Both Sony and Microsoft have been looking to take a bite out of Nintendo's wildly popular Wii system - and they need the help. Playstation 3 is plagued by the 'yellow screen of death', where it randomly dies for no reason, forcing me to pay $200 for a new system, which counts as a new sale and therefore makes a poorly QA'ed platform look better than it is, or send $150 to Sony to 'fix' the problem that could then happen again.Microsoft has a different problem. GameSpot said the Kinect facial recognition camera system doesn't work properly for some players with darker skin.
On October 26th, the residents of Earth’s northernmost town, Longyearbyen, Norway watched the sun set and the next time they see it will be February. Depressing? Science says Seasonal Affective Disorder exists and so a shortened day much less a non-existent one is bad. Longyearbyen is located at 78 degrees north latitude in the Arctic circle and experiences 'Polar Night', when it remains dark for four months each winter. It's not healthy.
From Scienceblogs:Lately I've been thinking and giving some talks about Scandinavian pseudo-archaeological writers, that is, people who publish books on the past with unsubstantiated claims to scientific credibility. The beyond all comparison most famous of them is the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl. Thor Heyerdahl's forays into archeology were pseudoscience because he had a single favorite model that he refused to let go of.
As the U.S. Navy bombs Guam with dead, poisoned mice in the latest attempt to eradicate invasive brown tree snakes, it's worth taking a moment to sit back and appreciate -- yes, appreciate -- invasive species.Now, before the environmentalists among you get upset, I'm not suggesting that species invasions are good things but let's put aside our usual feelings about invasive species, and just talk about some really cool animals.
In Physical Review Letters, a large group of physicists published their study from the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab in Illinois. When they looked at oscillations of muon antineutrinos into electron antineutrinos, they found the process happening faster than known physics predicts. Neutrinos followed the rules, but antineutrinos didn’t behave the same way did.So what does it mean?
Researchers Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey, associate professors in psychology at Villanova University and Rutgers University, respectively, were trying to test the idea that testosterone levels rise after a male has won a fight or challenge, and fall after he has lost. This would make evolutionary sense, because he could be hurt or killed, and therefore not breed if he kept fighting even though outmatched.
Blogs Krystal D'Costa at Scientific American;There are an estimated 900,000 elevators in the United States, each serving an average of 20,000 people per year (1). That means approximately 18 billion elevator rides are taken every year. With 310,622,223 people in the United States, that amounts to about 58 elevator rides per person per year (2).Yet despite the benefits to our lives and the close quarters, elevators have become home to an anthropological coping mechanism where people communicate less than in other venues.
Step 1. Go to Google MapsStep 2. Click the 'Get Directions' buttonStep 3. Input Japan as the starting location and China as the destinationStep 4. Click 'Get Directions'Go to #43. Laugh. Those Google guys think of everything.
Regarding the reelection prospects of Bill Foster in the 14th district in Illinois, an article on the candidate mentions "An atypical politician, Foster can list among his endorsers not only the Illinois Farm Bureau but 31 Nobel Prize winners. Foster worked at Fermilab and helped discover the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter."
So Christine O'Donnell lost her election race in Delaware by a ridiculous landslide margin - anyone worried that she could somehow get elected and institute forced witchcraft zones in schools can rest easy. No Republican took her seriously, in Delaware or anywhere else - that's why she lost so badly. Sure, MSNBC played her up but it's what they do.Likewise, Sam Brownback in Kansas is no friend to biology but the governor's office is a lot safer place for him than a local school board, where he could actually do some damage.In Colorado, Proposition 62, the so-called personhood amendment, would have defined a ‘person’ as beginning at conception and never had any chance of success. As predicted, it failed easily.
