Nach Wolf, Bär und Luchs: Nun hat auch ein Goldschakal seinen Weg in die Schweiz gefunden. Gesichtet wurde das Tier in den Nordwestalpen.
Der jüngste Vorfall mit «Badesalz» hat die Diskussion um Designerdrogen neu entfacht. Wie verbreitet die Stoffe hierzulande sind, ist unklar. Ebenso, was sie im Gehirn der Konsumenten anrichten.
Neil Armstrong soll in einer privaten Seebestattung beigesetzt werden. Zuvor wird sich die Öffentlichkeit in einer grossen Trauerfeier von ihm verabschieden können.
Zwei Mädchen haben das Blutbad bei Annecy überlebt. Cornelia Bessler, Chefärztin Kinder- und Jugendforensik an der Universität Zürich, sagt, wie Kinder mit einer solchen Extremsituation umgehen.
Bei einem grossen Unfall im AKW Mühleberg wäre laut einer Studie ein wirksamer Katastrophenschutz nicht möglich. Eine Animation zeigt, dass auch Zürich verstrahlt würde. 185'000 Menschen müssten ihre Häuser für immer verlassen.
Die 34 Postangestellten, die hospitalisiert werden mussten, zeigten Vergiftungserscheinungen ohne Vergiftung. Psychologin Gaby Bleichhardt erklärt weshalb.
Wissenschaftlich gesehen sind Biolebensmittel nicht viel gesünder als konventionelle. Weshalb setzen viele Konsumenten trotzdem auf Bio? Die Videoumfrage.
Biologische Lebensmittel sind gesund, so die landläufige Meinung. Eine neue Studie zeigt: Bio-Produkte sind zwar nicht nährstoffreicher als normales Essen. Doch sie bieten andere entscheidende Vorteile.
Zum ersten Mal seit 1977 ist in der Schweiz ein Fall von Tollwut tödlich verlaufen. Der Betroffene war für die Behandlung von Dubai in die Schweiz verlegt worden, lag bei der Ankunft aber bereits im Koma.
Forscher haben eine Methode entwickelt, mit der die Geruchsblindheit bei Mäusen geheilt werden kann – und vielleicht auch bald bei Menschen. Die Therapie hat allerdings einen entscheidenden Haken.
Vom 3. bis zum 6. September 1912 besuchte der deutsche Kaiser Wilhelm II. die Schweiz. Die Aufregung war gross, auch in Bern – die Schweiz schwankte vor hundert Jahren zwischen Bewunderung und Ablehnung.
Am Donnerstag wurde bekannt, dass der Chauffeur im Walliser Car-Dramas täglich ein Antidepressivum einnahm. Ein Experte erklärt, ob man trotzdem fahren kann und ob Depressive überhaupt Verantwortung übernehmen können.
Laut dem Psychologen Roy Baumeister ist nicht das Selbstwertgefühl der Schlüssel zum Erfolg, sondern Disziplin.
Eltern schätzen den Strassenverkehr als Hauptunfallgefahr für ihre Kinder ein. Zahlen aus Deutschland belegen, dass sie damit falsch liegen.
Die Nasa hat eine Forschungsmission des Strahlungsgürtels der Erde gestartet. Erstmals wurden gleich zwei Satelliten gemeinsam losgeschickt. Sie sollen genauere Wettervorhersagen im Weltraum ermöglichen.
Sollen Eltern ihre neugeborenen Söhne beschneiden lassen? Die einflussreiche «American Academy of Pediatrics» findet: Ja. Ein Entscheid, der auch finanzielle Folgen haben kann.
Wie das Leben unberechenbar ist, so sollte unser Blick auf die Welt vor allem eines bleiben: unvoreingenommen. Denn ein vermeintlich lückenloses Weltbild führt höchstens zur Selbstisolation.
Das Projekt «Wild Wonders of Europe» dokumentiert mit atemberaubenden Naturaufnahmen die Artenvielfalt Europas.
Gentechnisch veränderte Pflanzen bergen gemäss einer Nationalfonds-Studie keine Risiken. Warum die Schweiz die Gentech-Forschung stärker unterstützen sollte, erklärt Prof. Wilhelm Gruissem von der ETH Zürich.
