New Scientist Antimatter atoms captured for the first time
09:45 21 February 02
Antimatter atoms, among the most elusive matter in the Universe, have been captured for the first time.
According to the standard model of particle physics, every particle has a corresponding antiparticle with the same mass and opposite charge. The pair annihilate each other on contact, releasing a burst of energy.
Scientists have wondered if they can harness this energy, but they have found it difficult to make and control antiatoms. In the late 1990s, up to nine antihydrogen atoms were detected in particle accelerators at CERN and at Fermilab near Chicago. But they were moving at almost the speed of light - much too fast to be stored or studied.
Now researchers on the ATRAP experiment at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, think they have made and stored thousands of antiatoms indefinitely in a particle trap.
Thursday, February 21, 2002
BEAM Robotics Philosophy BEAM Robotics Philosophy
The idea is to improve robo-genetic stock through stratified competition and have an interesting time in the process. The science behind the idea stems from current concepts in artificial intelligence (AI), artificial life (ALife), evolutionary biology, and genetic algorithms. It seems that building large complex robots hasn't worked well, so why not try to evolve them from a lesser to a greater ability as mother nature has done with biologics? The problem is that such a concept requires self-reproducing robots which won't be possible to build (if at all) for years to come. A solution, however, is to view a human being as a robot's way of making another robot, to have an annual venue where experimenters can let their creations interact in real situations, and then watch as machine evolution occurs.
The phrase mass extinction often calls to mind such potential culprits as asteroid impacts and volcanism. But new research suggests that in the case of a die-off of marine creatures that occurred two million years ago, at the interface of the Pleistocene and Pliocene epochs, a different phenomenon was to blame. According to a report appearing in the February 25 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, cosmic rays from the explosion of a nearby supernova may have done these animals in.
NEUROSCIENCE
Brain Study Casts Doubt on Theory of How Human Intelligence Evolved
Of all the characteristics that distinguish humans from other primates, those related to intelligence hold special interest for scholars and laypeople alike. It's an appropriate enough fascination. After all, what could be more uniquely human than the desire to understand how our big, curious, narcissistic brains evolved? That said, a lot of the story is entirely unknown, and the results of a new study suggest that some of what scientists thought they knew may actually require revision.
According to a popular view of human cognitive capabilities, much of what sets our species apart from the other primates can be attributed to a disproportionate enlargement of a part of the brain known as the frontal cortex that occurred at some point in human evolution. But the evidence traditionally used to support that argument, say Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California at San Diego and her colleagues, comes from small studies that in many cases did not include data from apes, our closest relatives. Furthermore, the studies varied in the way they defined the region of the cortex.
The team's own findings, detailed in the current issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, led to a rather different conclusion. Using magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers obtained brain scans of 15 living great apes, four lesser apes, five monkeys and 10 humans—a sample larger than any used in the prev
freshmeat.net: Project details for bnetd bnetd
by Hakan Tandogan - Saturday, August 1st 1998 05:47 EST
About:
Bnetd is a program that emulates a Battle.Net server. It was originally written for the Linux platform, but has since been reported to work on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP/UX, and Irix. It supports many Blizzard clients including StarCraft, Brood Wars, and Diablo.
Author:
Hakan Tandogan
This site has been shutdown. we are down right now. However, this time it isn't because of technical reasons but for legal issues.
This site has been disabled as requested by Blizzard Entertainment and it will remain closed as we have no legal recourse other than to fight a long protracted lawsuit against a large corporation. This is due to 17 USC Section 512(c)(1)(C) (AKA DMCA, supposedly required to be passed by WIPO treaties). Blizzard claims bnetd is in violation of 17 USC Section 1201(b), though we do not agree with their interpretation. Blizzard refused to specify a specific list of files on this site so the whole thing must be blocked. We are very sorry for the inconvenience but there is nothing we can do.
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
Untitled Document "Our large range of SPUR GEARS and HELICAL GEARS (crossed and parallel axis) are now available to order on-line - click on the 'Enter Secure On-line Order Zone' button at the top of the page. Be sure to re-visit as more products become available."
