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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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HP reveals memristor, the fourth passive circuit element
1 week, 6 days ago
The long-sought after memristor -- the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory -- has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif.Memristors -- the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors -- were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP.
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Scientific Linux --the Big Physics community Linux of choice
1 month, 1 week ago
"In the Big Physics community, Linux is quite popular. Having met with numerous groups, Linux almost always comes up as a topic of discussion and in many cases it’s part of their labs roadmap for rolling out control, test, and other systems. .... " -
Wikipedia-reading researchers break keyless entry algorithm
1 month, 1 week ago
"A team of German scientists say they have cracked the encryption of a device widely used in keyless entry systems that electronically secure cars, garages and office buildings. ... The algorithm was kept secret for most of the two decades it's been in use. That changed about 18 months ago, when an an entry on Wikipedia published the cipher. The research team almost immediately spotted weaknesses." -
Crypto guru warns over random number backdoor
6 months ago
"A top cryptographer has expressed concern about a possible backdoor in a standard for random-number generators approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) this year .... " -
Fabricators descend on Maker Faire Austin
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"AUSTIN, Texas--If you've never seen a machine that makes 3D models out of sugar, you should. But unless you're part of a relatively small group of people who went to the Maker Faire in California in May, or are one of a few other people who know the machine's creator, you probably have never even heard of the device. " -
Is 'green' software possible?
9 months, 4 weeks ago
"As Kermit the infuriating frog puppet once said "It's not easy bein' green" - especially as a software developer .... " -
Docs want more info on video game addiction
10 months, 3 weeks ago
The American Medical Association called for more research into the public health risks of video and Internet games on Wednesday but stopped short of declaring them addictive.The AMA, which recommended a review of the current video game rating system, also said it would leave it up to the American Psychiatric Association and other experts to decide whether video game addiction should be designated a mental illness.
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Digital music no environmental cure
10 months, 4 weeks ago
This past March, Greenpeace made headlines by criticizing Apple's environmental policies--or lack thereof. -
NVidia Enters Computer Business with 'Deskside Supercomputer'
11 months ago
While ATI and its newfound parent AMD continue discussing the potential benefits of actually pairing their technologies into one cohesive unit, now that their companies have been paired together in a similar fashion, their principal rival in the graphics arena decided it isn't waiting to make a similar play with Intel. NVidia today may have launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.
Linux.com : Science & Research
A chat with Linux Astronomy's Eugene Clement (video)
At SCALE 6x in February, one of the first things on the expo floor to grab my attention was the scaffolding of a large telescope jutting up towards the ceiling in the far corner of the room. The device belonged to the Linux Astronomy project, which built the entire system from scratch.
Online library reaches million book milestone
An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.
Open Access bill vetoed
Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.
PRISM Coalition lobbies against open access
Forces are mashaling to oppose the open access movement, the open source-inspired movement to make academic research publicly available online. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently announced the creation of the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), an apparent lobby group organized to resist efforts to compel academic publishers to make publicly funded research generally available. PRISM's methods appear eerily similar to those used to oppose legislation to make public documents available in an open format, as well as the actions against free downloads by such organizations as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.
NCSA's CyberCollaboratory community thrives on open source
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave us Mosaic, the first Web browser with a graphical user interface. Today, the NCSA is still innovating, creating a project that monitors how global climate change is affecting plants and wildlife, one that tracks oil spills, and another that predicts the possible effects of seismographic activity on bridges and other structures. To facilitate communication and collaboration between stations, NCSA is making use of the Web infrastructure it helped to launch almost 15 years ago, in a research program called the CyberCollaboratory. Not surprisingly, open source software is an integral part of the Web-based intiative.
Academia's Open Access movement mirrors FOSS community
Free and open source software (FOSS) has roots in the ideals of academic freedom and the unimpeded exchange of information. In the last five years, the concepts have come full circle, with FOSS serving as a model for Open Access (OA), a movement within academia to promote unrestricted access to scholarly material for both researchers and the general public.