Der US-amerikanische Physiker Richard A. Muller gehörte zu den profiliertesten Zweiflern an der Klimaerwärmung. Nach eigenen Studien hat er nun seine Meinung geändert.
redletterdave writes "The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world traditionally known as the 'golden watercourse,' mysteriously blushed for the first time on Sept. 6. Residents in the surrounding area near the city of Chongqing, where the Yangtze connects to the Jialin River, literally stopped in their tracks when they noticed their once golden river had turned a shocking shade of red. Residents have carefully crept down to the riverbanks for the past few days to save some of the red, tomato juice-like river water in bottles. Early predictions from scientists say the red water was likely a result of pollution, but investigators are still investigating the unknown cause."
An anonymous reader writes "Lost amid the announcements for Amazon's new tablets and e-readers was the news that their latest Kindle Fire tablets would include advertisements. So-called 'Special Offers' would place ads on the devices' lock screens in a similar fashion to the lowest price Kindle e-readers. However, on the e-readers, you had the option to 'buy out' the ads by simply paying the difference in price between the cheaper device and the regular version. But Amazon has no confirmed there is no way to opt out of the ads on the new Kindle Fire tablets."
mhore writes "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the first all optical, nanowire-based NAND gate, which paves the way towards photonic devices that manipulate light to perform computations. From the release: 'The research team began by precisely cutting a gap into a nanowire. They then pumped enough energy into the first nanowire segment that it began to emit laser light from its end and through the gap. Because the researchers started with a single nanowire, the two segment ends were perfectly matched, allowing the second segment to efficiently absorb and transmit the light down its length.' The gate works by shining light on the nanowire structure to turn on and off information transported through the wire. The research appeared this month in Nature Nanotechnology (abstract)."
Underholdning writes "It's been five years since Radiohead brought the pay what you want model to the public with their successful sale of their 'In Rainbows' album. Now, here's a fresh example of how a game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him by offering his game, McPixel, for free and letting people pay what they want. Currently TPB has more than 5000 applicants wanting to do the same. 'Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't ... It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game. ... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion."'"
unixluv writes "Evidently, Wikipedia doesn't believe an author on his own motivations when trying to correct an article on his own book. A Wikipedia administrator claimed they need 'secondary sources.' I'm not sure where you would go to get a secondary source when you are the only author of a work. Thus, in a lengthy blog post for The New Yorker, Roth created his own secondary source. He wrote, 'My novel The Human Stain was described in the entry as "allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard." ... This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. The Human Stain was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.' The Wikipedia page has now been corrected."
An anonymous reader writes "Ars reports on a decision from a district judge in Illinois, who ruled that sniffing traffic on an unencrypted Wi-Fi network is not wiretapping. In the ruling, the judge points out an exception in the Wiretap Act which allows people to 'intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public.' He concludes that 'the communications sent on an unencrypted Wi-Fi network are readily available to the general public.' Orin Kerr disagrees with the ruling, saying that the intent of the person setting up the network is important: 'No one suggests that unsecured wireless networks are set up with the goal that everyone on the network would be free to read the private communications of others.'"
mbone writes "A very interesting paper (PDF) has just hit the streets (or, at least, Physics Review Letters) about the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship as it was originally formulated about measurements. The researchers find that they can exceed the uncertainty limit in measurements (although the uncertainty limit in quantum states is still followed, so the foundations of quantum mechanics still appear to be sound.) This is really an attack on quantum entanglement (the correlations imposed between two related particles), and so may have immediate applications in cracking quantum cryptography systems. It may also be easier to read quantum communications without being detected than people originally thought."
hypnosec writes "A new patch for Apache by Roy Fielding, one of the authors of the Do Not Track (DNT) standard, is set to override the DNT option if the browser reaching the server is Internet Explorer 10. Microsoft has by default enabled DNT in Internet Explorer 10 stating that it is to 'better protect user privacy.' This hasn't gone down well with ad networks, users and other browser makers. According to Mozilla, the DNT feature shouldn't be either in an active state or an inactive state until and unless a user specifically sets it. Along the same lines is the stance adopted by Digital Advertising Alliance. The alliance has revealed that it will only honor DNT if and only if it is not switched on by default. This means advertisers will be ignoring the DNT altogether no matter how a particular browser is set up. The DNT project has another member – Apache. It turns out that Microsoft's stance is like a thorn to Apache as well. Fielding has written a patch for the web server titled 'Apache does not tolerate deliberate abuse of open standards.' The patch immediately sparked a debate, which instigated Fielding to elaborate on his work: 'The only reason DNT exists is to express a non-default option. That's all it does. [...] It does not protect anyone's privacy unless the recipients believe it was set by a real human being, with a real preference for privacy over personalization.'"
