Interesting Reading…
January 14, 2009
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36.5 Megawatt superconducting motor Successfully Tested at Full Power – “Incorporating coils of HTS wire that are able to carry 150 times the power of similar-sized copper wire, the motor is less than half the size of conventional motors used on the first two DDG-1000 hulls and will reduce ship weight by nearly 200 metric tons. It will help make new ships more fuel-efficient and free up space for additional warfighting capability…”
10 things you need to do after reinstalling Windows – “When your Windows has become so sluggish and no amount of registry cleaning, virus scanning, and spyware cleansing can help it, then it is a good time to reformat and reinstall your Windows…”
Cornography – “The United States is the number one per capita consumer of corn in the world. Don’t recall stuffing your face with thousands of ears of corn last year? As expounded in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, King Corn, and Super Size Me, high fructose corn syrup and other derivatives work their way into everything from Wonder Bread to Big Macs. Add to that corn grown for ethanol production, and you’re looking at one corn-obsessed culture…”
A Newbie Switches to Ubuntu: What Worked and What Didn’t? – “Remember how, when you first took the SAT, people told you to “go with your first answer–it’s probably correct?” This series is by no means written by a Linux expert, but several of the off-the-cuff impressions about using Ubuntu, add-ons and more are interesting precisely because they are off-the-cuff…”
Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour – “The major focus with Windows 7 is how the user interacts with the machine, and so the major work in Windows 7 is to the user interface. Therefore I’ll focus mainly on the new interface elements in this brief look. For those more interested in the system administrative perspective, our PDC Coverage would be a good place to start…”
The Near Future of Aviation According to NASA – “NASA has presented its concept for the airliner of the future, bigger, more efficient and weird-looking, but still not as weird and intriguing as these other concepts, which include nuclear airplanes and flying airport bases…”
Super fast Ext4 filesystem arrives in Ubuntu 9.04 – “Ext4 is designed to provide better performance and increase reliability. It also increases the maximum filesystem size to one exabyte and reduces the amount of time that is required to perform a fsck operation…”
Chemists edge closer to recreating early life – “A test tube based system of chemicals that exhibit life-like qualities such as indefinite self-replication, mutation, and survival of the fittest, has been created by US scientists. The researchers say their perpetually replicating RNA enzymes take us a step closer to understanding the origins of life on Earth, as well as to how life may one day be synthesised in the lab…”
Bug enzyme generates fuel from water – “A light-powered bacterial enzyme that releases hydrogen from water could lead the way to new strategies for generating the energy-rich gas…”
Brave, Stupid, and Curious: Dangerous Psychology Experiments From the Past – “But there’s another ethical issue that you may not be so familiar with, and that has to do with protecting the research assistants running the study, many of whom are undergraduate students. In the field of social psychology, this is often a very real issue indeed. Sometimes there are dangers involved that the scientists themselves, I suspect, have not thought through entirely…”
















