Slashdot Mirror

joecool12321 writes "In this article at Scientific American we find that professor Stefan Frauendorf of Notre Dame has good news for lefties: he's found evidence of the long-sought left handed nuclei."

kastaverious writes: "I found this on Scientific American. It talks about developments in all optical switching and the growth in capacity of optical fiber. The article has some interesting graphs of bandwidth demand and the growth in bandwidth availabilty. There is also a good explanation of some of the technical issues involved in increasing switching capacity, and efforts underway to overcome these problems." The article also has lots of good SciAm-style graphics. This short article at Janes also sheds some light on the world on undersea cable laying, which also recalls the article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired a few years ago.

sandman935 writes "The editors at Scientific American have a wrap up of the important discoveries in the year 2000. It's a good read." It covers the gamut from the Golden Rice, Gecko's Toes, DNA Microarrays, and the new extra-solar system planets.

An AC pointed us to this story about genetic tests: An article in Scientific American discusses the growing evidence that employers hire and fire based on genetic tests. It highlights the story of a woman whose life was probably saved by a simple genetic test. Unfortunately, the same test also cost her her job and health insurance.

An AC pointed us to this story about genetic tests: An article in Scientific American discusses the growing evidence that employers hire and fire based on genetic tests. It highlights the story of a woman whose life was probably saved by a simple genetic test. Unfortunately, the same test also cost her her job and health insurance.

Mayor Quimby writes: "EETimes reports that LED guru Shuji Nakamura predicts White LEDs to overtake the light bulb Mr. Nakamura is an amazing guy who is given substantial credit in the development of blue and white LEDs. Other articles about him can be found here and here. He "works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 355 days a year, and says he has never taken a vacation." Also, check out this circuit board found in an LED flashlight that uses a single AA battery. It'll be nice when low cost knockoffs start flooding in from the Far East." I can vouch for the life of white-LED flashlights -- the ones I purchased more than a year ago from Holly Solar are still on their first sets of AA batteries. Not as bright as incandescents, but plenty for lighting up a tent or to keep from stumbling on a trail.

Amphigory writes: "According to an article at Scientific American scientists now think that large granite formations could form in only a few thousands of years instead of the hundreds of thousands or even millions previously thought. This may have some really interesting implications for everything from geology to cosmology to evolution."

Amphigory writes: "According to an article at Scientific American scientists now think that large granite formations could form in only a few thousands of years instead of the hundreds of thousands or even millions previously thought. This may have some really interesting implications for everything from geology to cosmology to evolution."

nachoworld writes "Normally we don't like bacteria in our water, but it seems this breakthru will allow us to use sulfate-reducing bacteria to clean up our water. Talk about "bugs" in our soup (ok, ok, I know that viruses are the bugs, bacterias are not, but I couldn't think of another joke)."

Paul Cobbaut writes "This http://www.sciam.com/2000/070 0issue/0700crawford.html is a link to an article on SA about Seti results so far. It discusses about why we found no ET yet, and provides more links." Very lucid and informative. Compare and contrast with a previous story.

Welcome to another episode of Slashback, laden with bits about the psychology of the Apple Cube, damage-control parity among handhelds, mourning the passing of a Linux-friendly ISP, technicalities of credit, and aliens. Can you ever read enough about aliens, anyhow? Enjoy.

Its maddening combination of color and shape drive one completely in -- No, wrong cube. Savage Henry Matisse writes: "There's a really super article analyzing the psychology behind Jobs' most recent flight of fancy, posted here. The thrust of it is that, rather than being a replay of the NeXT FUBAR or another instance of being too-far-ahead-of-his-time, the CUBE is really a very sly piece of manuevering meant to shoehorn Macs into the corporate compu-hierarchy from the top down. Very insightful-- an analysis kinda along the same lines as Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line" And for those who prefer the practical to the theoretical, RevAaron writes: "Many of us have been wondering about some of the details of Apple's newly released Power Macintosh G4 Cube, including whether or not it has an AGP slot or just a chip soldered onto the board. Listen to the story from the lead designer of the cube here at MacSlash."

