Sleeper Service - Slashdot User

Comment Lego Bricks (Score 1) 458

by Sleeper Service on Sunday November 21, 2010 @01:52PM (#34299070) Attached to: Thought-Provoking Gifts For Young Kids?

Lego bricks seem a good first place to start if you want something that let's a child think and be creative.

Best of all, they're fundamentally just unremarkable bits of plastic, so they shouldn't set off any Education Toy alarm bells. :)

(Do try to bear in mind, though, that every time you call them "Legos" a Lego fairy is melted down and recycled into a Coke bottle top.)

Comment Bowl of petunias, anyone? (Score 1) 242

by Sleeper Service on Monday December 14, 2009 @07:16PM (#30437072) Attached to: Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star

According to The Times, it was actually a number of new _plants_ discovered near this "neighbouring" star (neighbours 27 light-years away? I should be so lucky). They were apparently accompanied by a slightly surprised looking whale.

Researchers Hijack Mebroot Botnet, Study Drive-By Downloads 130

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 05, 2009 @03:30PM from the hijack-and-inject-vaccine dept.

TechReviewAl writes "Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by downloading. The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim's machine. The team, who previously infiltrated the Torpig botnet, found that at least 13.3 percent of systems that were redirected by Mebroot were already infected and 70 percent were vulnerable to about 40 common attacks."

Algae First To Recover After Asteroid Strike 86

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 05, 2009 @08:09AM from the can't-keep-the-little-green-guys-down dept.

pickens writes "The asteroid that impacted earth 65 million years ago killed off dinosaurs, but microalgae bounced back from the global extinction in about 100 years or less. Julio Sepúlveda, a geochemist at MIT, studied the molecular remains of microorganisms by extracting organic residues from rocks dated to the K-T extinction (in this research referred to as Cretaceous-Paleogene), and his results show that the ocean algae community greatly shrunk in size but only for about a century. 'We found that primary production in this part of the ocean recovered extremely rapidly after the impact,' says Julio Sepúlveda. Algae leave certain signatures of organic compounds and isotopes of carbon and nitrogen; bacteria leave different signatures. In the earliest layers after the asteroid impact, the researchers found much evidence for bacteria but little for algae, suggesting that right after the impact, algae production was greatly reduced. But the chemical signs of algae start to increase immediately above this layer. A full recovery of the ocean ecosystem probably took about a million years, but the quick rebound of photosynthesizing algae seems to confirm models that suggest the impact delivered a swift, abrupt blow to the Earth's environment."

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