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Whole Lot Of Shaking Went On In NZ

1:22 PM Tuesday, September 7, 2010

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Being Fat Is Good

12:30 PM Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Weight loss has a serious downside: it leads to the release of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which may have a significant impact on health.

POPs are man-made chemicals which enter the food chain from sources including pesticides and manufacturing. They have been linked to an increased risk of diabetes, cancer and dementia. Once consumed, POPs collect in fatty tissue, where they are not thought to be harmful. Now, Duk-Hee Lee of Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea, has shown that weight loss causes POPs to be freed, leading to their build up in the blood.

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War Is Hazardous to Your Health

12:29 PM Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The battle for Guadalcanal was one of the pivotal moments of the second world war. The Japanese occupied Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, in August 1942. When the Americans landed a few months later, the Japanese set out to reinforce their troops by sea. The struggle for naval supremacy that followed was confused and bloody, but by February 1943 the battle was over and the Japanese had evacuated their remaining troops.

The battle has a hidden legacy, however. Before the war, the stretch of water north of Guadalcanal was called Sealark Sound. Now it is known as Iron Bottom Sound, because of the number of wrecked ships there. One of these is the 6800-tonne Japanese freighter Hirokawa Maru, lying stranded off what would otherwise be an idyllic, palm-fringed Pacific island beach. Every now and then the ship leaks oil, threatening coral reefs, marine life and subsistence fishing.

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Driving DRAM Pricing Down

11:17 AM Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Prices of dynamic random access memory are expected to fall due to an oversupply in the market, thanks in part to devices like the iPad which use fewer DRAM components than traditional PCs.

Samsung Electronics on Tuesday warned that weakening PC sales could drive down prices on memory chips even further, according to Reuters. The report noted that there is currently an oversupply of memory in the market as sales of traditional PCs have slowed.

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USB 2.9.9

11:15 AM Tuesday, September 7, 2010

From The Inquirer:

ALL IS NOT WELL with motherboard makers’ plans to bung USB 3.0 into their boards. ASMedia Technology, VIA Labs, Etron Technology and Fresco Logic all had plans to offer USB 3.0 chips for use in motherboards by the end of 2010.

However it turns out that the mainboards set to use their chips might be delayed because the chips have not yet passed USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) certification. According to Digitimes there are technical problems with the USB 3.0 chips.

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NVIDIA Slashing the GTX 460?

11:34 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

GRAPHICS CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia might be about to lower the price of its GTX460 GPU, shortly before releasing its GTX450 model.

Reports of the price drop first surfaced at Kitguru, where bloggers wrote, “We’d heard that Jay Puri (Sales vice-president) and Jen Hsun Huang (CEO and co-founder of the chip firm) were looking to drop the price of the fastest selling Fermi card ever, by $20.”

All right, maybe not so much slashing as “nicking.”

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The Alien Prequels

11:32 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

Gemma Arterton told the Sunday Times that she’s scheduled to talk to director Ridley Scott about starring in the two Alien prequels he’s working on. (You may know Gemma from her role as “Strawberry Fields” in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.)

The Alien attempts to impregnate Ridley during the film’s climax.

We don’t know much about the movies other than Scott’s said they’ll “be really tough, really nasty. It’s the dark side of the moon.

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Intel May Finally Announce USB 3.0!

11:26 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

As AMD is already preparing to integrate USB 3.0 into its future chipset designs, Intel is expected to announce the addition of a USB 3.0 host controller into its Cougar Point motherboard reference design at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2010 in the US, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

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Phone Carriers Maybe, Aircraft Carriers Not So Much

11:25 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

News reports surfaced this past week that in a drastic bid to trim government spending Britain and France were discussing sharing aircraft carriers. Britain currently operates two carriers, HMS Ark Royal and HMS Illustrious, with two more under construction, while France operates the large deck carrier Charles de Gaulle.

Today, British and French officials threw cold water on the idea with Britain’s defense secretary Liam Fox calling the carrier time share idea “utterly unrealistic.” The two countries are discussing sharing aerial refueling aircraft and maintenance on the A400M transport aircraft and further industry collaboration, reports the Financial Times.

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It’s the Vitamin D

11:21 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

MIT researchers have created solar cells that repair themselves after damage from sunlight, similar to the way plants constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, to maintain optimal efficiency. Conventional silicon-based photovoltaic cells have little degradation, but the new technology could come in handy for new types of solar cells that have very significant degradation.

A solution for a problem that hasn’t happened or an excuse to for sloppy workmanship?

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Oracle Predicts Sexual Harrassment Suit

11:19 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

As some had been expecting, Oracle announced Monday evening that it has hired former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd to be its new company co-president as well as a member of its board of directors.

Hurd will report directly to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and alongside existing co-president Safra Catz. Charles Phillips, who had been serving as co-president with Catz, has resigned and given up his seat on the board, according to a separate announcement from Oracle Monday night.

“The name of the place is I like it like that!”

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Craigslist in the Pubic’s Interest

11:17 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

Craigslist has remained entirely tight-lipped about the insertion of the word “CENSORED” where its Adult Services used to be. Yet some wonder whether Craigslist might be trying to prove that closing the section will merely encourage those who place ads for prostitution to use another of Craigslist’s sections- such as Casual Encounters.

The New York Times quoted Richard (“I didn’t really serve in Vietnam”) Blumenthal, one of the entirely public-spirited attorneys general who have been pressuring Craigslist for some time, as saying: “If this announcement is a stunt or a ploy, it will only redouble our determination to pursue

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Unexploded Flash Bomb Found By Brits

11:14 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

A memory stick containing anti-terror training manuals and other sensitive material was reportedly found on a street outside a Manchester police station. The Greater Manchester Police-branded stick, which also held personnel files, was found by an unnamed businessman outside a cop shop in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, the Daily Star on Sunday reports.

The device was branded with the GMP POTU initials of the Greater Manchester Police Public Order Training Unit and contained 2,000 files including some produced by the National Police Improvement Agency about counter-terrorism tactics. Names and ranks of officers were also found on the reportedly unencrypted device after its finder plugged it into his PC.

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It Been Wendified

10:35 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

From The Onion:

Representatives for the restaurant chain Wendy’s announced Tuesday that due to the item’s continually dismal performance, the company would be discontinuing the widely disliked hamburger sandwich.

The hamburger sandwich, which Wendy’s sources described as a ground beef “patty” placed between vegetables and two slices of bread, has long been the restaurant’s worst-selling menu item, leading executives to decide that the time had finally come to phase it out of all 6,650 Wendy’s locations.

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Countermeasures

9:13 PM Monday, September 6, 2010

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new laser-based countermeasure for aircraft, and unlike others we’ve seen (and we’ve seen a few) this technology aims to “blind” missiles rather than knock ‘em out of the sky. The system uses a mid-infrared supercontinuum laser to mimic the heat signature of a helicopter, and it has no moving parts — making it rugged enough to last a long time on rotor-based aircraft.