New Page 1 In September 1999, faced with rising fuel prices and the fact that most of my journeys are less than 40 miles round trip, I decided that perhaps an Electrically Powered Vehicle would be worthwhile. I searched the web for anyone doing anything similar, and although I found a few sites for golf buggies and electrically assisted bicycles, there was nothing that I felt met my requirements.
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Recumbent Cycle Projects This is Timothy Smith's Home Page
of (mostly) Recumbent Cycle Projects.
International Human Powered Vehicle Association (IHPVA)Website The International Human Powered Vehicle Association is an association of national associations and organizations, dedicated to promoting improvement, innovation and creativity in the use of human power, especially in the design and development of human-powered vehicles. The HPVA is the former IHPVA and now the association for USA, Canada & Mexico, and still for anyone, worldwide, who does not have a national association.
The IHPVA and HPVA publish the journal Human Power and operate this Internet site, which is sponsored by Brian Wilson. Click to JOIN the HPVA.
Durchsichtig: Panzerkachel schützt vor Geschossen - Wissenschaft - SPIEGEL ONLINE Amerikas Waffentechniker zeigen Interesse an einer Panzerkachel aus Dresden. Im dortigen Fraunhofer-Institut für Keramische Technologien ist es gelungen, feinkörniges Aluminiumoxid bei 1200 Grad Celsius so im Ofen zu verbacken, dass ein extrem hartes, durchsichtiges Material entsteht.
Eine 10 mal 10 Zentimeter große Platte (Stärke: 1,0 cm) wiegt nur etwa 400 Gramm, ist aber dreimal härter als gehärteter Stahl. Bei Schusstests im Auftrag des Bundeswehrbeschaffungsamtes in Koblenz seien "hervorragende Ergebnisse" erzielt worden, berichtet der Forscher Andreas Krell.
Auch im US-Staat Idaho wurden die Fliesen untersucht: Das Pentagon ist von der Transparenz des Werkstoffs fasziniert, mit dem sich schussfeste Visiere oder große Fenster von Panzerspähwagen bauen lassen.
Stela 10, Copan, Honduras When looking through the window of Temple 22 toward the western horizon at Copan, Honduras, in the Spring, the sun sets behind Stela 10 sixteen days after Vernal Equinox at an orientation of 276*45'00". Four days later, the sun reaches the mid-line of the window at an orientation of 278*25'00. This second day always falls 20 days after Vernal Equinox and 20 days before solar zenith passage, when the sun is directly overhead at noon, and so precisely, in fact, that vertical objects do not cast a visible shadow at that time. This same sequence, but in reverse order, also occurs in the Fall, when the sun returns to these same orientations relative to solar zenith passage and Autumnal Equinox then.
During the Classic period, specifically when the ruler who built Temple 22 at Copan (18-Rabbit) was acknowledged as guardian of the World Tree for the people there, the relevant events for the sun's motion along the western horizon occurred in the following sequence in the Maya calendar
One of the worldwide three existing mayan codices (plus the Grolier fragment) to survive the book burnings by the Spanish clergy in 1521 turned up in Dresden in 1739. How it got to Vienna, where Johann Christian Goetze, director of the Royal Library at the court of Saxony purchased it from a private owner, is unknown, but it was probably sent by Hernán Cortés as a tribute to the king of Spain, who was also the king of Austria during the Conquest.
The Dresden Codex is considered the most beautiful and complete. It is made from Amatl paper( "kopó", tree bark that has been flattened and covered with a lime paste) , folded accordion-style and written and painted on both sides. It totals 74 pages in length, painted with extraordinary care and clarity using a very fine brush. The artist used both sides of all but four of the pages of the codices. Its basic colors are red, black and the so-called Mayan blue.