Well technically, they'd still block excess light from your eyes ... FroBugg writes "Handspring has just released an OS upgrade for all their Visor handhelds, which is supposed to fix the DRAM problem that caused crashes and data corruption. Go get it here." This is the same RAM Problem Palm devices have as reported a few weeks ago, at which point no fix was out for Visors.

The end of a (very brief era): dubious_1 writes "The free internet service provider http://www.freewwweb.com has ceased operation. The service provided by freewwweb used ppp and pap authentication for its dialup making it available to users of any operating system. Users of freewwweb agreed to set their web browsers home page to a page used by freewwweb, to allow them to support the service through ad revenue. According to the web page you are redirected to when accessing the previous freewwweb.com site, the service lost by the demise of freewwweb is now being filled by Juno however, this service is only available for users of MS Windows 9x and nt. Unlike freewwweb, Juno uses a proprietary front end to authenticate users on their service. The web site specifically says that this client program is not available for either Linux or MacOS."

One recurrent Ask Slashdot question is about this very issue -- Where are free ISPs for Linux users? I wonder if there are any good answers now that freewwweb has snuffed it. Surely if billions of dollars are there to be made with free-for-the-viewing television programming, there's no reason that ad-supported ISPs should be uncommon. Can you say "target market"?

Credit where credit is due. We mentioned a fraudulent site established to mimic the look of online personal credit-card site PayPal. Jawed Karim writes, "You incorrectly mention that your credit card can get stolen by becoming a victim to the fake PayPal site. This is not true. The credit card is not exposed when you log into your PayPal account. Just wanted to make this clear. (The same correction has been made to the MSNBC article, at the bottom of it)"

Well, isn't the danger that customers lulled into thinking they were on the right site would be also lulled into giving their information away? Someone sure wants to steal credit card information with this site, but yes, it's more of a social engineering trick than an automated number grabber.

Yes sir, we know that the damn cat is still in the box. Swede2048 writes: "Lots of people think that SETI is a hopeless adventure, and mostly a waste of time and processing cycles. [including many who read yesterday about the "SETI-on-a-board product" ;) -- t] For those who haven't read it yet, last month's Scientific American had a great article describing the results SETI has already provided. By NOT finding e.t.life in the searched sky, SETI has placed some restrictions on what kinds of e.t life can exist."

Welcome to another episode of Slashback, laden with bits about the psychology of the Apple Cube, damage-control parity among handhelds, mourning the passing of a Linux-friendly ISP, technicalities of credit, and aliens. Can you ever read enough about aliens, anyhow? Enjoy.

Its maddening combination of color and shape drive one completely in -- No, wrong cube. Savage Henry Matisse writes: "There's a really super article analyzing the psychology behind Jobs' most recent flight of fancy, posted here. The thrust of it is that, rather than being a replay of the NeXT FUBAR or another instance of being too-far-ahead-of-his-time, the CUBE is really a very sly piece of manuevering meant to shoehorn Macs into the corporate compu-hierarchy from the top down. Very insightful-- an analysis kinda along the same lines as Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line" And for those who prefer the practical to the theoretical, RevAaron writes: "Many of us have been wondering about some of the details of Apple's newly released Power Macintosh G4 Cube, including whether or not it has an AGP slot or just a chip soldered onto the board. Listen to the story from the lead designer of the cube here at MacSlash."

Well technically, they'd still block excess light from your eyes ... FroBugg writes "Handspring has just released an OS upgrade for all their Visor handhelds, which is supposed to fix the DRAM problem that caused crashes and data corruption. Go get it here." This is the same RAM Problem Palm devices have as reported a few weeks ago, at which point no fix was out for Visors.

