|
Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Robot Olympics - The RoboGames 2008 (VIDEO)
Post Date: 2008-03-17 15:20:44 by Tauzero
0 Comments
The Robot Games 2008 will get underway in June, geeks. The list of competitions include, autonomous auto, sumo, beam, bot hockey, combat, robot soccer, humanoid challenges, humanoid competitions, tetsujin, and art bot, micromouse maze and more. They also have a “Best of Show” category which can be any kind of robot doing anything. Robots from various countries participate in this event and there are, as in the human Olympics, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal categories. RoboGames is the world's largest open robot competition (even the Guinness Book of World Records says so!) We invite the best minds from around the world to compete in over 70 different events. Combat robots, ...
4 Recommendations to Defend Against a Financial Armageddon
Post Date: 2008-03-17 13:21:13 by tom007
6 Comments
4 Recommendations to Defend Against a Financial Armageddon posted on: March 17, 2008 * Font Size: * Print * Email Another week of all-time record high commodity prices and a fresh record low US dollar has had the expected result in US equity markets: the stocks of the commodity producers and export manufacturing sectors have led the way to a week over week gain in the broad indexes, but traders are focused on the macro picture and remain nervous. Capital markets are operating in a stagflationary environment, similar to the 1970’s. The combined impact of slowing or receding economies and rising costs is that equity prices, which are based on inflation-adjusted corporate revenue, ...
Glaciers suffer record shrinkage
Post Date: 2008-03-16 18:29:00 by robin
3 Comments
Glaciers suffer record shrinkage Some glaciers in Europe have suffered significant losses The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, data from the United Nations Environment Programme has shown. Average glacial shrinkage has risen from 30 centimetres per year between 1980 and 1999, to 1.5 metres in 2006. Some of the biggest losses have occurred in the Alps and Pyrenees mountain ranges in Europe. Experts have called for "immediate action" to reverse the trend, which is seen as a key climate change indicator. Estimates for 2006 indicate shrinkage of 1.4 metres of 'water equivalent' compared to half a ...
Climate panel on the hot seat
Post Date: 2008-03-16 14:07:58 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Climate panel on the hot seat By H. Sterling Burnett March 14, 2008 More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a "comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation." IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures ...
Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos
Post Date: 2008-03-16 13:43:27 by robin
2 Comments
Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos From Wired How-To WikiJump to: navigation, search Run a well-encoded video through YouTube's backend compression engine and it's going to turn out looking worse for the wear. It's a well-known critique of the site among videophiles, and to its credit, the video-sharing site has been promising it would start encoding videos at higher resolutions. Thankfully, YouTube is finally making good on that promise. Select videos on the site are already available in 480x360 resolution -- it's not HD, but it is a step up from the old 320x240 format. For the most part, this change only affects newer videos and YouTube is rolling it out in a somewhat ...
Feeling Scared? Just Clone Yourself and Become Smaller
Post Date: 2008-03-14 17:19:25 by Tauzero
1 Comments
Feeling Scared? Just Clone Yourself and Become Smaller It's a popular defensive strategy at the bottom of the ocean: If you're scared, just clone yourself. The process will make you smaller and harder to find, as well as doubling the chance that your genes will survive. Sand dollar larvae are rampant self-cloners, but they only do it when they sense danger. That means there's a kind of conscious intent behind their cloning -- it's not just an ordinary part of their reproductive cycle. How easy would it be to port this trait to humans, so we could just pop out a new self when the old one is about to be offed? Probably pretty difficult, not least of which because we ...
Ants riddled with cheating and corruption
Post Date: 2008-03-14 15:46:23 by Tauzero
4 Comments
Ants riddled with cheating and corruption Researchers find offspring of some fathers more likely to become queens updated 1:04 p.m. CT, Wed., March. 12, 2008 Although ants are noted for their communal cooperation, the ranks of ant royalty are actually riddled with cheating and corruption, a new study finds. Ant queens were thought to be the products of nurturing, as certain larvae were fed foods that prompted their development into queens, with any larvae having an opportunity to ascend to the royal ranks. But researchers who used DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants found that the offspring of some fathers were more likely to become reproductive queens than others. ...
Beware the politician posing as a scientist
Post Date: 2008-03-14 06:52:50 by Ada
2 Comments
Christopher Booker squares up to Sir David King, the former Chief Scientist, whose knowledge of chemistry does little to underpin his crusading rhetoric as a green campaigner One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue, however remote it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the government Chief Scientist. In 2001, when he was appointed by Tony Blair at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface ...
