Experiments at the National Ignition Facility have given researchers confidence that they'll achieve a milestone in nuclear fusion sometime this year.
The tests involved blasting a cylinder the size of a pencil eraser, known as a "hohlraum," with 192 laser beams and seeing whether researchers could tweak the energy to create the right kind of implosion. The results suggested that they could - and that the $3.5 billion blaster in California just might produce the world's first controlled fusion reaction, with more energy coming out than going in.
For more than a half-century, scientists have been trying to harness the nuclear fusion reaction to generate what could be prodigious amounts of energy. The reaction involves crushing together light atoms (like hydrogen) so forcefully that they fuse into heavier atoms (like helium). Each reaction converts a tiny amount of mass from the atoms directly into energy.
When you multiply that demonstration of E=mc2 by trillions, you start producing power on the scale of an H-bomb or the sun.
The research reported by the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, represents a step toward actual energy production in a controlled reaction. But there are still many steps to go before scientists reach that break-even point. Even if NIF is successful, it will take years to adapt the technology for commercial applications. And that's the most optimistic view.
Jeffrey Atherton, the program director for target experimental systems at NIF, is an optimist.
"The potential for NIF and fusion energy as the game-changer [for energy resources] is enormous," he told me. He acknowledged that commercial fusion was far from a sure bet, but said the technology had to be included in... [Read More]
I plan on doing the usual, hanging out with the family, playing some football, stuffing my face with food and passing out early. I'll be out around midnight that same night though, I have a few things I need to get for my new apartment before I move.
Only four days after the first attempt to send a particle beam around the LHC, we have arrived at the point when all four experiments got their first real collisions from the machine. This was met by celebrations and champagne, as people have been waiting years and years for this moment. It is a testament to the engineering of the machine that collisions were reached already, so few days after restarting. The LHC had already demonstrated ca 10h stable beams, and now also stable beams in both directions at the same time. In the coming weeks, we need only wait for increased intensity and the first attempts at acceleration.
Assessors at the Gifted Children's Information Centre in Solihull said Oscar, with an IQ of at least 160, is one of the brightest children they have every come across.
He has been ranked in the 99.99th percentile of the population and has been ranked off the scale as the Stanford-Binet test cannot measure higher than 160.
Oscar's father Joe, 29, an IT specialist from Reading in Berkshire, said: "Oscar was recently telling my wife about the reproductive cycle of penguins. "He is always asking questions. Every parent likes to think their child was special but we knew there was something particularly remarkable about Oscar. "I'm fully expecting the day to come when he turns around and tells me I'm an idiot."
Mother Hannah, 26, told The Daily Mail: "He amazes everyone. We knew at 12 weeks he was extremely bright. He was unusually alert." Mrs Wrigley, a housewife, added: "His vocabulary is amazing. He's able to construct complex sentences. "The other day he said to me, 'Mummy, sausages are like a party in my mouth'."
Dr Peter Congdon, who assessed Oscar, said he was a "child of very superior intelligence". "His abilities fall well within the range sometimes referred to as intellectually gifted. He demonstrated outstanding ability," he said.
John Stevenage, Mensa's Chief Executive confirmed Oscar had been accepted aged two years, five months and 11 days. "Oscar shows great potential. Converting that potential to achievement is the challenge for his parents and we are delighted that they have chosen to join the Mensa network for support", he said.
The youngest British child to join Mensa is Elise Tan Roberts, from Edmonton, North London, at two years, four months and 14 days, with an IQ of 156.
Researchers have unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a putative human ancestor--and it is full of surprises. Although the creature, named Ardipithecus ramidus, had a brain and body the size of a chimpanzee, it did not knuckle-walk or swing through the trees like an ape. Instead, "Ardi" walked upright, with a big, stiff foot and short, wide pelvis, researchers report in Science. "We thought Lucy was the find of the century," says paleoanthropologist Andrew Hill of Yale University, referring to the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton that revolutionized thinking about human origins. "But in retrospect, it was not."
Researchers have long argued about whether our early ancestors passed through a great-ape stage in which they looked like protochimpanzees, with short backs; arms adapted for swinging through the trees; and a pelvis and limbs adapted for knuckle-walking (Science, 21 November 1969, p. 953). This "troglodytian," or chimpanzee, model for early human behavior (named for the common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes) suggests that our ancestors lost many of the key adaptations still found in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, such as daggerlike canines and knuckle-walking, which those apes were thought to have inherited from a common ancestor.
Evidence has been hard to come by, however, because there are almost no fossils of early chimpanzees and gorillas. Until now, the oldest known skeleton of a human ancestor was Lucy, who proved in one stroke that our ancestors walked upright before they evolved big brains. But at 3.2 million years old, she was too recent and already too much like a human to reveal much about her primitive origins. As a result, researchers have wondered since her discovery in 1974, what came before her--what did the early members of the human family look like?
Now, that question is being answered in detail for the first time. A multinational team discovered... [Read More]
The popular social networking site Twitter has been hit by a denial of service attack, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
In an e-mail to CNN.com, Stone said this morning's attack is not related to a recent incident in which a hacker stole internal documents from the site.
"There's no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack," Stone said in the e-mail.
"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services
MORE THAN half of US doctors use Wackypedia to work out what is wrong with their patients, according to a study published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
While US doctors charge their victims, er patients, huge amounts of cash, their actual tool of choice seems to be the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
According to New Scientist this means that people with made up doctorates and Daily Tech readers with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind are effectively treating people with serious illnesses.
To be fair to Wackypedia, its medical coverage is not too bad. Studies conducted by the medical community show that the online encyclopedia is almost free of factual errors. Generally its pages get better with time.
However there is the problem that some of Wikipedia's volunteer editors sometimes get bees in their bonnets about certain types of treatment and fill up pages with negative information about some types of drugs.
It also has information on only about 40 per cent of drugs questions and often skips information that is too dull for the editors to want to write. For example you should not take St Johns Wort with the HIV drug Prezista even if you are really depressed about your illness, but you won't find that out at Wikipedia.
There are also potential complications and side effects that Wackypedia's editors can't be bothered to mention, but they are just the sorts of things that doctors need to know when they are prescribing drugs.
Bloomberg is reporting that the World Health Organization discovered a single, surprising characteristic that's emerged among swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are all fat. Infected people with a body mass index greater than 40 suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal. The virus appears to be on a collision course with the obesity epidemic. WHO officials are gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. 'It's very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks.' Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body's immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO's chronic diseases department in Geneva.
Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.
Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at small, low-cost netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well.
Google said netbooks with Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010.
"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS," the firm said in its official blog.
The operating system, which will run on an open source licence, was a "natural extension" of its Chrome browser, the firm said.
They're designing it to be quick, simple, and easy to use, and want it to start in a matter of seconds, allowing people to be surfing the internet in moments.
I've not read the three links above yet (but I have a couple of others), but my thoughts are that this is going to be the first truly web-oriented OS, and... [Read More]
Remember OnLive? The tiny console that is supposed to be released in the future that allows you to stream any game to your TV with 1 millisecond ping times? Well this tops that. No software to install, no system requirements besides an internet connection. Seems like you could use this service to play Crysis quality games on a 6 inch net book...
Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer!
Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection.
We call this Streaming Worlds, taking the full richness of modern computer games to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
From: http://www.dperry.com/archives/news/...aikai_-_video/
Our Gaikai team has been working really hard for the last year, we demonstrated our tech privately at GDC, then LIVE (hands on) to most of the major publishers at E3.
For the people that visit my blog, I wanted to flick through some demos and show the experience under the following conditions:
(1) No installing anything. (I'm running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.) ... [Read More]
Some guy on b.net are saying the first dungeon Tristram Cathedral is too elaborate. But he's wondering whether the dungeons in the rest of the games will continue to be awesome, or only important dungeons like the Cathedral will "become sprawling?"
Q u o t e: My issue is not about it being a cathedral. My issue is that with the first dungeon being so amazing and sprawling and epic, wouldn't it make smaller dungeons look lacking?
"I think there's a nice juxtaposition between the larger more epic dungeons and the others that may be less epic but have very specific tones and themes associated with them. When you step inside one of the more epic dungeons, like the Tristram cathedral (and considering its past, shouldn't it be epic?) you immediately know you're somewhere important. Somewhere that looks and feels magical in its presentation and lighting, as opposed to, say... a cave. Still cool! Caves are still awesome, but you probably don't want magical purple and green lighting in a cave, it's probably going to have a much different and subdued feel. If it's a natural cave it may have light streaming in from cracks above, or if it's a mine it might have lighting from lanterns. Much earthier and natural. Then you walk into some ancient tomb of a powerful wizard, oh crap, this place clearly has something else going on. The lighting is a bit unnatural, maybe some sickly greenish hues to set a theme and mood.
That type of theming adds a lot to keeping the scenery changing and interesting. If you're just fighting demons against a grey or brown backdrop for hours and hours, days and days, maybe years and years... it gets boring. Interesting, themed,... [Read More]
"The Great Sundering, also known as simply the Sundering or the Cataclysm,WRPG 185, 211 was a world event which reshaped AzerothWar of the Ancients. This event was triggered due to the Well of Eternity being destroyed. approximately 10,000 years ago at the end of the Prior to the Sundering, there was only one continent on Azeroth, referred to as Kalimdor. In the catastrophic explosion, eighty percent of the land mass was destroyed,W3Man #? leaving behind the major continents and scattered islands that are known today: Northrend, Kezan, the Eastern Kingdoms, and the remnant still referred to as Kalimdor. The site of the Well of Eternity became a swirling vortex of power known as the Maelstrom."
I didn't really browse the forums yesterday because it was Canada day (day off for me!), but here's some news about the patch.
"Many of you are wondering what's up with the patch and the ladder reset. While I've sprinkled some information around, it's about time it was all mashed up in one easy-to-read location.
The Story -
Once upon a time our internal legacy development teams wanted to put some much needed love into Diablo II. Diablo II doesn't have tournaments with millions of dollars swirling about them, so it generally took a back seat to the patch development time of our other legacy titles. But one day the planets aligned, and it was finally time to give the old girl a new coat of paint and break a bottle of champagne over her bow with the release of a patch. This went well. Meetings were held, the community was involved and polled, and an extremely long list of ideas and changes was created. That list was then cut down to changes felt to be either necessary changes, or easily implemented to ensure development time was efficient. This also went well.
Not long after, the alarm bells sounded. The patch was progressing quickly, and the release was potentially imminent. Early on it was decided, and somewhat of a no-brainer, that a ladder reset with coincide with the patch release. With the patch progressing well, a potential release of two weeks was estimated, and as always this is the exact amount of forewarning given to players and the community before a ladder reset. An announcement was made quickly and immediately to ensure a full two week notice was given. There are many reasons for this standard two-week notice, not the least of which is that most players don't understand the meaning of ladder and non-ladder, and how a reset affects their characters. Following any reset our support departments are flooded with issues related to the change of their characters, so we attempt to inform beforehand and... [Read More]
The Pirate Bay is to be bought for $7.8 million by Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish company specializing in internet café management software, the company has announced. As well as taking over the controversial brand, GGF has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. The acquisitions mean that GGF will be at the heart of 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing.
Update: Global Gaming Factory have confirmed (according to Dagens Nyheter, a respected news outlet in Sweden) that "Users of The Pirate Bay will have to pay to download music and movies. Those who seed material will be able to profit from doing so."
It costs Apple roughly $3 more to make an iPhone 3G S than it does Palm to pump out a Pré, hardware analysis by market watcher iSuppli has revealed.
Following a Bill of Materials (BoM) and manufacturing breakdown of the iPhone 3G S, iSuppli concluded that each unit will cost Apple $172.46 in components and $6.50 to manufacture.
By contrast, the same analysis conducted on the Pré back in April discovered that Palm’s smartphone costs $170 in components.
The analysts’ latest BoM breakdown was conducted on a 16GB iPhone 3G S. It discovered that the phone’s priciest part is its Flash memory, supplied by Toshiba at a cost of $24.
Apple’s second highest outgoing is the phone’s Toshiba-supplied 3.5in display module, which costs $19.25, iSuppli said.
One of the iPhone 3G S’ cheapest components is it GPS receiver, iSuppli discovered, which costs just $2.25.
The latest iPhone sports several hardware improvements over its predecessor. For example, the 3G S’ processor is 200MHz faster than the 3G model’s – a change that adds $14.46 to the BoM of each new iPhone. The 3G S also has a more powerful camera than the 3G model.
However, the analyst stressed that “the 3G S hardware feature set is not much different from that of the 3G” and so concluded that, from a component and design perspective, Apple’s able to produce the 3G S “at only a slightly higher materials and manufacturing cost” than the model’s forerunner.
