Levitation of small animals achieved
From the article:
Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.
The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.
"It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.
More at http://www.livescience.com/animals/090909-mouse-levitation.html
Host your own bittorrent tracker complements of Google
You can let Google host your very own bittorrent tracker! Atrack is a new project that implements the Google App Engine and Google's complementary hosting. As far as privacy and confideniality, you'll only have to worry about Google releasing the access log file to your entire App Engine account it seems.
“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,”
This has got to be the bane of any association pursuing the take down of hosted bittorrent trackers.
more info at atrack | freshmeat.net
CodePlex Foundation
Microsoft in inheriently against open source movements in their own self preservation... so why did they make their own 501c foundation dedicated to open source?
More at Microsoft's new CodePlex Foundation
Judge says Facebook needs to hand over their source code
If you didn't know already, Leader Technologies is suing Facebook for patent infringement. Evidently you can patent a method for "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" if it has to do with computers.
Well, everyone thought this was just a publicity stunt, but not any more. The judge ruled in Leader's favor and demanded Facebook present their full source code to Leader for review. Of course this was nonsense so Facebook appealed expecting reasonable protection of their trade secrets. Sucks for Facebook because today, the judge upheld the verdict in the appeal and Facebook is still required to hand over their source code. Wow.