The codex was written by eight different scribes, each with their own distinctive style, type of glyphs and subject matter. It is linked to the Yucatecan Maya in Chichén Itzá, the extraordinary ancient Mayan city situated in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula. It was made between A.D. 1200-1250, and was still possibly in use when the conquistadors arrived. The "Codex Dresdensis" as one of the few pre-Columbian Mayan hieroglyphic writings (most of them on stelas found in Palenque, one of the ancient cities of Yucatán) contains ast
Dartboard IP We built a parallel port onto a dartboard. We connected the dartboard to an old laptop, which we call the dartboard server. The dartboard server has a wireless network card. The end result is a dartboard with its own IP address and a wireless connection to the Internet. We wrote a dart daemon to poll for dart hits. The daemon accepts multiple simultaneous TCP connections and sends the dart hits to all connected clients. We wrote a game managing client, which runs on a desktop near the dart toe-line, connects to the dart server and manages matches. The results of the matches are uploaded to the dartboard server when the matches are over. The dartboard server then compiles several statistics on all matches and uploads them to the Dworkin Darts web page.
Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo THE DEMO
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
TechTV | Flash Advance Linker Visoly's Flash Advance Linker lets you copy homemade Game Boy Advance games from your computer to a cartridge. You can also download other people's homemade games to your computer, then copy them to the cartridge. The Flash Advance Linker also allows you to take existing GBA games, copy them to your computer to play in a GBA emulator, then copy them to a blank cartridge
EAGB Advance Hardware Previews & Reviews - Flash Advance Linker Kit Review - Flash Advance Linker & Flash Advance 64M Card
( Added June 24nd 2001 - By Eric)
Introduction
The Flash Advance Linker & Flash Advance 64M Card although recently released, is probably old news to hobbyist and programmers involved in the GBA emulation scene. If you don't already know, the Linker is a GBA hardware development and back-up kit, which GBA programmers use to test their compiled game codes.
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
He Who Controls the Bootloader He Who Controls the Bootloader
(He Who Controls the Bootloader: Page 1 of 1 )
By Scot Hacker
August 27, 2001
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the Net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with Be, my guess is that the company intends to beef up and extend its product line — make palm-sized devices more media-friendly, and possibly build appliance-like units for the home. As analyst William Crawford recently said, "Where they have to go, Be already is." Be's lightweight footprint and excellent media handing capabilities make the technology a good fit. Be will receive $11 million in Palm stock, which they intend to liquidate to pay off debts. Considering that Apple allegedly once considered paying $125 million for Be, Palm got Be for a song — a fire-sale blowout.
Be Inc sues Microsoft
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 20/02/2002 at 00:48 GMT
Be Inc is suing Microsoft for the destruction of its business. A damages figure isn't enumerated, but Be points out that at one stage the company was valued at over $1 billion.
The company is now a shell, with the assets including BeOS and BeIA, and some 46 staff, having been transferred to Palm Inc in the Fall for $11 million.
But BeOS as a desktop system effectively ceased to compete for OEM attention in the New Year 2000.
The main focus of the suit is on the boot-loader question, which Gassee aired in Byte last year.
Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.
"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim. "
Hitachi eventually shipped a system with BeOS loaded, but with no sign that Be was loaded on the system the PC booted directly into Windows and users were required to create boot floppies and install the bootloader themselves.
Compaq and Gateway declined to market dual-boot 'Creativity PC' systems Be had co-developed with Intel, citing the Windows license. Even when Be offered the OEMs the op
DOJ/Antitrust Re: United States v. Microsoft Corp. & State of New York v.
Microsoft Corp., United States District Court for the
District of Columbia, Case Nos. 98-1232, 98-1233
The Register Web wife jilted on the auction block
By Tim Richardson
Posted: 19/02/2002 at 15:41 GMT
It is with great sadness that El Reg informs its readers that Kay Hammond - the 24-year-old blonde internet entrepreneuress from Birmingham, England, who tried to find a husband by auctioning herself online – will not be getting married. Well not in the short term, anyhow.
It seems that Ben Webb – the chap who bid more £250,000 for her hand – can't be found.
One "Ben Webb" was traced, but when confronted, he knew nothing of the auction. Apparently, he's just returned penniless from travelling overseas.
A spokesman for Miss Hammond told The Register that it seems the bid appears to have been a cruel hoax.
It is unlikely that Miss Hammond will place herself up for auction again, he said.
