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Submission + - E.U. parliament votes to ban cloning of farm animals (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The European Parliament today voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals as well as the sale of cloned livestock, their offspring, and products derived from them. The measure, which passed by a large margin, goes beyond a directive proposed by the European Commission in 2013, which would have implemented a provisional ban on the cloning of just five species: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses. The supporters of the ban cited animal welfare concerns, claiming that only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term, and many die shortly after birth. The ban does not cover cloning for research purposes, nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species.

Submission + - "Happy Birthday" Public Domain after all? (techdirt.com)

Submitted by jazzdude00021
jazzdude00021 writes: No song has had as contentious of copyright history as "Happy Birthday." The song is nearly ubiquitous at birthday parties in the USA, and even has several translations with the same tune. Due to copyrights held by Warner Music, public performances have historically commanded royalty fees. However, a new lawsuit has been brought to prove that "Happy Birthday" is, and always has been in the public domain.The discovery phase for this lawsuit ended on July, 11 2014, yet this past week new evidence surfaced from Warner Music that may substantiate the claim that the lyrics were in the public domain long before the copyright laws changed in 1927. From the source:

And, here's the real kicker: they discovered this bit of evidence after two questionable things happened. (1) Warner/Chappell Music (who claims to hold the copyright for the publishing, if it exists) suddenly "found" a bunch of relevant documents that it was supposed to hand over in discovery last year, but didn't until just a few weeks ago, and (2) a rather important bit of information in one of those new documents was somewhat bizarrely "blurred out." This led the plaintiffs go searching for the original, and discover that it undermines Warner Music's arguments, to the point of showing that the company was almost certainly misleading the court. Furthermore, it definitively shows that the work was and is in the public domain.
Programming

Submission + - The 21st IOCCC has been announced (ioccc.org)

Submitted by leob
leob writes: As promised at the end of the 20th IOCCC earlier this year, the 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest will accept entries from 2012-Aug-15 03:14:15 UTC to 2012-Sep-14 09:26:53 UTC. The earliest announcement about the next contest was on Twitter on July 13, giving the interested parties more than 2 months to polish their entries.
Space

Astronomers Dissect a Supermassive Black Hole 77

Posted by kdawson from the telescopes-are-where-you-find-them dept.
Matt_dk sends along a piece from the European Southern Observatory, which reports on observations of the so-called "Einstein Cross," a fortuitous conjunction of a nearby galaxy and a distant black hole. A team of researchers from Europe and the US combined the effects of macrolensing (from the intervening galaxy) and microlensing (from stars in that galaxy), captured by an earth-bound telescope. "Combining a double natural 'magnifying glass' with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs."
The Internet

Opera Develops Search Engine For Web Developers 31

Posted by Soulskill from the web-devs-need-love-too dept.
nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set." Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.
Space

Lunar Spacecraft Compete For $2 Million NASA Prize 48

Posted by Soulskill from the turbo-cratermaker-9000XL dept.
coondoggie writes "Nine rocket-powered vehicles will compete for NASA's $2 million, 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Oct. 24-25. The goal is to accelerate development of commercial Lunar Landers capable of bringing payloads or humans back and forth between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. NASA of course would expect to use some of the technology developed at the Challenge. To win the prize, teams must demonstrate a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. After landing, the vehicle must take off again within a pre-determined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad." Details about the teams involved with the competition are available at the X-Prize website. The event will be broadcast live via webcast next weekend.

Feed Engadget: Artificial pancreas developed, twice as cool as your boring real one (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Wearables

We've never really found much use for our pancreas. It doesn't comes up in conversation, and tends to be a bit of a non-entity when it comes to our social life. Still, some people have a bit more trouble with their pancreai, and for those folks the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is working on an artificial pancreas to do the job. It's based around existing technology for monitoring and moderating blood sugar levels, but "closes the loop," scratching out human error by feeding monitoring data, computer predictions and insulin injections into one system that doesn't require human intervention. To start out, the foundation plans on creating a product aimed at regulating blood-sugar overnight, and then from there move on to a 'round the clock device.

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