Street-Level Credit Card Fraud
Post Date: 2008-03-13 23:06:55 by Indrid Cold
1 Comments
Until recently, Las Vegas police officers couldn't figure out why some of the prostitutes and drug addicts they arrested were found carrying multiple hotel room keys and slot machine player's club cards. When confronted, the suspects said they kept them as souvenirs or found them on the sidewalk. The cops initially assumed that the cards were stolen, or -- in the case of the prostitutes -- perhaps belonged to some of their more frequent clients. "It was getting fairly regular that in post-arrest inventory, we would find eight to 10 room key cards ... all from different hotels," said Dennis Cobb, deputy chief of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's Technical ...
Magnitude 7.0 - Vanuatu, Pacific ocean - west
Post Date: 2008-03-12 16:45:52 by robin
6 Comments
Click for Full Text!
Invasive species create dangerous 'genetic hotspots'
Post Date: 2008-03-10 17:03:33 by Tauzero
0 Comments
Invasive species create dangerous 'genetic hotspots' 16:00 10 March 2008 NewScientist.com news service Phil McKenna The secret of invasive species' notoriously destructive power may have been discovered. Genetic analysis of an introduced snail suggests that successive waves of invasion create a "hotspot" of evolutionary potential that means conservationists should be even more vigilant against invading species. Patrice David of France’s National Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier and colleagues examined key physiological and behavioural attributes, or "life history traits" of an invasive population of freshwater snails ...
California cows start passing gas to the grid
Post Date: 2008-03-09 17:08:13 by robin
3 Comments
RIVERDALE, California (Reuters) - Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep. Meet California's most alternative new energy. On a dairy farm in the Golden State's agricultural heartland, utility PG&E Corp began on Tuesday producing natural gas derived from manure, in what it hopes will be a new way to power homes with renewable, if not entirely clean, energy. The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the brainchild of life- long dairyman David Albers, aims to provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day, Albers said at the facility's inauguration ceremony. "When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile ...
For Those Who Want To Share Large Files
Post Date: 2008-03-09 15:14:12 by James Deffenbach
0 Comments
If you want to share files larger than 10mb (I think that is the usual cutoff in most free email programs), you might want to check out RapidShare. Click on the url source if you want to check it out.
Britain makes camera that "sees" under clothes
Post Date: 2008-03-09 15:03:03 by robin
5 Comments
LONDON (Reuters) - A British company has developed a camera that can detect weapons, drugs or explosives hidden under people's clothes from up to 25 meters away in what could be a breakthrough for the security industry. The T5000 camera, created by a company called ThruVision, uses what it calls "passive imaging technology" to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays -- known as Terahertz or T-rays -- that they emit. The high-powered camera can detect hidden objects from up to 80 feet away and is effective even when people are moving. It does not reveal physical body details and the screening is harmless, the company says. The technology, which has military and ...
They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know
Post Date: 2008-03-09 12:43:18 by Horse
28 Comments
ONE year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to “upgrade”? Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent. Last month, the company trimmed prices on retail packages of Vista, trying to entice consumers to overcome their reluctance. In the United States, an XP user can now buy Vista Home Premium for $129.95, instead of $159.95. An alternative theory, however, is that Vista’s reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The ...
San Francisco’s Green Building Nightmare
Post Date: 2008-03-07 10:38:54 by Indrid Cold
20 Comments
The idea of “green” buildings is a terrific marketing concept. In San Francisco, it has helped grease the political roadway for massive, view-blocking luxury condominiums, implying that building these structures is more environmentally sustaining than leaving land vacant. Few seem to care whether green buildings can be a nightmare for those having to work inside high-rise structures lacking heat or air conditioning. The new Thomas Mayne designed Federal Building at 7th and Mission Streets in San Francisco is a case in point. Lauded by the New York Times as a building that “may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s ...
MAGPUL Flash-light Machine Gun (hehehe)
Post Date: 2008-03-06 20:38:02 by noone222
3 Comments
Poster Comment:Everyone that walks their dog needs one of these Mo-Fo's
Peak Oil - True or False
Post Date: 2008-03-06 06:13:51 by Stephen Lendman
11 Comments
Peak Oil - True or False - by Stephen Lendman The arguments are so one-sided, it's practically a given that "peak oil" is real and threatening. Or is it? This article examines both sides. It lets readers decide and deals only with supply issues, not crucial environmental ones and the need to develop alternative energy sources. First some background. The name most associated with "peak oil" is M. King Hubbert. He became the world's best known geologist when he worked for Houston-based Shell Oil Company from 1943 to 1964. His theory goes something like this. Oil is a finite resource. Peak oil, or Hubbert's peak, is the point at which maximum world production ...
