Dev.SN

gewg_ writes:

From dartmouth.edu

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Those innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world.

Dartmouth's April 30, 2014, BASIC at 50 anniversary celebration will kick off with the public premiere of a documentary on the history and impact of BASIC, created by filmmakers Bob Drake and Mike Murray with Professor Dan Rockmore. The event will be held from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in the Hood Museum of Art's Hood Auditorium.

Any memories about your first programs?

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Woods writes:

Remi Soummer, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD., led his team to reanalyze images that had been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planetary disks using improved detection algorithms.

The stars were initially targeted with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) based on unusual heat signatures obtained from NASA space-based telescopes, including IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The previous data provided interesting clues that dusty disks might exist around these stars. Such disks might be seen in scattered light from small dust particles. But when Hubble first viewed the stars between 1999 and 2006, no visible-light disks were detected in the NICMOS pictures.

Recently, with improvements in image processing — including algorithms used for face-recognition software — Soummer and his team reanalyzed the archived images. This time, they could unequivocally see the debris disks, and they could even determine their shapes.

"We are also working to implement the same techniques as a standard processing method for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope," said STScI teammate Laurent Pueyo. "These disks will also be prime targets for the Webb Telescope."

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to be launched in 2018, and with a collecting area about five times larger than that of Hubble, JWST will have unprecedented resolution.

The full journal article (pdf) is available.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC's 5 Live science podcast has a section on research at University College London (UCL) looking at the limits on fossil fuel consumption while meeting the goal of limiting to a 2°C Temperature rise by 2050 as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The interesting result is that we actually already have access to more fossil fuels than we could use according to the models available.

The authors show that the overwhelming majority of the huge coal reserves in China, Russia and the United States should remain unused along with over 260 thousand million barrels oil reserves in the Middle East, equivalent to all of the oil reserves held by Saudi Arabia. The Middle East should also leave over 60% of its gas reserves in the ground.

[...] Lead author Dr Christophe McGlade, Research Associate at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources said: "We've now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2°C temperature limit.

"Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2°C goal. If they go ahead with developing their own resources, they must be asked which reserves elsewhere should remain unburnt in order for the carbon budget not to be exceeded."

The research is being published in full in Nature (paywalled link only), and there is additional coverage in International Business Times, The Engineer and The Independent

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omoc writes:

Reported by LWN:

As of tonight, there is no more SPARC in testing. The main reasons were lack of porter commitments, problems with the tool chain and continued stability issues with our machines.

The fate of SPARC in unstable has not been decided yet. It might get removed unless people commit to working on it. Discussion about this should take place on #745938 [debian.org].

I can still remember using my first SPARCstation station. They were only supplied to our lecturers and we would use them any chance we could. Anyone else going to miss this venerable architecture?

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Papas Fritas writes:

Ars Technica reports that the government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

Would upgrading the systems make them more safe and reliable, or a liability?

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crutchy writes:

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 8 "Jessie".

Debian now comes with Xfce as the default window manager (it's still possible to select an alternative desktop to install at the boot prompt). Some of the other changes are:

The Linux kernel has been updated from 3.2 to 3.13
ia64 architecture has been removed
75 languages are supported (full translation for 12)

Original Submission

Angry Jesus writes:

The Verge has a fascinating article on the implications of a recently published study indicating that lab mice have a stress response to the scent of male researchers but not female researchers.

"People have not paid attention to this in the entire history of scientific research of animals," says Jeffrey Mogil, a pain researcher at McGill University and lead author of the study. "I think that it may have confounded, to whatever degree, some very large subset of existing research."

Interestingly, the stress response isn't only dependent on the sex of an intruder, but also on the circumstances of his or her approach. "If you put a male-worn T-shirt and a female-worn T-shirt in the same room, the female T-shirt counteracts the effect of a male T-shirt." This, Mogil says, indicates that solitary males represent the real threat. "A lone male is up to no good — either hunting or defending his territory."

What do you think are the implications of this study?

Original Submission

Angry Jesus writes:

Looking for a new guilty pleasure tv show? If Tosh.0, Jackass and Mythbusters had a three-way baby, it would be National Geographic UK's new show, The Science of Stupid. Each episode centers around a couple of stunts, like doing backflips, roundhouse kicks, bike jumps or skateboard grinds. Each segment starts with a handful of videos demonstrating people failing at doing the stunts often with hilarious results, and then progresses to a discussion of the physics of the stunt, why the stunt failed and the correct way to do it. The show lets you laugh at stupid youtube videos and is at least somewhat educational at the same time. Throw in a snarky british commentator and the result is more watchable than it has any right to be.

You can see videos on youtube and also there is a version in Spanish

Original Submission

Papas Fritas writes:

The NYT writes in an editorial that for the last few months, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy by pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive. "The coal producers' motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses. That might seem distant at the moment, when nearly 40 percent of the nation's electricity is still generated by coal, and when less than 1 percent of power customers have solar arrays. But given new regulations on power-plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants, and the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions, the future clearly lies with renewable energy."

For example, the Arizona Public Service Company, the state's largest utility, funneled large sums through a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama. Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. "Like Obamacare, it's another government mandate we can't afford," the narrator says. "That line might appeal to Tea Partiers, but it's deliberately misleading," concludes the editorial. "This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change."

Original Submission

lhsi writes:

From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first "solar" kerosene

An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first "solar" jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers have for the first time successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene, using concentrated light as a high-temperature energy source. The project is still at the experimental stage, with a glassful of jet fuel produced in laboratory conditions, using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight, CO2 and water.

Original Submission