It’s worth remembering, though, that Apple’s $179 BOM doesn’t include additional costs, such as software development, shipping, distribution and packaging.
Looks like the interwibbles were all atwitter after the king of pop died last night.
------------------ The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death.
Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application". "It's true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.
Google's trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called "hotness" gauge the topic was rated "volcanic". The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at 0400 BST was 48% higher than average.
Fail
Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public's clamour for information.
The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service.
Searches for topics related to Michael Jackson peaked at 3PM Pacific
Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages.
Before the company's servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates.
According to initial data from... [Read More]
We've just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50.
Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon at his Holmby Hills home and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.
A source tells us Jackson was dead when paramedics arrived. A cardiologist at UCLA tells TMZ Jackson died of cardiac arrest.
Once at the hospital, the staff tried to resuscitate him but he was completely unresponsive.
We're told one of the staff members at Jackson's home called 911.
La Toya ran in the hospital sobbing after Jackson was pronounced dead.
Michael is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince "Blanket" Michael Jackson II.
CNN claims that he's in a coma. LA Times has, however, confirmed that he's dead.
The Telegraph reports that scientists have found that if you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear. Known as the 'right ear advantage,' scientists believe it is because information received through the right ear is processed by the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information than the right side of the brain. 'Talk into the right ear you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain,' say researchers. The team, led by Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University of Chieti in central Italy, observed the behavior of hundreds of people in three nightclubs across the city where they intentionally addressed 176 people in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left. 'These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized specialization of right and left hemispheres,' say researchers. 'We can also see this tendency when people use the phone, most will naturally hold it to their right ear.'
Satnav firm Mio is launching a device with an integrated TV tuner. The Mio Spirit range includes a digital television tuner that is intended to be used 'during breaks in the journey or at their final destination.' However, safety campaigners fear there's little to stop the television being used at the wheel. When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!
A helioseismic map of the solar interior.
(Credit: Image courtesy of National Solar Observatory)
ScienceDaily (June 19, 2009) — The sun is in the pits of a century-class solar minimum, and sunspots have been puzzlingly scarce for more than two years. Now, for the first time, solar physicists might understand why.
At an American Astronomical Society press conference in Boulder, Colorado, researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star's interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.
Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear.
Howe and Hill found that the stream associated with the next solar cycle has moved sluggishly, taking three years to cover a 10 degree range in latitude compared to only two years for the previous solar cycle.
The jet stream is now, finally, reaching the critical latitude, heralding a return of solar activity in the months and years ahead.
"It is exciting to see", says Hill, "that just as this sluggish stream reaches the usual active latitude of 22 degrees, a year late, we finally begin to see new groups of sunspots emerging."
The current solar minimum has been so long and deep, it prompted some scientists to speculate that the sun might enter a long period with no... [Read More]
Artist's concept of LCROSS nearing impact with the moon. Credit: NASA
Two robotic probes were speeding towards the Moon at 8,000mph last night on a mission that will help to earmark future human camp sites, as hearings got under way in Washington that could shake up Nasa’s plans for returning Man to the lunar surface.
The launches of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) from Florida represent what Nasa calls its “first step in a lasting return to the Moon”, nearly 40 years after Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot there.
The twin voyage, which comes with a $580 million (£350 million) price tag, will produce the most precise and comprehensive measurements of the Moon’s topography yet made, with LRO mapping the surface over several years from an altitude of 31 miles.
The life of LCROSS will be somewhat shorter. On October 9 it will separate from its Centaur rocket casing, which will then hurtle the final 54,000 miles into the Moon, hitting it at 6,000mph and kicking up an estimated 350 tons of material. LCROSS will begin its own kamikaze descent four minutes later, flying through the debris plume and beaming back readings of its content — searching for the presence of ice or water vapour, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials — before it, too, crashes.
“LCROSS has been the little mission that could,” said Doug Cooke, the associate administrator for Nasa’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. “We stand poised for an amazing mission and possible answers to some intriguing questions about the Moon.”
The vision is for a manned base on the Moon by 2024, where astronauts could one day grow their own food, scout for new sources of mineral energy, plant the early... [Read More]
The Cash-for-Clunkers program, which has been much-debated over the past few months, finally passed Congress, riding on the coattails of an emergency war funding bill, which now awaits President Obama’s signature.
Car owners could get a voucher worth $3,500 if they traded in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for one getting at least 22 m.p.g. The voucher would grow to $4,500 if the new car’s mileage was 10 mpg higher than the old vehicle. The m.p.g. figures are listed on the car’s window sticker.
Owners of sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks or minivans getting 18 m.p.g. or less could receive a voucher for $3,500 if their new truck or S.U.V. got at least 2 m.p.g. higher than their old vehicle. The voucher would increase to $4,500 if the mileage of the new truck or S.U.V. was at least 5 m.p.g. higher than the older vehicle.
The unexplained bee disappearance known as Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD, is a problem that affects more than just honey producers. It may not seem like it, but bees play a big role in ice cream making. The domino-like process begins with the pollination of seeds for hay in order to feed the dairy producing cows for this internationally beloved dessert.
California has one fifth of the nations honey bees. More specifically, the state’s honeybees account for $6 billion of the $15 billion in commercial crop pollination value.
The CCD problem, involves the abandonment of the hive by adult bees. “The bees are not fleeing because of lack of food, but the ones left behind are dying because of lack of food and no other bees to keep them warm,” said Eric Mussen who is the extension apiculturist at U.C. Davis.
Honey bees in the U.S. were brought over from Europe in 1622. It was not until the 1900’s that contamination problems within the bee populations arose, the first one caused by mites. More recently viruses have become the main focus of bee research in the U.S.
Penn State and University of Montana are two of the top research hubs that focus on CCD. Mussen, who acts as liaison between the academic and the real worlds offers an explanation about the influence of CCD on modern bee studies.
“After CCD came, things have changed,” said Mussen who compares his role as extension apiculturist to a firefighter who has to jump up and fight fires whenever they arise. “CCD is there and now it’s something that we need to take care of before we can get back to other up-and-coming developments.”
U.C Davis, where Mussen works is not currently conducting research on CCD, but within the centers that are, especially on the east coast,... [Read More]
The World Health Organization raised the swine flu alert Thursday to its highest level, saying the H1N1 virus has spread to enough countries to be considered a global pandemic.