Scary or sensational? A machine that can look into the mind
Post Date: 2008-03-05 20:59:22 by robin
2 Comments
Scary or sensational? A machine that can look into the mind James Randerson, science correspondent The Guardian, Thursday March 6 2008 Article history About this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday March 06 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 00:07 on March 06 2008. MRI scans Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject ...
Record warm winter for northern Europe
Post Date: 2008-03-05 19:16:30 by angle
0 Comments
STOCKHOLM, Sweden—Icebreakers sit idle in ports. Insects crawl out of forest hideouts. Daffodils sprout up from green lawns. Winter ended before it started in Europe's north, where record-high temperatures have people wondering whether it's a fluke or an ominous sign of a warming world. "It's the warmest winter ever" recorded, said John Ekwall of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. In December, January and February, the average temperature in Stockholm was 36 degrees—the highest on record since record-keeping began in 1756. Record winter highs were set at 12 other locations across the country, according to the national weather service, ...
Rare Gray Wolf Appears in Western Mass.
Post Date: 2008-03-05 19:09:25 by angle
2 Comments
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) -- When more than a dozen lambs and sheep were slaughtered on a Shelburne farm last fall, wildlife officials suspected either a wolf that had escaped from captivity or a rogue mutt on a hungry rampage. But after the culprit animal was killed and examined, they found themselves with a bigger mystery: How did a wild eastern gray wolf, an endangered species absent from the state for more than a century, find its way to western Massachusetts? Thomas J. Healy, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Northeast regional office, said Tuesday recent DNA tests at the agency's Oregon labs confirmed it is the first gray wolf found in New England since a 1993 case ...
Climate Skeptics Roast Gore On Global Warming
Post Date: 2008-03-05 17:07:56 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Climate Skeptics Roast Gore On Global Warming NEW YORK - Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his environmental advocacy, was the main target on Monday at a conference of dissident scientists skeptical of his views on global warming. Several speakers at the conference on climate change whose theme was "Global warming is not a crisis," took pot-shots at the ex-vice president and his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won last year's Academy Award for best documentary. "Whether we like it or not, it was extremely effective propaganda," said Timothy Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of ...
Future 'quantum computers' will offer increased efficiency... and risks
Post Date: 2008-03-05 15:45:51 by farmfriend
5 Comments
Contact: Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala zkotala@mail.ucf.edu 407-823-6120 University of Central Florida Future 'quantum computers' will offer increased efficiency... and risks UCF Professor makes unique discovery, may revolutionize encryption technology An unusual observation in a University of Central Florida physics lab may lead to a new generation of “Quantum Computers” that will render today’s computer and credit card encryption technology obsolete. The observations are documented this week in the online version of Nature Physics under Advance Online Publication (http://www.nature.com/nphys/index.html ). The title of UCF Professor Enrique del Barco’s paper is ...
Our Solar System isn't What it Used to be
Post Date: 2008-03-05 07:08:43 by YertleTurtle
2 Comments
WASHINGTON — Move over, Copernicus. Your once-revolutionary idea — that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around — has been eclipsed. Recent years have brought a sweeping new revolution in solar system astronomy. The Earth still orbits the sun, as Copernicus declared 400 years ago, but the planetary system in the textbooks you studied is now out of date. ``The entire view of astronomy you learned in high school has changed dramatically,'' said Alan Stern, NASA's associate administrator for science. ``We're really in a new age of discovery.'' The changes go well beyond the International Astronomical Union's controversial ...
Linear Tactics in a Chaotic War
Post Date: 2008-03-05 05:54:00 by Ada
0 Comments
One of several dead hands the First Generation of Modern War lays on contemporary state militaries' throats is linearity. Most state militaries both seek and expect linearity on and off the battlefield. Sometimes, this manifests itself in tactics that offer magnificent if unintentional tableaux vivants. I recall a field exercise years ago with the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune where, rounding a bend, we found a lieutenant had built a perfect 19th-century fortress wall across the road, complete with firing step. The division sergeant major, in whose jeep I was riding, said, "My God, it's the siege of Vicksburg!" More often, linearity manifests itself in a military ...
Latest [Newer] 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 [Older]
|