The end of a (very brief era): dubious_1 writes "The free internet service provider http://www.freewwweb.com has ceased operation. The service provided by freewwweb used ppp and pap authentication for its dialup making it available to users of any operating system. Users of freewwweb agreed to set their web browsers home page to a page used by freewwweb, to allow them to support the service through ad revenue. According to the web page you are redirected to when accessing the previous freewwweb.com site, the service lost by the demise of freewwweb is now being filled by Juno however, this service is only available for users of MS Windows 9x and nt. Unlike freewwweb, Juno uses a proprietary front end to authenticate users on their service. The web site specifically says that this client program is not available for either Linux or MacOS."

One recurrent Ask Slashdot question is about this very issue -- Where are free ISPs for Linux users? I wonder if there are any good answers now that freewwweb has snuffed it. Surely if billions of dollars are there to be made with free-for-the-viewing television programming, there's no reason that ad-supported ISPs should be uncommon. Can you say "target market"?

Credit where credit is due. We mentioned a fraudulent site established to mimic the look of online personal credit-card site PayPal. Jawed Karim writes, "You incorrectly mention that your credit card can get stolen by becoming a victim to the fake PayPal site. This is not true. The credit card is not exposed when you log into your PayPal account. Just wanted to make this clear. (The same correction has been made to the MSNBC article, at the bottom of it)"

Well, isn't the danger that customers lulled into thinking they were on the right site would be also lulled into giving their information away? Someone sure wants to steal credit card information with this site, but yes, it's more of a social engineering trick than an automated number grabber.

Yes sir, we know that the damn cat is still in the box. Swede2048 writes: "Lots of people think that SETI is a hopeless adventure, and mostly a waste of time and processing cycles. [including many who read yesterday about the "SETI-on-a-board product" ;) -- t] For those who haven't read it yet, last month's Scientific American had a great article describing the results SETI has already provided. By NOT finding e.t.life in the searched sky, SETI has placed some restrictions on what kinds of e.t life can exist."

Dr. Zowie writes: " Scientific American 's "Amateur Scientist" column this month tells how to amplify and isolate DNA chains in your kitchen, using the tried-and-true Polymerase Chain Reaction technique. Use it for massively parallel computing experiments; to ID friends, pets, and favorite houseplants; or to help eliminate epidemics. But what'll happen when enterprising teenagers start playing with plasmids and recombinant DNA?" I love articles that remind you that one of the ingredients it recommends playing with is a nasty mutagen. Interesting that PCR has become so common that all it takes is a hundred dollars and a dark room!

Dr. Zowie writes: " Scientific American 's "Amateur Scientist" column this month tells how to amplify and isolate DNA chains in your kitchen, using the tried-and-true Polymerase Chain Reaction technique. Use it for massively parallel computing experiments; to ID friends, pets, and favorite houseplants; or to help eliminate epidemics. But what'll happen when enterprising teenagers start playing with plasmids and recombinant DNA?" I love articles that remind you that one of the ingredients it recommends playing with is a nasty mutagen. Interesting that PCR has become so common that all it takes is a hundred dollars and a dark room!

ruppel writes: "Scientific American has an interesting article on molecular computing. The article is quite extensive, covering several technological issues and visions for the future. It also lists references for further reading and some interesting links. " The article is a great technical overview of what's actually going in nano/molecular/x computing.

ruppel writes: "Scientific American has an interesting article on molecular computing. The article is quite extensive, covering several technological issues and visions for the future. It also lists references for further reading and some interesting links. " The article is a great technical overview of what's actually going in nano/molecular/x computing.

eric434 writes: "If you are trying to explain the DeCSS issue to your neighborhood or any other relatively computer illiterate person(s), check out the current Scientific American, Cyber View section. They give a very well-written, no-computer-knowledge-required explanation of DeCSS, and what it's for. It appears they have really researched the issue, and the viewpoint presented is not that of the MPAA's. Check it out here. "

Phase Shifter wrote to us about the limits of conventional hard drives, which Scientific American is discussing. The article talks about the history of hard drives, and why sometime soon, due to the limitations of the superparamagnetic effect, we will need to find a new storage type. It's a cool background read on hard drives and what goes into them.

