paulandscruffy.wordpress.org One of the most challenging problems in theoretical computer science has been solved. Kind of. It was solved, moreover, not by researchers at MIT, Cal Tech, or Carnegie Mellon, but by bumblebees. Scientists researching the critters at Queen Mary and Royal Holloway of the University of London noticed that[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
Skype vs. Google Voice
Whether you’re chatting with your parents, friends, or boyfriend, long-distance relationships have been made easier with chat programs that allow voice and video communication. Skype seems to have taken the lead in the industry, but there are other chatting and video streaming programs that are just as good, if not[Read More…]
Stealing from the cookie jar
Your online accounts are vulnerable. From Amazon to Yahoo!, your personal information on many of your favourite sites, if used on a public network, can easily be stolen. Thanks to a Firefox plug-in called Firesheep, released last week by hacker Eric Butler, this risk is higher than ever. By installing[Read More…]
Harvard’s Roger Brockett discusses intelligent machines
What is an intelligent machine? On Friday, Roger Brockett, a roboticist at Harvard University, gave a lecture at the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines that attempted to answer this question. In the 1950s, the Turing test was the standard for determining whether or not a machine was intelligent. In the[Read More…]
Comparing the Dell XPS M1730 and HP Mini 210
Holly Stewart I own four computers. Call me a hoarder all you like, but I use all of them on a daily basis. I have two laptops for school and two LAMP servers in my room at home which I use for working on a network application. Having two laptops[Read More…]
Pseudoscience Symposium fills the aisles of Leacock 132
Adam Scotti James Randi fools students with electric beard trimmer. “You already have been fooled,” said James “The Amazing” Randi, a magician and pseudoscience investigator, in a lecture on Tuesday. “When I came out here, I took the microphone. I didn’t really need it. It simply is a beard trimmer.”[Read More…]
New research shows video games may be addictive
Many people play video games as a temporary retreat from work or study, or to occasionally escape in the experience of traveling virtually to places and situations unlikely or impossible in the real world. According to recent studies by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto and[Read More…]
The greatest inventions of all time
freepatentsonline.com Sliced bread is awesome. But, if it’s truly one of the greatest inventions of all time, why do people still own bread knives? Here are some other suggestions for the top innovative inventions of all time. While these inventors may not have won Nobel Prizes, they certainly deserve some[Read More…]
Stuxnet: the world’s most sophisticated virus
Stuxnet is a working and fearsome prototype of a cyber-weapon that will lead to the creation of a new arms race in the world Kaspersky Labs When one of the world’s leading malware research labs releases a quote like this, it’s time to get worried. Stuxnet is one[Read More…]
In Switzerland, accelerator begins smashing protons at full speed
At 12:58 p.m. local time last Tuesday, the Large Hadron Collider, a mammoth particle accelerator buried 100 metres beneath Geneva, Switzerland, finally began smashing subatomic particles together at record-high speeds. Though the LHC’s first successful particle collisions occurred in November, on Tuesday physicists at the accelerator recorded the first collisions at the energy level – about seven trillion electron volts (TeV) – at which the collider will operate for about the next year and a half.