Increasing the alert to Phase 6 does not mean that the disease is deadlier or more dangerous than before, just that it has spread to more countries, the WHO said.
"This is an important and challenging day for all of us," WHO Director General Margaret Chan said in a briefing with reporters. "We are moving into the early days of the first flu pandemic of the 21st century." The last previous pandemic occurred in 1968. As of Thursday, the virus had spread to 74 countries, the health agency said. There were 28,774 confirmed cases and 144 deaths. The United States had 13,217 cases and 27 deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said June 5 in its weekly update. Cases have been reported in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The U.S. death toll is expected be higher when the CDC releases its latest figures Friday, said Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
New England -- particularly Massachusetts -- and the New York and New Jersey areas have been hit the hardest, Schuchat said Thursday at a CDC news conference. The Phase 6 pandemic designation had been widely expected for weeks. "Further spread is considered inevitable," Chan said at a news conference at WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. "The scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met." The announcement came after a meeting of the WHO's Emergency Committee, which has debated since April whether the spread of a novel H1N1 flu virus was fast and widespread enough to warrant a Phase 6 designation. Phase 6, Chan said, is meant as a signal to countries to recalibrate their... [Read More]
Mr Boole said he could not make sense of his survival
A skydiver from Staffordshire has survived a 6,000ft free fall in Russia without his parachute.
James Boole, from Tamworth, said he was supposed to have been given a signal by another skydiver to open the parachute, but it came two seconds too late.
Mr Boole, who was filming the other skydiver for a television documentary, landed on snow-covered rocks and suffered a broken back and rib.
"What went through my mind was my wife and my daughter," he said.
"I really thought that I was going to die - incredible feeling of sadness and just how unfair that was."
Mr Boole, who has made 2,500 jumps, is now back at home in a body brace.
He said: "(The other flyer) took us so close to the ground where I thought I was dead.
"When I finally looked at the ground and realised how low I was, I knew there was no time for me to get a full parachute above my head.
"For the first 48 hours after the accident I thought maybe I am dead and this is some kind of after-life limbo, or some other reality, because I couldn't make sense of it - how I was still here to come through this?"
Video shot from the plane captures the moment the skydivers hit the ground
Sorry I am a little late on this news, but I was in transit.
Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. It actually computes knowledge from its database and or the internet. So if you ask it a natural language question rooted in academics it will return answers in various forms (graphs, maps, pictures, etc)
The International Space Station is a partnership of the US, Russian, European, Japanese, and Canadian Space Agencies. The station has been continuously human occupied since Nov 2, 2000. Orbiting 16 times per day at 17,500 miles per hour 250 miles above the ground, it passes over 90% of the world’s surface. When complete in 2010, it will weigh over 800,000 pounds and have a crew of 6 conducting research and preparing the way for future exploration to the moon and beyond.
Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all.
Edit: Due to massive complaints, a link to the official discussion thread about this digital cataclysm can be found not here but here.
Care to opt-in early for the StarCraft II beta test period? Blizzard just stamped its World of Warcraft news feed with a new post detailing the steps necessary to make it so, if you'd like a shot at a golden ticket.
Head over to the "Beta Profile Settings" page in your Battle.net account management interface — you'll need a Battle.net account if you don't have one — and walk through the new beta "opt-in" procedure (basically a system-spec snap-grab so Blizzard can ensure you're not planning to test running Windows on WINE in Linux on a 486-something-or-other).
Only downside? You'll have to download an app to run the info-pull. Well, that, and Blizzard's a little vague on what "other information" refers to in the sentence "includes such information as how much RAM you have, available hard drive space, your graphics card and driver, and other information about your system." Will we trust 'em anyway? Probably.
Tired of opting into Blizzard's sneak previews proactively? Run the new process once and you'll apparently have the option to volunteer for future betas as well. Easy enough.
Note that signing up now is still a gamble. Per the StarCraft II Beta FAQ, "once you’ve successfully uploaded a beta profile, the associated Battle.net account is added to a pool of potential beta testers."
No word (yet) on whether this covers all eventual intended platforms, i.e. both Windows as well as OS X.
First to test when they flip the switch? North America, Australia, and New Zealand, says Blizzard.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is open to debate the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
His remarks come as a San Francisco lawmaker has introduced a bill to regulate marijuana like alcohol, with people over 21 years old allowed to grow, buy, sell and possess cannabis, the newspaper says.
An analysis by the State Board of Equalization says the proposal to impose a $50-an-ounce levy on sales of marijuana would boost state revenues by about $1.3 billion a year.
Schwarzenegger, in responding to a reporter's question, says it is not time to allow the state to regulate and tax pot, but adds, "I think it's time for debate. I think all of those ideas of creating extra revenues -- I'm always for an open debate on it."
In 1996, California voters legalized marijuana for medical use with permission from a physician, although this still violates federal law
Multiple hadrosaur red blood "cells" surrounded by white, fibrous matrix
A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.
Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.
Yet critics said the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and asked for protein sequences, better handling of samples to prevent contamination, and confirmation analyses from other laboratories.
So Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.
Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.
The Ibn Sina robot will soon get a Facebook profile page
Facebook could soon be helping bridge the divide between humans and robots.
Researchers are giving a robot its own Facebook profile page to help foster meaningful relationships with people.
The page will be populated with interactions the robot has with people as well as photos of the time it spends in human company.
Its creators hope that embedding it in a social web will give rise to a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine.
Ancient scholar
The coupling of robot and social network is the idea of Dr Nikolaus Mavridis and co-researchers as they look into ways of overcoming the reluctance of people to stay in touch with robots.
While robots that can engage people have been produced before now, research suggests that humans lose interest at most a few weeks after being introduced as the behavioural repertoire of the machine is exhausted.
In a paper on the pre-print website Archive.org server, the researchers say they want to find out if this can be thwarted by giving humans and robots a pool of shared memories and if they are part of the same social circle of friends.
The platform for exploring the problem is a robot that can recognise faces created by Dr Mavridis and colleagues from the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML) at the University of the United Arab Emirates plus co-workers in Germany and Greece
The prototype is based around a PeopleBot machine from ActivRobots to which they have added a range finder, touch screen and stereo camera. The current prototype is called "Sarah" but when the project begins this will be swapped for a machine with the face of Arabic... [Read More]
A research team of the University of Zaragoza has developed a prototype of a brain-actuated wheelchair. During May 2008, five subjects, only using their thoughts, successfully carried navigation and manoeuvrability tasks with the wheelchair in the University. The non-invasive method to record the human neural activity was the EEG and the wheelchair was robotized and equipped with a laser sensor.