Phase Shifter wrote to us about the limits of conventional hard drives, which Scientific American is discussing. The article talks about the history of hard drives, and why sometime soon, due to the limitations of the superparamagnetic effect, we will need to find a new storage type. It's a cool background read on hard drives and what goes into them.

Alex Farber turned us on to this story in the January 2000 issue of Scientific American about something NASA never talks about: sex in space. The article says, "Rumors of unofficial orbital couplings abound, but no one is talking." With manned (and/or womanned) Mars missions likely to take 2.5 years or more, and duty cycles on the planned International Space Station expected to be nearly six months, outer space sex is a subject even the most prudish NASA bureaucrats will not be able to avoid much longer. Face it: wouldn't you want to experiment with Zero-G lovemaking if you had a chance to do so - and you had a willing partner available whose curiosity quotient was as high as yours?

Alex Farber turned us on to this story in the January 2000 issue of Scientific American about something NASA never talks about: sex in space. The article says, "Rumors of unofficial orbital couplings abound, but no one is talking." With manned (and/or womanned) Mars missions likely to take 2.5 years or more, and duty cycles on the planned International Space Station expected to be nearly six months, outer space sex is a subject even the most prudish NASA bureaucrats will not be able to avoid much longer. Face it: wouldn't you want to experiment with Zero-G lovemaking if you had a chance to do so - and you had a willing partner available whose curiosity quotient was as high as yours?

Regan writes "The December issue of Scientific American has a scary story on the use of facial recognition software to identify "subversives" among the general population. I did a PhD in image recognition and have serious doubts about the reliability of this software. Automatic face recognition is hard, even when the subject cooperates. What are they going to do about false positive identifications? If you're suddenly bundled into a car the next time you're walking past the post office you'll know the answer. " Interesting point: What do you folks think? Can this work?

Regan writes "The December issue of Scientific American has a scary story on the use of facial recognition software to identify "subversives" among the general population. I did a PhD in image recognition and have serious doubts about the reliability of this software. Automatic face recognition is hard, even when the subject cooperates. What are they going to do about false positive identifications? If you're suddenly bundled into a car the next time you're walking past the post office you'll know the answer. " Interesting point: What do you folks think? Can this work?

pcarter writes "Scientific American has an interesting article about the possibility of unifying all the fundamental physical forces (electro-weak, strong and gravity) by 2050 and how it might be done. "

pcarter writes "Scientific American has an interesting article about the possibility of unifying all the fundamental physical forces (electro-weak, strong and gravity) by 2050 and how it might be done. "

joshv writes "Ever think that physics professor was smokin dope as he described those mysteriously shaped clouds of electron probability floating around atoms? Here's proof. Someone has managed to image atomic orbitals using X-ray crsytallography." The story's from Scientific American; very cool stuff. This may be old hat to physics grads, but it's interesting to us laypeople. ;-)

joshv writes "Ever think that physics professor was smokin dope as he described those mysteriously shaped clouds of electron probability floating around atoms? Here's proof. Someone has managed to image atomic orbitals using X-ray crsytallography." The story's from Scientific American; very cool stuff. This may be old hat to physics grads, but it's interesting to us laypeople. ;-)

Amoeba Protozoa writes "Here is an amusing and well written interview with Edward Teller, atomic science history's own real-life Dr. Strangelove." It's in Scientific American. And at one point, Teller threatens to throw the interviewer out of his office if he mentions Dr. Strangelove "three more times."

Amoeba Protozoa writes "Here is an amusing and well written interview with Edward Teller, atomic science history's own real-life Dr. Strangelove." It's in Scientific American. And at one point, Teller threatens to throw the interviewer out of his office if he mentions Dr. Strangelove "three more times."

limited wrote in about the October issue of Scientific American, in which, he says, "there is a Special Report on High Speed Inet Access." Great in-depth tech stuff! In related (and IMO excellent) news, here's a News.com story Zyber sent in about a new ruling from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that requires cable TV operators to sell access to competing Internet service providers. Perhaps the US FCC will be smart enough to follow the Canadians' lead. One can only hope.