First time accepted submitter mrhelio writes "I work for a medium-sized helicopter company; we mainly fly tourists around on sightseeing flights. My company needs help finding a hacker-friendly portable music player for our helicopters. We have a problem with our onboard music players — mostly because it is an obsolete terrible design. The manufacturer has made an updated model, but it's basically the same obsolete design with the same terrible software and user interface. We are worried about spending $1000 per unit on these because the manufacturer will eventually stop making replacement units and then we will be force to buy upgrades for our entire fleet again and get everything recertified. (Any piece of equipment hard mounted in a commercial aircraft has to be certified by the FAA and it takes a lot of paper work, time and money for that to happen.) So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons. There are buttons and toggle switches already designed into the flight controls for these kind of purposes and we have mechanics/ engineers that can wire it all together, but the music player has to support the remote interface in the first place. Our first choice would be to give each pilot an iPod, but Apple is notoriously anti-hacking and anti-open source, plus you have to pay them ridiculous licensing fees to get access to their USB interface. So we are looking for a manufacturer that is open source / hacker friendly and makes something that meets our needs. Do you know of anything that would work for us? Maybe something that runs Rockbox? Should we just break down and design something from scratch like the Butterfly MP3 player?"
First time accepted submitter brocket66 writes with this excerpt from BGR: "Three major revisions of Google's Android operating system have launched since the company released Android 2.3 more than 21 months ago in December 2010, but Gingerbread is still the most widely used version of Android by a wide margin. A study conducted early this year by graphic designer Chris Sauve projected that based on Android adoption trends up to that point, Android 2.3 Gingerbread would be the dominant version of Android in 2012 despite the fact that Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich had already been released. Now, as the fourth quarter of 2012 approaches, data from Google's Android version distribution tracker confirms once again that those projections were accurate."
lkcl writes "Rhombus Tech's first CPU Card is nearing completion and availability: the schematics have been completed by Wits-Tech. Although it appears strange to be using a 1ghz Cortex A8 for the first CPU Card, the mass-volume price of the A10 was lower than other offerings. Not only does the A10 classify as 'good enough' (in combination with 1GB of RAM), Allwinner Tech is one of the very rare China-based SoC companies willing to collaborate with Software (Libre) developers without an enforced (GPL-violating) NDA in place. Overall, it's the very first step in the right direction for collaboration between Software (Libre) developers and mass-volume PRC Factories. There will be more (faster, better) EOMA-68 CPU Cards: this one is just the first."
An anonymous reader writes "Election Analytics is a website developed by Dr. Sheldon Jacobson at the University of Illinois designed to predict the outcomes of the U.S. presidential and senatorial elections, based on reported polling data. From the site: 'The mathematical model employs Bayesian estimators that use available state poll results (at present, this is being taken from Rasmussen, Survey USA, and Quinnipiac, among others) to determine the probability that each presidential candidate will win each of the states (or the probability that each political party will win the Senate race in each state). These state-by-state probabilities are then used in a dynamic programming algorithm to determine a probability distribution for the number of Electoral College votes that each candidate will win in the 2012 presidential election. In the case of the Senate races, the individual state probabilities are used to determine the number of seats that each party will control.'" You can tweak the site by selecting a skew toward the Republican or Democratic tickets, and whether it's mild or strong. Right now, this tool shows the odds favor another four years for Obama, even with a strong swing for the Republicans.
itwbennett writes "Hoping to avoid a sales ban in the Netherlands, Samsung has said that Android's multitouch software doesn't work as well as Apple's. Samsung lawyer Bas Berghuis van Woortman said that while Apple's technology is a 'very nice invention,' the Android system is harder for developers to use. Arguing the bizarre counterpoint, Apple's lawyer Theo Blomme told judge Peter Blok, that the Android multitouch isn't inferior and does so infringe on Apple's patent: 'They suggest that they have a lesser solution, but that is simply not true,' said Blomme."