This web describes a new non-invasive brainactuated wheelchair that relies on a P300 neurophysiological protocol and automated navigation. When in operation, the user faces a screen displaying a real-time virtual reconstruction of the scenario and concentrates on the location of the space to reach. A visual stimulation process elicits the neurological phenomenon and the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal processing detects the target location. This location is transferred to the autonomous navigation system that drives the wheelchair to the desired location while avoiding collisions with obstacles in the environment detected by the laser scanner. This concept gives the user the flexibility to use the device in unknown and evolving scenarios. The prototype was validated with five healthy participants in three consecutive steps: screening (an analysis of three different groups of visual interface designs), virtual-environment driving, and driving sessions with the wheelchair. On the basis of the results, this paper reports the following evaluation studies:... [Read More]
A team from Austria's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send entangled photons 144 kilometres (90 miles) between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics.
Because of the success of the test, the IQOQI team said it was now feasible to send this kind of unbreakable encrypted communication through space using satellites.
Quantum cryptography works by sending streams of light particles, or photons, making it entirely secure, as any eavesdropping would leave traces and immediately be detected.
In quantum cryptography, photons are used as the key for the encrypted communication -- just as mathematical formula are used in conventional cryptography.
The application of entangled photons on satellites and their distribution will allow us to test quantum mechanics over a distance of many thousand of kilometres. Albert Einstein and his colleagues discovered the “spooky action at a distance,” whereas the term “entanglement” found its way into quantum language and quantum information through the Austrian scientist Erwin Schrödinger.
With the development of novel ideas which produce more then 2. Mio. pairs of entangled photons per second, it is now possible to think seriously about the use of satellites. In this experiment, created by a team around Anton Zeilinger and Rupert Ursin, both photons were sent on a 144 km long journey from La Palma to Tenerife, before being received by the ESA ground station. The photons were exposed to the conditions they would find on the way from the satellite to earth. With that the feasibility of transmission from satellite to an optical ground station has been proven.
Indeed quantum cryptography is possible over a modern glass fibre net, but because of the high rate of... [Read More]
Why should you care about what Trent Reznor has to say about Apple or smartphones in general? Well, for one thing, the front-man for Nine Inch Nails is a digital music visionary who's gone it alone and found gold in the deep coffers of the Internet. And that little device in your pocket just happens to be the future of mobile computing and converged media players.
The story begins last week when Apple rejected an update to the official Nine Inch Nails iPhone application on the grounds of "objectionable content" (read: too many F-bombs). In this case, as it was in the rejected Tweetie update, the offensive content isn't actually part of the application; Apple's concern is with the song "The Downward Spiral" that can be streamed to the updated NIN iPhone App. The stupidity of this is palpable, but the hypocrisy is best described by Trent himself in a forum post over at NIN.com. Steel yourselves: unlike Apple we haven't censored the material -- so if naughty words can hurt you then by all means, don't click through to the full quote after the break. But Mr. Jobs, old pal, if you're listening... Trent may not be Bob Dylan, but he is the voice of the digital music generation.
As posted by Trent himself in response to Apple's rejection eMail:
Trent Reznor said:
...I'll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and "clean" versions be made
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the new swine flu spreads, people have lots of questions about how it affects their day-to-day life. Here are some answers.
Q: How easy is it to catch this virus?
A: It's spreading as easily as regular winter flu, which infects millions each year. Early estimates are that 25 percent to 30 percent of family members are getting sick once a relative brings it home.
Q: How dangerous is it?
A: Nobody knows yet. Genetically, it doesn't share the same traits that made the infamous 1918 pandemic so deadly, nor does it seem as virulent as the bird flu that scientists have tracked for several years. While Mexico reported many deaths, the virus is causing less severe illness in the U.S. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says most cases so far haven't needed medical attention.
Q: Could I have some immunity?
A: Since it's a never-before-seen mix of mostly pig but also human and bird viruses, the CDC has cautioned that's unlikely. But it is a member of the H1N1 family of flu viruses, which circulate widely. Flu specialist John Treanor at the University of Rochester says people born before 1957 spent their childhood repeatedly exposed to H1 viruses. So experts are withholding final judgment on that question.
Q: Is it treatable?
A: Yes, with the standard anti-flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza. They lessen symptoms if taken within 48 hours of the first symptoms.
NASA will probably not build an outpost on the moon Camera as originally planned, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, told lawmakers on Wednesday. His comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.
NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there. But some space analysts and advocacy groups like the Planetary Society have urged the agency to cancel plans for a permanent moon base, carry out shorter moon missions instead, and focus on getting astronauts to Mars.
Under Scolese's predecessor, Mike Griffin, the agency held firm to its moon base plans. But the comments by Scolese, who will lead NASA until President Barack Obama nominates the next administrator, suggest a shift in the agency's direction. He spoke to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies of the House Committee on Appropriations.
Scolese was asked repeatedly whether NASA could still make it to the moon by 2020 under the proposed 2010 budget, but failed to give a clear yes or no, and his answers suggested the agency's plans were in flux.
Short trips
"We were looking at an outpost on the moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited," he said. "It will probably be less than an outpost on the moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the moon to various
Yes, if we play our cards right - or wrong, depending on your perspective.
In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".
Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.
How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.
If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own
World's fastest camera relies on an entirely new type of imaging
Ultrafast, light-sensitive video cameras are needed for observing high-speed events such as shockwaves, communication between living cells, neural activity, laser surgery and elements of blood analysis. To catch such elusive moments, a camera must be able to capture millions or billions of images continuously with a very high frame rate. Conventional cameras are simply not up to the task.
Now, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a novel, continuously running camera that captures images roughly a thousand times faster than any existing conventional camera.
In a paper in the April 30 issue of Nature (currently available online), UCLA Engineering researchers Keisuke Goda, Kevin Tsia and team leader Bahram Jalali describe an entirely new approach to imaging that does not require a traditional CCD (charge-coupled device) or CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) video camera. Building on more than a decade of research on photonic time stretch, a technique for capturing elusive events, the team has demonstrated a camera that captures images at some 6 million frames per second.
"The most demanding application for high-speed imaging involves fast events that are very
GENEVA – An outbreak of swine flu in Mexico and the United States is a quickly evolving situation that has "pandemic potential," the head of the World Health Organization said Saturday before an emergency meeting of flu experts.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the North American outbreak of a never-before-seen virus was a very serious situation.