FiringSquad A Surprising Result
So here I am, all tidied up and looking good on the desktop. I pop into Links 2001 to check things out and am poking around for video information and the like when what should happen? I notice that now, resolutions above 1280x1024 are listed! Odd... So, I fire up Unreal Tournament (where the same problem occurred) and I find that I can now see every single resolution above 1280x1024 that my card can manage!
Just to be sure of things, I went ahead and did a clean install of Windows 98 SE on my formatted hard drive (after backing up of course) and then the only thing I added was the Geforce drivers and the two games. If I left things as is, neither game would allow selection above 1280x1024. If I went into the registry and deleted the extra resolutions that I did not like and rebooted the machine, suddenly both of those games had no trouble going to 1600x1200. Looks like I tripped over a solution here to a problem I've been messing with for a long time, so I thought I would share it with the kind folks who read the articles I push out of my brain. Hope it helps!
Spam busters : ICON : News Possibly the most significant list of late is Spam Prevention Early Warning System. Despite its rather unappealing acronym, SPEWS is proving to be a considerable force. "We don't know who SPEWS is. We think it's made up of a number of senior system administrators who are powerful enough to have gained the authority to cut down the traffic. They're powerful but we don't know who they are," Barry says.
BBC News | NEW MEDIA | Next generation DVD born The "next generation" of DVDs, able to hold almost six times as much information as current discs, has been unveiled by major technology companies.
The new format, the Blu-ray Disc, will store more than 13 hours of film, compared with the current limit of 133 minutes,
News Release | National/Panasonic
Large Capacity Optical Disc Video Recording Format "Blu-ray Disc" Established
The Blu-ray Disc using blue-violet laser achieves over 2-hour digital high definition video recording on a 12cm diameter CD/DVD size phase change optical disc
Friday, February 15, 2002
Seti Logs
| Date | Units | Percentile Rank | Total Users | Rank | Users at Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2/15/02 | 3957 | 99.528% | 3545316 | 16718 | 5 |
Seti@Home
Thursday, February 14, 2002
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Monday, February 11, 2002
Friday, February 08, 2002
Digital Sky The Digital Sky
Federating the Sky Surveys
Large-area digital sky surveys are a recent and exciting development in astronomical research. The combination of terabyte/teraflops computational resources with the recent large-area surveys in optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths will provide unprecedented capability for astronomical research. With these capabilities, astronomers will have access to a multi-wavelength digital library covering a significant fraction of the real sky. The Digital Sky and the tools for its exploration will help revolutionize multi-wavelength astronomical studies, both by the sheer increase of the data available, and by providing faster and more sophisticated methods for its analysis. The Digital Sky offers a perspective of the universe which is statistical and data-focused, in contrast to traditional work with individual stellar objects. The Digital Sky is funded through the NPACI (National Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) program of the NSF (National Science Foundation). More?
Technology and The National Virtual Observatory Standards mean that however complex the task, you only have to do it once for everyone to share and profit. This is why so many people worry about fragmentation or proprietary standards on the Web, which could force people to use several costly tools instead of just one low-cost web browser.
Technology and The National Virtual Observatory (Technology and The National Virtual Observatory: Page 1 of 1 )
By Bill Nicholls
December 24, 2001
The NVO, the National Virtual Observatory, has just received a $10 million NSF grant. While this is not enough for the whole job, it is enough to establish a prototype and prove the concept in real use.
Just how challenging is the NVO? Very. Extremely. Mind boggling complex. The NVO will advance both science and technology by significant strides. I say this both as a physicist with a long-time interest in space and astronomy, and as a senior IT professional. "So what?", I hear you say. So what indeed.
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Thursday, February 07, 2002
New Scientist Teleporting larger objects becomes real possibility
19:00 06 February 02
Anil Ananthaswamy
The dream of teleporting atoms and molecules - and maybe even larger objects - has become a real possibility for the first time. The advance is thanks to physicists who have suggested a method that in theory could be used to "entangle" absolutely any kind of particle.
