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http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91783

There's an enlish-language article on the subject at New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91783

Ho hum. At least there are always New Scientist and Nature to satisfy our urges

If the other sources somehow become slashdotted, NewScientist also has an article up on this.

It's up under the title "Anger plays key role in human cooperation".

--R

If the other sources somehow become slashdotted, NewScientist also has an article up on this.

It's up under the title "Anger plays key role in human cooperation".

--R

At the top it introduces numbers (0-12 then a few others). It shows a number in base 1 (just dots), then in binary, then the symbol they want to use for it, with their symbol for equals in between.

It then goes on to basic math and by looking at the numbers you can figure out what the operator is and its symbol. I make the first one out to be 1+1=2 and the second one (going down) is 1+2=3. Then comes geometry, atoms, spectral lines (?), etc.

The idea of these messages (they really need to be much longer to be useful) is that, by the end, you have an entire working language and can then start telling them stuff. I have a problem with this message because it wastes lots of space on pictures that have meaning to us but probably aren't very interesting to the aliens (case in point: the map of earth). These messages should be long and focus on text (symbols) and diagrams when necessary (the atoms).

For a *decent* article on these messages read Let's learn Lincos on the New Scientist website.

Note: I'm no linguist so If I can read it so can you. Give it another shot!

Also on NewScientist.com last year

New Scientist has more info including a graphic of how the moon shields raido waves

Don't just blame corporations, several governments have recently been uncovered to have conspired against UN anti-polution conferences and programs.

Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

Don't believe it?

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91734

*We can now look forward to the spectacle of competing firms scrambling to reverse engineer Sun's new compiler trick and incorporate the same voodoo into their own wares* This will be excellent, duel rates of improvement= fasterer computers, the elbow in the rate of moores law. Still, applications for this tech have imagine a beowulf of these results as side effects.

The 20-25% false negative rate is not bad (for a supplemental security tool) but the 10% false positive rate revealed in the corresponding newscientist.com article is excessive.

Heres the New Scientist article about it

...old news from 1997. This older article is much better than the submitted one, so check it out.

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 695000/1695390.stm
• http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91663
• http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91649

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 695000/1695390.stm
• http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91663
• http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91649

Wind power is getting more viable as a power source every day. Small turbines are popping up throughout Scotland on remote farms, and near remote villages. Even the large power companies are building these, in order to avoid dragging costly power lines across long distances to relatively small groups of users.

New turbines with outer cowlings to focus the wind through the turbine generate up to 40% more power size for size, and at wind speeds as low as 2 metres per second (5 is the normal cut off). See This New Scientist Special Report.

When I buy my 10 acres I'm going to stick a couple of these babies on 'high field' with the goats!

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91639

New Scientist isn't Nature, it is just a scientific newspaper rather than a journal. It is also cheaper and has a much wider circulation. You may want to wait for the full paper in Nature, but as a non-particle physicist, I'm quite happy with New Scientist's summary for the moment.

New Scientist isn't Nature, it is just a scientific newspaper rather than a journal. It is also cheaper and has a much wider circulation. You may want to wait for the full paper in Nature, but as a non-particle physicist, I'm quite happy with New Scientist's summary for the moment.

It's already in the works.

Here's an interesting experiment on using microwaves to heat up crowds of dissenters.

The Air Force Research Lab has already set guidelines for acceptable pain levels for use against civilians, though some say the levels are too high as they could cause eye damage. Testing against human volunteers has already begun.

Never been achieved on a large scale? What about 1 trillion atoms? Correct me if I'm wrong, but 1 trillion sounds like a pretty large number to me :)

Draging a hazy memory out of my brain... I'm sure that I saw an article about 'ant-modeling' in New Scientist quite a lot of years ago (at least 2/3 years ago) where they were using ant's and their scent trails (modeled of course...) to find the optimum routes across a network.

I think it worked as followed:
Put a bunch of ants on the start node, all they know how to do is travel from node to node and they know when they reach the end node.

Each ant will go down a path to a connected node, except that they will not backtrack to their previous node. Each of these ants is releasing an electronic scent and they are more likly to go down the path with the strongest scent.

Repeat with several thousand ants and you should have your optimum path across the network.

I seem to recall that the article said that BT (British Telecom) was looking into this as a way to optimise the routes that a phone call takes from switching station to switching station... but it was a very long time since I read it.

[No ants were harming in the writing of this post]

However, recently the ad which appears for marijuana changed to NewScientist.com, a science journal which has been publishing much more balanced and thorough information on weed, some of which advocates that weed is less dangerous than alcohol. Also the top result is NORML, a legalization-advocacy group. (This is probably not due to tampering w/ the search engine, but is interesting)

I believe that The Powers That Be within Google have taken the more moderate, academic drug stance, as opposed to gov't-sponsored propaganda. Google's pretty influential, Internet-culture-wise. Food for thought.

(Offtopic, sort of, i know, but I saw a Google story and had to run with it!)

There was an article on New Scientist about some technology similar to this. It would analyze what parts of a web page were hit the most, and bring those to the foreground (think bigger, bolder links), and shrink or kill off the unused links.

It's all part of the process of creating a more "intellegent" web.

To see the article, you'll need to get a trailist account with their archive. Once you have it, go here, or search for "Sizzling Skies" in the 06 Jan 01 issue.

To see the article, you'll need to get a trailist account with their archive. Once you have it, go here, or search for "Sizzling Skies" in the 06 Jan 01 issue.

