michael favia

In the heyday of high-temperature superconductor research, thousands of physicists converge in New York for an impromptu session on superconductivity that lasts into the wee hours of the night.

Kilrah_il writes "The linked article provides a short summery of the problems scientists have with statistics. As an intern, I see it many times: Doctors do lots of research but don't have a clue when it comes to statistics... and in the social science area it's even worse. From the article: 'Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.'"

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ByronScott writes "Want eyesight that could put your neighborhood cyborg to shame? Well, University of Washington professor Babak Amir Parviz and his students are working on solar powered contact lenses embedded with hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, letting wearers experience augmented reality right through their eyes. If their research proves successful, the applications — from health monitoring to gameplay to just plain bionic sight -could be endless."

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Start with a moisturizer, then add a few (safe) preservatives, an antistatic agent, and some of that stuff inside breast implants, and you have dry scalp care!

Competition turns cutthroat as more and more people track their travels with the location-based service. At the South by Southwest conference, the quest for badges and tussles over mayorships gets frenetic and weird.

Tress are among the oldest living things on the planet, and the oldest we know of are pushing 5,000 years. If you count clonal trees, which continually grow new trunks from the same roots, the oldest may be 80,000 years old.

With thousands of bands playing at South by Southwest 2010, it can be difficult to spot the killer music wedged in amongst all the buzz and noise. Here are 10 bands worth your inebriated time and attention.

hansamurai writes "Over one hundred cars equipped with a Webtech Plus blackbox were remotely disabled when a former employee of dealership Texas Auto Center got hold of his employer's database of users. Webtech Plus is repossession software that allows the dealership to disable a car's ignition or trigger the horn to honk when a payment is due. Owners had to remove the battery to stop the incessant honking. After the dealership began fielding an unusually high number of calls from upset car owners, they changed the passwords to the Webtech Plus software and then traced the IP address used to access the client to its former employee."

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Led by a boutique guitar effects maker, the three-piece band makes its third trip to South by Southwest to show off its visceral musical creations.

Lanxon writes "The guy behind Ultima Online once bought an old Russian rover, despite it being lost on the moon somewhere. And now, using images released by NASA, it has been located on the moon's surface after nearly four decades of being MIA, reports Wired. Richard Garriott, who created the Ultima Online multiplayer game, bought the Lunokhod 2 in a Sotheby's auction in New York in 1998. And so new was the discovery of his lost possession, he hadn't even heard that the craft had been discovered when Wired spoke to him." (Richard Garriott is also well known as Lord British.)

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States are adding convicts to sex-offender registries, even if they did not commit sex-related crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the registries, but might have a chance to review whether non-sexual deviants can be added to the databases.

Chroniton writes "NASA ice scientists have found a shrimp-like creature and a possible jellyfish 'frolicking' beneath 600 feet of solid Antarctic ice, where only microbes were expected to live. The odds of finding two complex lifeforms after drilling only an 8-inch-wide hole suggests there may be much more. And if such life is possible beneath Earth's oceans, why not elsewhere, like Europa?"

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There's plenty of Star Wars nerd rage in this engaging new documentary, which lays out the case against Lucas' endless tweaks and creative decisions. But plenty of warm-and-fuzzy flashbacks to the franchise's roots soften the blow.

The company that makes cool digital cameras wants you to find it online soon at http://canon. It's the first of what could a wave of new top level domains for companies, and it's just one sign of big changes coming to the net's naming conventions.

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles (good, encyclopedia style videos only!). Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."

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Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet that is near habitable temperature and also crosses in front of its star, allowing it to be studied from Earth.

marklyon writes "HB 872, recently signed into law by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, makes Caller ID spoofing illegal. The law covers alterations to the caller's name, telephone number, or name and telephone number that is shown to a recipient of a call or otherwise presented to the network. The law applies to PSTN, wireless and VoIP calls. Penalties for each violation can be up to $1,000 and one year in jail. Blocking of caller identification information is still permitted."

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The first television series with an "environmentalist" bent, Our Vanishing Wilderness, is available online in all its strange, groovy, apocalyptic glory.

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone." The article mentions Google's similar dewarping system; the difference here is speed.

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The General's latest science project makes the entire windshield a monitor and you a safer driver.