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Review: The Trouble Twisters The Trouble Twisters by Poul Anderson
X141 / Berkley Medallion Paperback June 1967 / Review by Ernest Lilley
Back in the mid 60's, about the time Trek was airing with its vision of utopian humanity reaching for the stars, Poul Anderson introduced a character with no less charisma than James Kirk, but rather than a dashing starship commander, David Falkayn was an explorer merchant. It's easy to say that Anderson maintained that greed and need would remain constants in the human expansion to the stars, but the truth is rather that he recognized that where man goes, so goes trade. Trek itself only accepted this in recent years, and begrudgingly at that, characterizing the greedy Ferengi as vile creatures. And yet, there was one episode where Quark, DS9's oft derided bar owner, had to sit a Vulcan down and explain the economics of war to him. And offer him peace at a fraction of the cost.
AllSciFi.com Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews and Commentary! Zany Sci-Fi discussion coupled with very detailed reviews.
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The Templeton Gate - Authors - Poul Anderson
His scientific literacy is probably exceeded in the genre by only Asimov and Clarke, whereas the traditions of his ancestral heritage embues much of his work with a profound humanistic and libertarian philosophy, reminiscent of the best of vintage Heinlein. I would rank him higher in the SF heirarchy if not for what I consider his one shortcoming; the inability to create (with just a couple of exceptions) well-rounded, distinctively identifiable and believable characters. Even with that, I would still have to say that his galaxy-spanning narratives and hard-SF scenarios never overlook or overshadow the personal and emotional impact on his protagonists.
Guardian Unlimited Books | News Obituary: Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson, who has died aged 74 from prostate cancer, published his first short story in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1947, and went on to produce more than 100 books, most of them novels. One of the last writers from science fiction's golden age, he was in the generation that followed authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl.
Telzey's Homepage I'm Telzey!
I'm a character on FurryMUCK. FurryMUCK is the largest and longest-standing MUCK on the Internet. When I'm online, you'll usually find me there. I also appear on FurToonia, but not as often. I've been active on FurryMUCK since April of 1994. I've had a web site of my own since summer of the same year.
Poul Anderson Poul Anderson (1926- )
US writer born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents; he lived in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of WWII. In 1948 PA gained a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota. His knowledge of Scandinavian languages and literature and his scientific literacy have fed each other fruitfully through a long and successful career. He is Greg BEAR's father-in-law.
Ex Libris Archives: Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson was one of the pulp science fiction masters of the '50's and '60's. He's been eclipsed in recent years, and hasn't maintained his popularity the way, say, Robert A. Heinlein has....but he's still written some very good stuff. I've never attempted to build a complete collection of Anderson's books, but there are a few titles I cherish, and pull out periodically when I need a lift.
Science Fiction and Fantasy World - sffworld.com
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SF REVIEWS.NET: Ensign Flandry Starkad is a distant world inhabited by two sentient species--the aquatic Zletovar and the land-borne Tigeries--that has become a pawn in the chess game of interstellar expansion and power between imperial Earth and the alien Merseians. Dominic Flandry, a brash 19-year-old ensign in the Imperial Naval Flight Corps, finds himself caught in the middle of escalating conflicts on Starkad when it becomes apparent that the Merseians may well be engineering hostilities between the two species. But why the Merseians might try to aggravate a situation on this remote world that could lead to interstellar war--indeed, why they might be interested in Starkad in the first place--is more than a little mysterious.
Religion in the fiction of Poul Anderson Much of Poul Anderson's fiction is set in his "Technic Civilization" universe. Nicholas van Rijn and his associates are important characters in many of these stories. One of his contemporaries, and perhaps a competitor, is Martin Schuster, the master trader in "The Three-cornered Wheel" (the first part of The Trouble Twisters). Schuster knows and respects Jewish traditions. He uses his knowledge of the Kabbalah to deal with the theocracy that the protagonists confront.
Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Monday, February 04, 2002
Friday, February 01, 2002
IKIP Homepage The International Kuril Island Project is an international collaboration of American, Russian, and Japanese scientists to survey the plants, insects, spiders, freshwater and terrestrial mollusks, freshwater fishes, amphibians, and reptiles of the Kuril Archipelago. Participating institutions include the University of Washington (Fish Collection, Burke Museum, and Herbarium), the Russian Academy of Sciences, Far East Branch, and Hokkaido University, Hokkaido, Japan.
• Key Players in the Plame Affair
