Hannibal_Ars - Slashdot User

Alligator Blood May Be Source of New Antibiotics 265

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday April 08, 2008 @11:16AM from the darn-tasty-eating-too dept.

esocid writes "Biochemists from McNeese State University have described how proteins in gator blood may provide a source of powerful new antibiotics to help fight infections associated with diabetic ulcers and severe burns. This new class of drug could also crack so-called 'superbugs' that are resistant to conventional medication. Previous studies have showed alligators have an unusually strong immune system; unlike humans, alligator immune systems can defend against microorganisms such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria without having prior exposure to them. Scientists believe that this is an evolutionary adaptation to promote quick wound healing, as alligators are often injured during fierce territorial battles."

Sony Thinks Blu-ray Will Sell Like DVDs by Year End 434

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday April 08, 2008 @09:54AM from the ambitious-planning dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sony CEO Ryoji Chubachi knows something we don't. At a press conference, he announced Sony's plan to increase Blu-ray market share to 50% of all movie discs by the end of the year. 'DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs, Chubachi indicated. The new BD devices to be offered by Sony include models integrating an HD LCD TV with BD recording functionality, Chubachi pointed out. Sony has relied mainly on the PlayStation 3 (PS3) to promote BD, and sales of the game console will increase along with the offering by top Hollywood studios of new BD movies, Chubachi noted. However, Sony will extend its BD promotion from the current focus on the PS3 and BD players/recorders to IT devices, Chubachi pointed out.'"

Submission + - Power consumption and the future of computing (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mrdirkdiggler on Friday June 29, 2007 @03:18PM

mrdirkdiggler writes: ArsTechnica's Hannibal takes a look at how the power concerns that currently plague datacenters are shaping next-generation computing technologies at the levels of the microchip, the board-level interconnect, and the datacenter. In a nutshell, engineers are now willing to take on a lot more hardware overhead in their designs (thermal sensors, transistors that put components into sleep states, buffers and filters at the ends of links, etc.) in order to get maximum power efficiency. The article, which has lots of nice graphics to illustrate the main points, mostly focuses on the specific technologies that Intel has in the pipeline to address these issues.

Submission + - Intel Releases Information on Penryn, Nehalem

Submitted by

Justin Wheeler

on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @09:02PM

Justin Wheeler writes: "Intel has been slowly trickling information on their new Penryn cores (the next release after Merom/Conroe), as well as their upcoming Nehalem cores. From the articles: "At a press meeting today, Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, "we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture." What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments.""

Submission + - Scientists Break Speed of Light

Submitted by PreacherTom on Monday March 05, 2007 @06:25PM

PreacherTom writes: Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature.

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