting the process to break the system in a way which is devastating to the system; however, scientists are currently free to release genetic sequences into the wild which are not properly tested (as evidenced by the fact that they behave differently than expected).

Again, it only takes one of these scientists screwing up (think of how often some engineer in a team breaks the build by throwing in some last-minute bugs) to cause major damage. Like software companies, some scientists are going to be more careful than others (for many different reasons - compare Windows to QNX), and some scientists are bound to do crappy work and try to get it released.

As long as scientists around the world are releasing under-tested DNA sequences (which at this point in our understanding means just about anything that we have come up with), we have a very dangerous situation on our hands.

Here is some reference:

Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz of the Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena found that genes used to modify oilseed rape (canola) were transferred to bacteria in the guts of bees. He experimented with honey bees and GM oilseed rape, which had been modified to resist a specific herbicide; he removed oilseed rape pollen from legs of bees and fed the pollen to young bees. When he examined the intestines of the young bees he found that some carried the gene that resisted the herbicide.

In Mexico, tailored DNA sequences have contaminated native varieties of corn - even those growing in remote areas (100km from the nearest industrial farm). Read the BBC article.

In Canada, they recently discovered that the minimum distance required between fields of GM crops and fields of 'elite' crops is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the distance that is actually necessary to prevent 'unacceptable' levels of contamination (because they found that earlier assumptions about how far pollen would spread were false). Too bad they didn't bother to find this out in the lab... Here's the New Scientist article.

I don't claim that this article is correct and I don't claim that the Discovery episode is incorrect. I am just saying that you should not adopt the information contained in one documentary as your new world view. Keep in mind that there are other explanations for everything. Newton's gravity model was once unquestionable.

Basically, as far as I can tell, the first paragraph is saying, "I heard about one study that contradicts another study."

Any time some study conclusively "proves" that blah de blah is true or false, it just smacks of scientific arrogance to me. You never have proof. Only evidence.

This Discovery special was about about another paper that came out right after the first (because of the first) from many many more thousands of scientists and other *ologists that said that both were a crock of shit, media and political propoganda.

I recommend New Scientist's summary

...or at least 80, according to an article at New Scientist.

However, there could be a slight problem with inbreeding. From the article:

"The decrease in genetic variation is actually quite small and less than found in some successful small populations on Earth," he says. "It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period."

Edward Castronova, of the economics department at California State University at Fullerton, studied thousands of EverQuest transactions performed through eBay to determine the real-world economic value generated by the inhabitants of Norrath.

Castronova discovered that Norrath's gross national product per-capita is $2,266. If Norrath was a country, it would be the 77th most wealthy in the world, just behind Russia.

Castronova also found that Norrath's virtual currency is more valuable in the US than the Yen. And his research shows that EverQuest players earn an average of $3.42 for every hour spent playing the game.

...

Launched in 1999 by Sony, EverQuest is one of the largest role playing games on the internet. According to Sony, the game has 400,000 users in total, with up to 60,000 inhabiting the game at any one time.

• 7 go to the internet looking. (3 go to a commercial source)
• Of those 7...
  • 2 find what they need the first time. Their money is *poof* gone. They've made the move. They'll do this again.
  • 2 find what they need, but it doesn't work quite right. They want free so badly, they'll screw with it till it works.
  • 1 finds something close, but it doesn't quite work. This one hires a consultant to tell them how to do it... they'd rather pay a human than buy software.
  • 2 don't find it, and buy software.

although this announcement seems a bit early on the research curve for me right now. I suppose an organ like a kidney would be slightly easier than a section of intestine, or something like that.

With enough heat and oxygen, most stuff will burn. And yes, they had a lot of questionable junk, stuff that wouldn't burn if they had 4-5 psi oxygen, but that would burn with 17 psi oxygen. Things like that.

Here's a neat example: An oxy-acetalene torch burns through steel slabs.

You use the regular torch to heat up a spot on the metal to just about melting, then you blast it with oxygen. Because the metal is so hot and you're giving it so much pure oxygen, it burns, which creats a *ton* more heat, which heats up the nearby metal, which then burns with the oxygen you're feeding it, etc etc.

You have to keep the oxygen jet moving at just the right speed in order to continue the reaction.

Here is a cool reference.

And this "thermic lance" used to burn through 6 feet of concrete, wow, I'd never seen that before!

.

You could also make it explode... See for example this article in New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91795

That article was mentioned in Risks Digest 21.87 (see the newsgroup comp.risks). Exploding chips are a dangerous idea. You would not like them to be triggered by accident...

The first thing that came to my mind after reading the article was this article, which I read a just few minutes ago..

Dunno, it's got GPS, communication and could be used to "help everyday people track everyday things" (as was stated in the maccentral article).. But then again, it was developed by HP, and not by woz..

Now there's an interesting benefit.. err... effect of using a cell phone.

Here is how they can do this. The question about how ethical (or aesthetical?) is to degrade the music just to avoid (just up to some extent) being pirated, is pretty interesting, I think.

BMG in Europe launched 2 CDs lately with copy protection but have now switched back to ordinary CDs. NewScientist has a decent article about this here. Also covered are the reaction from Congressman Rick Boucher, who has written to the RIAA and others informing them that releasing copy-protected CDs may be a violation of the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act).

In the other New Scientist article there is this jucy tidbit:

Martin Dalgleish, of world-renowned British hifi company Linn, warns that getting copy-protection technology right is increasingly hard because consumer manufacturers often cannot get good quality CD drive components and use computer ROM drives instead - which can make copy-protected discs misbehave.

Philips says copy-protected CDs have no future at New Scientist. As an aside, I find New Scientist to be one of the best all-around sources for sci/tech news.

Philips says copy-protected CDs have no future at New Scientist. As an aside, I find New Scientist to be one of the best all-around sources for sci/tech news.

Recently law makers have been showing resistance to industry execs who are pushing cd copy-protection. Here is a recent story on this. The recording industry according to this article is rethinking copy protection all together.