Tag: science

Big Bang Discovery Researchers Backtrack on Original Claims

Well, this is embarrassing. Remember how a Harvard team found the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation right after the Big Bang ? Well, now it’s published its findings—and it’s backtracking on its original claims. Read more…

Read More:
Big Bang Discovery Researchers Backtrack on Original Claims

First Movie of an Entire Brain’s Neuronal Activity

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes “One of the goals of neuroscience is to understand how brains process information and generate appropriate behaviour. A technique that is revolutionising this work is optogenetics–the ability to insert genes into neurons that fluoresce when the neuron is active. That works well on the level of single neurons but the density of neurons in a brain is so high that it has been impossible to tell them apart when they fluoresce. Now researchers have solved this problem and proved it by filming the activity in the entire brain of a nematode worm for the first time and making the video available. Their solution comes in two parts. The first is to ensure that the inserted genes only fluoresce in the nuclei of the neurons. This makes it much easier to tell individual neurons in the brain apart. The second is a new techniques that scans the entire volume of the brain at a rate of 80 frames per second, fast enough to register all the neuronal activity within it. The researchers say their new technique should allow bigger brains to be filmed in the near future opening up the potential to study how various creatures process information and trigger an appropriate response for the first time.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
First Movie of an Entire Brain’s Neuronal Activity

After 47 Years, Computerworld Ceases Print Publication

harrymcc (1641347) writes “In June 1967, a weekly newspaper called Computerworld launched. Almost exactly 47 years later, it’s calling it quits in print form to focus on its website and other digital editions. The move isn’t the least bit surprising, but it’s also the end of an era–and I can’ t think of any computing publication which had a longer run. Over at Technologizer, I shared some thoughts on what Computerworld meant to the world, to its publisher, IDG, and to me.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue reading here:
After 47 Years, Computerworld Ceases Print Publication

Sharp’s Free-Form Display Make Bezels Super-Thin, Screens Any Shape

Rectangular screens are so square. Which is presumably why Sharp has announced a new technology called Free-Form Display—that could allow screens to come in any space, and reduce bezel size to almost zero. Read more…

Taken from:
Sharp’s Free-Form Display Make Bezels Super-Thin, Screens Any Shape

IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

phrackthat writes with an update to Friday’s news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS’s apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. … Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taken from:
IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation

These Inductive Batteries Keep Your Power Tools Perpetually Charged

It’s almost impossible to think of a time when you had to wrangle a long cord while working with power tools. But as convenient as cordless tools are, they’re useless if their batteries are dead. So this fall, Bosch will be introducing batteries with inductive charging that simply need to be placed on a base station for the power to flow. Read more…

Read More:
These Inductive Batteries Keep Your Power Tools Perpetually Charged

Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs

crookedvulture (1866146) writes “Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn’t really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs

Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland

An anonymous reader writes This week the Portland City Council has approved a franchise agreement with Google to bring its fiber service to Portland. “As a result of the unanimous vote, Google will be subject to a five percent ‘franchise fee’ on its video revenues. It won’t have to pay a three percent ‘PEG’ fee that Portland otherwise charges rival Comcast, but it will offer free Internet service for Portland residents for a $300, one-time fee. It’ll also provide free Internet service to some to-be-determined nonprofits, in addition to providing a total of three free Wi-Fi networks in various parts of the city.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland

Bic Is Trying To Make a Font Based on All the World’s Handwriting

In yet another crushing blow to Comic Sans, pen-maker Bic is currently soliciting handwriting samples from anyone on Earth who wants to participate in its Universal Typeface Experiment . The goal is to create a universal font that will presumably supplant Comic Sans as the go-to typeface for amateur designers making birthday cards, lunch room signage, or business cards for toddlers. Read more…

See the original post:
Bic Is Trying To Make a Font Based on All the World’s Handwriting