She called Saturday's emergency meeting to consider declaring an international public health emergency over the outbreak, which is believed to have killed dozens of people in Mexico and sickened at least eight in the U.S.
The experts are also expected to recommend whether WHO should raise its pandemic alert to a higher level.
At least 62 people have died from severe pneumonia caused by a flu-like illness in Mexico, according to WHO. Some of those who died are confirmed to have a unique version of the A/H1N1 flu virus that is a combination of bird, pig and human viruses.
Mexico has closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters in a bid to contain the outbreak, which may have sickened about 1,000 people there.
"The situation is evolving quickly," Chan said at a telephone news conference in Geneva. "A new disease is by definition poorly understood.
"In the assessment of WHO, this is a serious situation which must be watched very closely."
"This is an animal strain of the H1N1 virus, and it has pandemic potential because it is infecting people," Chan said.
A planet orbiting a red dwarf star 20 light years away could be the first known water world, entirely covered by a deep ocean.
The planet, named Gliese 581d, is not a new discovery, but astronomers have now revised its orbit inwards, putting it within the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist on the surface. "It is the only low-mass planet known inside the habitable zone", says Michel Mayor of Geneva Observatory.
Mayor and his team used the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile to observe the low-mass star Gliese 581, and a precise spectrometer called HARPS to analyse its light.
That turned up the faint footprints of four planets, since the orbiting planets make the star wobble slightly, giving its light a slight Doppler shift. Three of the planets had been identified previously.
The outermost planet had been thought to have a period of 83 days, putting it too far away from the small star's gentle heat to bear liquid water. But that was a mistake. "We only had a limited number of observations", Mayor told New Scientist. Now with three times as much data, he finds an orbital period of 66 days, putting the planet closer to its star – about a quarter of the Earth-Sun distance – and just inside the red dwarf's habitable zone.
New class
Gliese 581d is about seven times as massive as Earth, so it is much too small to be a gas giant like Jupiter, but probably too big to be a rocky world like our own. "Around such a small star, it is very difficult to have so much rocky material at such a [large] distance," says Mayor. Instead, the planet is likely to have a makeup similar to Neptune or Uranus, which are dominated by... [Read More]
Cornell University researchers have created a program that can find relationships in large amounts of data. It sounds like simple data processing, but it is not:
The Cornell program came up with an formula describing the physics of a two-part pendulum. It did in a day what some of the most brilliant physicist minds took centuries to do. The program accomplished this feat without any knowledge of physics or geometry!
This is only an example of what the researchers are hoping to do with such programs: To help human scientists analyze infinitely large data sets.
Wired said:
“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis.
The UN Human Rights Council assaulted free expression today, in a 23-11 vote that urges member states to adopt laws outlawing criticism of religions. The proposal came to the UN from Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference. There were 13 abstentions. South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil, all strong democracies, allowed this to pass by abrogating their responsibility.
"The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life's savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back."
The Diablo Cube is a side project of mine, which automatically gives away free accounts with high-quality Diablo 2 items on the USEast Ladder several times per day.
How does it work?
The login and password for a mule account is published at random times during every day. Whoever happens to see the information and is quick enough to log into the account first will effectively win the items. Joy!
The chance that the next account will be published during the following 60 minutes is displayed at the bottom of the page. After each account is published, the chance of the next account being displayed in the following hour is reset to its default value, but will increase quickly up to 100% during the following 23 hours.
In short, new account information may appear at any time during the day, so be sure to update often!
Why give away items for free?
Face it, it's going to become an extremely addictive game, and it will most likely make Zelaron very popular. You get items for free, and we get visitors. Everyone wins! So, what are you waiting for?
Since I posted this a bit late, the winner will be displayed on the portal throughout both January and February! The winner will, again, be given an opportunity to write something about him- or herself for everyone to behold!
The list is based on members who signed up prior to November, who have posted at least once in December or January, and have made more than 10 posts in total.
Lenny is excluded from the list this time, because he won the hearts and minds of us last time.
Yes, 2009 has hardly had time to settle in, and Zelaron has now rocketed into its seventh year of existence!
This year, we are going to put more emphasis on game hacking and the like, which will hopefully culminate in a Diablo III hacking community. That is not to say that we will abandon other areas (such as general conversation); the "hacking" emphasis is mainly a general direction we will head in to make Zelaron a more interesting and active community.
Oh, and since you're all useless, the "dungeon" isn't really a dungeon.
A very unusual amount of Earthquakes have joggled the Yellowstone National Park in the past few days. Many of the tremors have originated deep underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!
Nearly 50 years after one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history by Stanley Milgram, Jerry M. Burger, a social psychology professor at Santa Clara University, has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure.
Jerry M. Burger, PhD, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.
Burger's findings are reported in the January issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association. The issue includes a special section reflecting on Milgram's work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984, and analyzing Burger's study.
"People learning about Milgram's work often wonder whether results would be any different today," said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. "Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram's experiments still operate today."
Stanley Milgram was an assistant professor at Yale University in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects – thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning – administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of "teacher" to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of "learner." In reality, both the authority figure and the learner... [Read More]
Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new high-capacity data storage medium made out of a layer of graphene (layers of graphite) only 10 carbon atoms thick.
The new graphene technology could some day replace NAND flash memory, which will reach its limit of 20nm by around 2012. Graphehe is also more viable for three-dimensional or stacked arrays, multiplying capacity.
Researchers have uncovered what may be a universal cause of aging, one that applies to both single cell organisms such as yeast and multicellular organisms, including mammals. This is the first time that such an evolutionarily conserved aging mechanism has been identified between such diverse organisms.
The mechanism probably dates back more than one billion years. The study shows how DNA damage eventually leads to a breakdown in the cell's ability to properly regulate which genes are switched on and off in particular settings.
Like our current financial crisis, the aging process might also be a product excessive deregulation.
Researchers have discovered that DNA damage decreases a cell's ability to regulate which genes are turned on and off in particular settings. This mechanism, which applies both to fungus and to us, might represent a universal culprit for aging.
"This is the first potentially fundamental, root cause of aging that we've found," says Harvard Medical School professor of pathology David Sinclair. "There may very well be others, but our finding that aging in a simple yeast cell is directly relevant to aging in mammals comes as a surprise."
These findings appear in the November 28 issue of the journal Cell.
