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Space

Submission + - Extra-Galactic Planet Discovered in Milky Way (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Between six to nine billion years ago, the Milky Way collided with another galaxy. As you'd expect, this caused quite a mess; stars dust and gas being ripped from the intergalactic interloper. In fact, to this day, the dust hasn't quite settled and astronomers have spotted an odd-looking exoplanet orbiting a metal poor star 2,000 light-years from Earth. Through a careful process of elimination, the extrasolar planet (known as HIP 13044b) actually works out to be an extragalactic planet, a surviving relic of the massive collision eons ago."
Supercomputing

Submission + - The problem with the Top500 supercomputer list (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Like Hollywood's Academy Awards, the Top500 list of supercomputers is dutifully watched by high-performance computing (HPC) participants and observers, even as they vocally doubt its fidelity to excellence. Many question the use of a single metric — Linpack — to rank the performance of something as mind-bogglingly complex as a supercomputer. During one panel at the SC2010 conference this week in New Orleans, one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get the largest Linpack number, thereby revealing the "stupidity" of Linpack. While grumbling about Linpack is nothing new, the discontent was pronounced this year as more systems, such as the Tianhe-1A, used GPUs (graphics processing units) to boost Linpack ratings, in effect gaming the Top500 list."
The Internet

MPAA Dismisses COICA Free Speech Concerns 300

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-worry-about-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The EFF has gone into detail about why it opposes 'The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,' or COICA. It has the potential to give the Department of Justice the power to shut down any domestic website, or block any foreign website it so chooses, setting the stage for Internet censorship in the United States. Addressing the free speech concerns, MPAA chief Bob Pisano dismissed the First Amendment issues, saying '...the First Amendment was not intended as a shield for those who steal, irrespective of the means.'"
Government

Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency 164

Posted by timothy from the putting-on-an-acta dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support release of the actual text, but that other countries do not. Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners, the text simply can't be released until everyone is in agreement. A new leak from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem countries."
Medicine

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy from the applied-psychology dept.
the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."
Science

Why Time Flies By As You Get Older 252

Posted by kdawson from the like-a-banana dept.
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
Apple

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson from the triple-word-score dept.
andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."
Space

Spectrum of Light Captured From Distant World 32

Posted by Soulskill from the what-are-you-made-of dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos: "Astronomers have made the first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the Solar System and are deciphering its composition. The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ... The find is important, because hidden within a light spectrum are clues about the relative amounts of different elements in the planet's atmosphere. 'The features observed in the spectrum are not compatible with current theoretical models,' said co-author Wolfgang Brandner. 'We need to take into account a more detailed description of the atmospheric dust clouds, or accept that the atmosphere has a different chemical composition from that previously assumed.' The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said the ESO. Until now, astronomers have been able to get only an indirect light sample from an exoplanet, as worlds beyond our Solar System are called. They do this by measuring the spectrum of a star twice — while an orbiting exoplanet passes near to the front of it, and again while the planet is directly behind it. The planet's spectrum is thus calculated by subtracting one light sample from another."
Space

Herschel Spectroscopy of Future Supernova 21

Posted by Soulskill from the that's-a-big-star dept.
davecl writes "ESA's Herschel Space Telescope has released its first spectroscopic results. These include observations of VYCMa, a star 50 times as massive as the sun and soon to become a supernova, as well as a nearby galaxy, more distant colliding starburst galaxies and a comet in our own solar system. The spectra show more lines than have ever been seen in these objects in the far-infrared and will allow astronomers to work out the detailed chemistry and physics behind star and planet formation as well as the last stages of stellar evolution before VYCMa's eventual collapse into a supernova. More coverage is available at the Herschel Mission Blog, which I run."

Comment Re:wtf? (Score 1) 2

by PC_Freak (#28916917) Attached to: "Orwellian" CARS Application Disclaimer
It's super-brief, but at the very end of the clip they say "The government has malware systems and tracking cookies, now look--" and cuts off. I think the assumption is that, during the time that your computer is `property of the Federal Government' they wouldn't be breaking any laws by installing rootkits or whatnot on your system, and once *that's* done then they can get at you forever.
The Media

Submission + - Censorship SOS from Iceland (icelandweatherreport.com)

Submitted by jon jonson
jon jonson writes: Information from the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing, revealing billions in insider loans, has been leaked to Wikileaks and the Bank has been working day and night to censor the information contained in the document! Last night at 6:55pm GMT they served an injunction against the The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, 5 minutes before the 7pm news was due to goto air! The TV station just displayed the WikiLeaks URL instead. They've also injuncted Iceland's national radio, banning all discussion about the contents of the document and are actively trying to censor the rest of the Icelandic media along with Wikileaks! Please, send this file to as many media outlets as you can. I hope someone from the international press picks this up.

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