To see the article, you'll need to get a trailist account with their archive. Once you have it, go here, or search for "Sizzling Skies" in the 06 Jan 01 issue.

They just want to get their feet wet, for now.

New Scientist has a good story on this. And there is this page with links on the chinese space program from U.S. Embassy Beijing Environment, Science and Technology Section.

What is the difference between a cancer cell and a "normal" cell? Why would radiation therapy tend to kill cancer cells faster than normal cells?

What is the difference between a cancer cell and a "normal" cell? Why would radiation therapy tend to kill cancer cells faster than normal cells?

There was an interesting piece in the New Scientist about the Mars Society. I'll dig out the reference tonight if anyone wants it.

The thing that stuck out in my mind was a single line.
"One wonders if genuine Astronauts would leave their dirty dishes lying in the sink all day"

That kind of detail allows the world to treat the Mars Society as a bunch of big kids playing in the desert. It certainly lowered my expectations of their 'work' actually proving fruitful. One assumes they would be on best behaviour with Journos around... imagine what they do when their not there!

They have made evolutionary electronic devices. I seem to remember it was a New Scientist article but I don't have a copy to hand. An FPGA was trained to differentiate between two frequencies, which was accomplished with far fewer gates than traditional designes, and the final array contained a block of gates that weren't linked to the main block, which if removed stopped the device from functioning.

A neat trick would be to get solar cells on clothes. Our bodies have a fair amount of surface area that we could use to gather power for all these smart devices that we'd be wearing. Here's an article on this type of thing: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 9618

A small feature which would be greatly appreciated is the functionality of the xmms-crossfade plugin.

I recon this sounds more interestings. More info also here in a good New Scientist article that also conducted an experiment like the Turing test, but with an audience of clubbers listening to the artificial DJ.

Unfortunately I think the HP has the patents on these algorithms, but I guess it maybe possible to licence...

Most of our space craft ARE in orbit around the earth. This would be great for satellites, especially microsatellites. These are usually under 100kg and could be used for anything from satellite observation and diagnostics to cheap comm sats to HDTV mobile cameras. This experiment could help drive their cost down as it would mean that they could use a cheap GPS receiver for guidance instead of some clumsy, custom method. The US Air Force has some interesting ideas. As does this New Scientist article.

According to this article in the online version of New Scientist, Malaysia is about to introduce a compulsory national id card system, using smart cards with biometric information on them (fingerprints).

According to this article in the online version of New Scientist, Malaysia is about to introduce a compulsory national id card system, using smart cards with biometric information on them (fingerprints).

YOU probably have a black hole in you! No, not kiddin' New Scientist had as the cover story [registration required free for seven days] that some scientists believe that small black holes probably exist in a stable state, acting a little like a atomic nucleus.... that is a massive (as in has mass) core with electrons whizzing round. These stable black holes were created near the beginning of time and will have persisted til today: "Despite their fearsome reputation, not all black holes are cosmos-gobbling monsters, says Marcus Chown. There could even be one inside you". The scientists calculated the approximate proportion of these black-hole atoms and concluded that some people might have one somewhere inside them.

To my knowledge, I don't think there is a single example fo where a black hole from inside a person has detroyed the earth/solar system/galaxy. I'm sure that if it ever happens the BBC will carry the story :-)

YOU probably have a black hole in you! No, not kiddin' New Scientist had as the cover story [registration required free for seven days] that some scientists believe that small black holes probably exist in a stable state, acting a little like a atomic nucleus.... that is a massive (as in has mass) core with electrons whizzing round. These stable black holes were created near the beginning of time and will have persisted til today: "Despite their fearsome reputation, not all black holes are cosmos-gobbling monsters, says Marcus Chown. There could even be one inside you". The scientists calculated the approximate proportion of these black-hole atoms and concluded that some people might have one somewhere inside them.

To my knowledge, I don't think there is a single example fo where a black hole from inside a person has detroyed the earth/solar system/galaxy. I'm sure that if it ever happens the BBC will carry the story :-)

Apparently, for the vast majority of buildings in the USA, an impact by an aircraft, similar to what happened, would take them down almost instantly. The construction of these buildings saved lives.

There are many articles in New Scientist Magazine on many related subjects to this event, including one that discusses the buildings in some detail.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site using Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

There is another good article on the collapse at NewScientist.com

I was very much impressed with the way the buildings withstood that kind of impact long enough for some people to escape. The loss of life if they had gone immediately, or had toppled sideways just doesn't bear thinking about.

It isn't horrible - it's about as poisonous as lead, and used for the same reason as lead is used: it's very heavy.

To find more info google search for "depleted uranium" or New Scientist has lots of info.

This sort of telepresence idea would be good for a project like HAL -- a "child" computer program being raised using speech by Ai in Israel. Speech itself is not much of a sensory input to experience the world through compared with touch and vision, and yes, moving the whole system around would be a pain.

New Scientist had an article on it some time ago.

--

Nic

oops! k it's written here instead! Sorry- I er...copied the address from the wrong window...

See New Scientist.

I'm more impressed by some of the other research being done in this area, such as the German scientists who are developing solar fabric. Maybe solar-powered textiles will finally explain 7of9's shiny wardrobe.

I guess I'm arguing that intelligence is a function of pathway complexity and self-referentiality (real word?).

Its being done, at least sort of. (Check here if you don't have access to New Scientist)

I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of hardware and software is created this way in the future.

is here.