For some time, scientists have know that a group of genes called sirtuins are involved in the aging process. These genes, when stimulated by either the red-wine chemical resveratrol or caloric restriction, appear to have a positive effect on both aging and health.
Nearly a decade ago, Sinclair and colleagues in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab of Leonard Guarente found that a particular sirtuin in yeast affected the aging process in two specific ways—it helped regulate gene activity in cells and repair breaks in DNA. As DNA damage accumulated over time, however, the sirtuin became too distracted to properly regulate gene... [Read More]
The winner will be displayed on the portal throughout December, and will be given an opportunity to write something about him- or herself for everyone to behold.
The list is based on members who signed up prior to October, who have displayed activity in last two months and have made more than 10 posts.
After having floated around in the ether with no real purpose for almost seven years, it's finally time for a public alpha test of the brand-new Zelaron portal!
The "alpha state" of the portal implies that most of its rudimentary features are operational, yet may be prone to failure in a smorgasbord of interesting and unpredictable ways. No-one will be held liable for anything, including, but not limited to slow loading times, crashing web browsers and whales arbitrarily falling from the sky!
So, by now you may wonder, what is the purpose of this... "portal"?
The purpose of the web page that you now see when you visit http://www.zelaron.com is to serve as a useful, content-rich, slick and informative portal that will give you a quick and comprehensible overview of the Zelaron community, while it also makes it easy to reach other, trans-Zelaron regions of the Internet (such as Google and Wikipedia). In fact, a Google search form is available directly in the top right part of the portal, which lets you search the Internet right away, should you desire to temporarily migrate from Zelaron.
The main thing that I think makes the portal awesome is that it's directly linked to the current Zelaron forum software. In other words, the news and reviews that you see are actually threads posted by our members; the RPGMaker charsets and tilesets are images added to social groups; its download sections contain attachments selected and approved by staff members, and so on.
Also note that the portal is highly modular, and will thus allow us to make adjustments to it very easily. If you happen to know HTML or PHP and want to write a module for the portal, I'll be happy to add it (assuming that the members want your modification).
Presently, I will add comprehensive and detailed information regarding the portal to the Zelaron... [Read More]
I've been playing this game since yesterday. It's definitely the best flash game I've played in a while. If any of you ever played any of the starcraft "turret defense" UMS maps, this is pretty much just like that. There are different "waves" of enemies that come, following the path. Some are fast, some are slow, some are very numerous, some have a lot of health. You use various weapons to prevent them from reaching the end of the path, including gun towers, grenade towers, missile turrets, etc. You get money for killing enemies, and at the end of each round you get interest on the money you have. The object of the game is to get through all of the levels without losing all of your lives (you have 20). Every time an enemy gets to the end of the path, you lose a life. You can upgrade your units, as well as research technology to improve them. Certain units are better for certain things, such as the gun towers being fast and accurate but weaker, and the grenade towers being slower and less accurate but stronger and better at killing multiple enemies due to splash damage.
Anyway, try it out, it's a fun game. Feel free to post any strategies that you've figured out that work well, I'll probably post some of my own if enough people show interest.
There is a sequel, but I do not like it as much. They over-complicated the game by adding different resources for different types of weapons, which you have to mine with mines, and by adding other things like weapons over-heating so you have to place cooling towers near them, weapons running out of power so you have to place power generators near them, etc. I prefer the simplicity of the original myself.
Someday, you might take business data off a disk drive and move it into the nucleus of an atom.
Scientists have demonstrated what is being called the "ultimate miniaturization of computer memory," storing data for nearly 2 seconds in the nucleus of an atom. This is a key step in the development of quantum computers, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Using a new technique, an international team of scientists "demonstrated that information stored in the nucleus has a lifetime of about 1 ¾ seconds," the NSF says in a press release describing a new study in the journal Nature. "This is significant because before this technique was developed, the longest researchers could preserve quantum information in silicon was less than one-tenth of a second. Other researchers studying quantum computing recently calculated that if a quantum system could store information for at least 1 second, error correction techniques could then protect that data for an indefinite period of time."
The scientists, from Princeton University, Oxford University and the U.S. Department of Energy, broke the 1-second barrier with a system that uses the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal. The electron and nucleus each behaved like tiny "quantum magnets" that could store quantum information, but the instability of the electron made it unsuitable for storing information. "To overcome the problem, researchers moved the information into the nucleus where it survived much longer," the NSF states. Data in the electron cloud, which is a million times bigger than the nucleus, can be manipulated, thus serving as a "middle-man" between the nucleus and the outside world, researchers say.
"Nobody really knew how long a nucleus might hold quantum information in this system," Princeton researcher Steve Lyon says in the press... [Read More]
Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Previous CO2 capturing devices have only functioned when they were installed close to the sources of emission (e.g. in a car, or inside a coal plant) to capture escaping greenhouse gasses, but the new technology can be placed (almost) anywhere on Earth. Expect to see greenhouse gas capturing plants in the near future.
Read more about the innovation here, or read the content of same article below if you're lazy.
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University of Calgary team creates CO2 atmosphere-scrubbing machine.
An ever-present point of concern for the planet’s future welfare, worries over damaging CO2 emissions could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a University of Calgary climate change scientist who’s developed a machine capable of removing CO2 from the air.
More pointedly, David Keith and a team of researchers working out of the University of Calgary have been diligently looking for a way to capture harmful greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air by utilising “near-commercial” technology.
The team now believes it is close to achieving that goal with the development of a relatively simple machine that can capture, or “scrub” the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.
“The climate problem is too big to solve easily with the tools we have,” explained Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s (ISEEE) Energy and Environmental Systems Group and a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering.
“While it’s important to get started doing things we know how to do, like wind power nuclear power and... [Read More]
A Chinese man who swore to God that he didn't owe money to a neighbour was hit by lightning a minute later.
The man, named Xu, made the oath in front of a crowd of neighbours in Fuqing city, reports Southeast Express.
He vowed that he had never borrowed money from Mr Huang, who claimed Xu borrowed 500 yuan, the equivalent of £40, from him three years earlier.
"He borrowed 500 yuan three years ago from me for a friend's marriage gift, but he has denied it ever since then," said Huang, who went to Xu's home to demand payment.
"I told him that if he dared to swear to God that he didn't owe me the money, then I would waive his debt," said Huang.
Xu made the oath, but was suddenly struck by lightning a minute later.