Rhys Dyfrgi writes "There is an article in this month's Scientific American about the Raw microchip. Based around field programmable gates arrays, they claim it will reach speeds between 10 and 15 gigahertz by the year 2010. Because it's a FPGA, it can be instantly reconfigured to perform any task. It is one of the central items for the Oxygen Project. "

Rhys Dyfrgi writes "There is an article in this month's Scientific American about the Raw microchip. Based around field programmable gates arrays, they claim it will reach speeds between 10 and 15 gigahertz by the year 2010. Because it's a FPGA, it can be instantly reconfigured to perform any task. It is one of the central items for the Oxygen Project. "

TeknoDragon writes "In the July Scientific American there's an article on how conductive metals can be made into optical sieves. Two applications of this technology pursued by NEC are color LCD screens up to six times as bright and photolithography techniques that would help plants upgrade to a smaller fab. "

Mike Hicks writes "Scientific American has a short article talking about fractal antennas. They can be 25% more efficient when used in place of the stubby antennas on cellular phones. An antenna that's fun to look at -- who'd a thunk it? "

Derek Pomery writes "Scientific American Online has a new article by an IBM team concerning their new search engine, named "Clever". Clever is a link based search engine, but the logic is a little different then Google (they compare the two). It'll be interesting to see which is more effective. "

Derek Pomery writes "Scientific American Online has a new article by an IBM team concerning their new search engine, named "Clever". Clever is a link based search engine, but the logic is a little different then Google (they compare the two). It'll be interesting to see which is more effective. "

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a Scientific American article that is an interview with Gordon Moore discussing all sorts of things relevant to a guy who gets a cool law named after him.

Cory Williams writes " Scientific American has a nice little article about Open Source and its superiority to commercial software: "The Best Things in Cyberspace Are Free". Not like we didn't already know this. "

democritus writes "Scientific American is reporting that IBM has made a new double-gate transistor" As transistors become shorter, current bleeds through them when they are supposed to be off. The new design should enable anything down to 25 nm long transistors. Currently transistors are 250 nm long, but to attain higher speeds, circuit designers often use fatter transistors which can drive a wire to a high or low state (binary 1 and 0) faster (hence very hot CPUs). The new design acts as if it doubled the length of the transistor, enabling higher speed circuits in the same area. Finally, because each transistor has two gates, a chip using the new transitor could use either both gates (for fast operation) or a single gate (to save power for portable applications).

carter writes "It appears Georgia Institute of Technology & Sudeshna Sinha of the Institute of Mathematical Science in Madras, India, published the first design for a chaotic computer. Such computers could in theory could preform trillions of operations a second. Think of how fast your kernels will compile with one of those things. :-) "

Alan writes "An article in December's Scientific American indicates that Microsoft invested $20M to develop technology that could be placed in neighborhood patroling vans to detect copyright infringement. This "Tempest radiation technology" uses the radio emissions from monitors which can be received and decoded, remotely reproducing the image that appears on the monitor."

Alan writes "An article in December's Scientific American indicates that Microsoft invested $20M to develop technology that could be placed in neighborhood patroling vans to detect copyright infringement. This "Tempest radiation technology" uses the radio emissions from monitors which can be received and decoded, remotely reproducing the image that appears on the monitor."

zeta writes "A team of scientists led by Ryuzo Yanagimachi of Hawaii University, have now cloned clones. They have reproduced over 50 mice that genetically match their sister/parent, sister/grandparent and sister/great-grandparent."

Jesse Becker writes "Nicholas K. Sheridon, a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, came up with an idea for making digital paper that can hold the image, even after the power source is removed. The digital paper is erasable (a few million times), and requires almost now power to operate (a solar cell the size of your finger will do nicely). There, unfortnately, are no pictures at this URL (though there are in the print version of the magazine). "