He was immediately taken to hospital where doctors confirmed he had been hit by lightning. He is expected to make a full recovery.
Chinese researchers claim they've confirmed the theory behind an "impossible" space drive, and are proceeding to build a demonstration version. If they're right, this might transform the economics of satellites, open up new possibilities for space exploration –- and give the Chinese a decisive military advantage in space.
To say that the "Emdrive" (short for "electromagnetic drive") concept is controversial would be an understatement. According to Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who developed the concept, the drive converts electrical energy into thrust via microwaves, without violating any laws of physics. Many researchers believe otherwise. An article about the Emdrive in New Scientist magazine drew a massive volley of criticism. Scientists not only argued that Shawyer's work was blatantly impossible, and that his reasoning was flawed. They also said the article should never have been published.
"It is well known that Roger Shawyer's 'electromagnetic relativity drive' violates the law of conservation of momentum, making it simply the latest in a long line of 'perpetuum mobiles' that have been proposed and disproved for centuries," wrote John Costella, an Australian physicist. "His analysis is rubbish and his 'drive' impossible."
Shawyer stands by his theoretical work. His company, Satellite Propulsion Research (SPR), has constructed demonstration engines, which he says produce thrust using a tapering resonant cavity filled with microwaves. He is adamant that this is not a perpetual motion machine, and does not violate the law of conservation of momentum because different reference frames apply to the drive and the waves within it. Shawyer's big challenge, he... [Read More]
Chruser started this as a poll test and deleted it, but because I think it's interesting I'm recreating it. After a month it will automatically move itself from Opinion and Debate (where I think it will see more activity) to The Singularity (where it belongs).
So, the question is: is [technological] singularity near?
For those not in the know, technological singularity is the point in time where human minds will be surpassed by computers, and they will become the source of great inventions. More can be found here.
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I don't think it is.
A computer passing the Turing Test will be the first indication that we're on the road to said singularity, and unless someone somewhere is making headway with it, I don't expect it to happen for a number of years yet. Once you've got the one, though, the programming can be adapted and copied and used in other programs, eventually bringing the majoirty of the worlds machines to a level near to that of a human. From there, it's a simple case of programming some sort of autonomy and free thinking, ratcheting up the level of intelligence, and leaving a select group of these machines in a cold room with several instances of notepad open.
Very exciting to hear about this about to finally take place. I remember hearing about this a while ago, probably about 3-4 months. Should be interesting to see what they can unveil with this amount of though process put into it, i'll try and keep it updated to see what, if anything comes from this experiment.
"An engineer at Jet Propulsion Labs says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk — a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise. Adrian Stoica has written software that recognizes human movement in aerial and satellite video footage by isolating moving shadows and using data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows that are elongated or foreshortened. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data. Extending the idea to satellites could prove trickier, though. Space imaging expert Bhupendra Jasani at King's College London says geostationary satellites simply don't have the resolution to provide useful detail. 'I find it hard to believe they could apply this technique from space,' says Jasani."
Comments on the article speculate on the maximum resolution possible from KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites.
(CNN) – Sen. John McCain has chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket for the White House in November, a senior McCain campaign official has told CNN.
Palin, 44, is a first-term governor who unseated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary in 2006 and went on to defeat former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in the general election.
An advocate of drilling for oil in her state's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she is little known outside of Alaska.
If you haven't heard of it before, Folding@home is basically a Stanford-developed distributed computing project which performs computationally intense simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics.
Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world, and it is used to give scientists a better understanding of why proteins sometimes do not fold correctly, which occasionally leads to various consequences and diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.
All you need to do to run Folding@home on your computer (either on your CPU or your GPU) or on your PS3 is to download the client from http://folding.stanford.edu.
Note that your computer (or PS3) runs Folding@home on low priority by default. Thus, Folding@home will only run on full speed while you are not using your computer. When you are using your computer, Folding@home's calculation speed (or more specifically, its amount of calculations per second) will slow down to not bog down your other applications and games. In other words, running Folding@home will not (notably) affect your computer's performance.
What are you waiting for? Join the Zelaron folding team now and start folding!
Zelaron Team ID (Input this into your Folding@home client): 143204
By MUSA SADULAYEV, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 48 minutes ago
OUTSIDE TSKHINVALI, Georgia - Russia and small, U.S.-allied Georgia headed toward a wider war Saturday as Russian tanks rumbled into the contested province of South Ossetia and Russian aircraft bombed a Georgian town, escalating a conflict that already has left hundreds dead.
Georgia's Foreign Ministry said the country was "in a state of war" and accused Russia of beginning a "massive military aggression." The Georgian parliament approved a state of martial law, mobilizing reservists and ordering government authorities to work round-the-clock.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that Moscow sent troops into South Ossetia to force Georgia into a cease-fire and prevent Georgia from retaking control of its breakaway region after it launched a major offensive there overnight Friday.
In a meeting with refugees, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin characterized Georgia's actions as "complete genocide," according to his office's Web site. Putin also said Georgia had effectively lost the right to rule the breakaway province — an indication Moscow could be preparing to fulfill South Ossetians' wish to be absorbed into Russia.
The risk of the conflict setting off a wider war also increased Saturday when Russian-supported separatists in another breakaway region, Abkhazia, also targeted Georgian troops by launching air and artillery strikes to drive them out.
President Bush called for an end to the Russian bombings and an immediate halt to the violence.
"The attacks are occurring in regions of Georgia far from the zone of conflict in South Ossetia. They mark a dangerous escalation in the crisis," Bush said in a statement to reporters while attending the Olympic Games in... [Read More]
WASHINGTON - Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday admitted to an extramarital affair while his wife was battling cancer. He denied fathering the woman's daughter.
Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter but said that he didn't love her. He said he has not taken a paternity test but knows he isn't the father because of the timing of the affair and the birth.
A former Edwards campaign staffer claims he is the father, not Edwards.
Hunter's daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, was born on Feb. 27, 2008, and no father's name is given on the birth certificate filed in California.
The National Enquirer first reported on the affair in October 2007, and Edwards denied it.
"The story is false," he told reporters. "It's completely untrue, ridiculous." He professed his love for his wife, Elizabeth, who had an incurable form of cancer, saying, "I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known. So the story's just false."
Last month, the Enquirer carried another story stating that its reporters had accosted Edwards in a Los Angeles hotel where he had met with Hunter after her child's birth. Edwards called it "tabloid trash," but he generally avoided reporters'
