http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/290492025/article.cfm

Astronomers have discovered traces of a star that went supernova about 140 years ago, around the time of the U.S. Civil War and the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. The expanding debris cloud, or remnant, known as G1.9+0.3, lies near the center of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from Earth.

Besides making G1.9+0.3 the youngest supernova remnant known in our galaxy, the finding begins to fill a peculiar astronomical gap. Based on studies of other galaxies, researchers estimate that about three supernovae should pop off per century in the Milky Way. They knew of one recent remnant, Cassiopeia A, which went supernova around 1680.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/290470230/article.cfm

"Follow the water" has been NASA's mantra as it has explored Mars for signs of present or past life. It will be no different later this month when the Phoenix Mars Lander touches down on the Red Planet for what researchers hope will be their closest encounter yet with extraterrestrial water.

Powered by solar panels, Phoenix is set to take a three-month tour of the plains near the north pole of Mars, enduring surface temperatures from –100 to –28 degrees Fahrenheit (–73 to –33 degrees Celsius). The craft is designed to dig into the cementlike layer of ice that researchers believe lies buried a few inches below the surface in the planet's polar regions, scanning for signs of past liquid water and organic compounds, the carbon-rich molecules that make life on Earth possible.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/290461405/article.cfm

There's new hope for the more than 7 million American women (and their partners) who long for a child and are plagued by infertility. Australian researchers have developed a method for screening embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the ones that have the best shot of developing into healthy babies. [More]

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944521-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944521-37.html

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944266-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944266-37.html

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/290401801/article.cfm

Starving polar bears are eating one another in the Arctic. Flowers are blooming too soon and dying. The ice caps are melting so swiftly that rising water levels will threaten coastal towns as far away as Florida within several decades. These are just a few examples of the dire consequences of climate change supported by a new analysis in Nature that paints a dark portrait of what a warming world will look like in the years to come.

The researchers assessed 829 geologic phenomena--including melting glaciers--along with nearly 30,000 changes in plants and animals (from bird migration patterns to plummeting penguin populations), and found that about 90 percent of them are in sync with scientists' predictions about how global warming will alter the planet.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/290367325/article.cfm

SHANGHAI, China--Rescue workers are using microphones and fiber-optic cable to probe rubble, searching for people trapped in Monday's devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province. Specially trained dogs are being used to lead crews to areas where humans may be buried beneath slabs of concrete, and workers gingerly sift through the wreckage, hoping for survivors. The death toll has reached nearly 15,000 and at least 25,000 are missing, with time running out to rescue them.

In addition to trying to save injured survivors, physicians here are preparing for another challenge: possible viral outbreaks or other epidemics. The pipes that carry water in many of the cities of Sichuan have been destroyed or damaged, including the famous World Heritage Site irrigation waterworks of Dujiangyan, exposing them and drinking water to contamination. Many survivors are sleeping outdoors for fear of aftershocks--a powerful one ripped through the province on Tuesday that measured 6.1 on the Richter scale--exacerbating the poor sanitation situation.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/14/8502594.aspx

When last we left my dead desktop computer, it had returned to the world of the living with the assistance of the onboard video adapter. The screen was fuzzy because I was running my LCD monitor through the analog VGA cable. Performing an auto-adjust helped a little but it was still blurry. Still, it was within the realm of acceptability for casual low-volume use.

Well, the computer once again died, and before it finally kicked the bucket, the onboard video card started pumping out corrupted pixels. My suspicion that my motherboard ate video cards was correct. In fact, its appetite for video cards was so voracious, it ate itself.

Okay, so here are the options I've been able to come up with so far.

1. Feed the computer video cards.
2. Replace just the motherboard.
3. Replace the entire computer.

The first option is out because the rate of consumption appears to be one video card per month, which is a rather expensive diet.

The second option is a possibility, but the computer was purchased pre-assembled from a name-brand manufacturer, so the odds of finding a motherboard that exactly fits into the original case are pretty slim. I'll probably have to move everything to a new case.

The third option is the lazy way out, and is in fact the solution employed by most non-technical users.

For now I'm going to investigate option two. I'll have to take the computer apart to get at the motherboard anyway, and then I can investigate what type of replacement I need to get. (In terms of socketry and stuff.) Though who knows how long it will be before I actually get around to fixing the computer.

Meanwhile, my laptop which was manufactured back in 2000 continues to chug along happily.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/05/14/8502228.aspx

When the Internet Explorer folks announced that they were going to call their next version of Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, many people responded to the awkward name by suggesting that it be shortened to Internet Explorer 7 XP and Internet Explorer 7 Vista. Why the longer names?

Lawyers.

Microsoft's own trademark guidelines† specify that the product names are Windows XP and Windows Vista and not just XP and Vista. The trademark is on the entire phrase, not just the last word. Furthermore, the trademark guidelines specify that products may not append just XP or Vista to their names; they have to say X for Windows XP or X for Windows Vista.

In an earlier era, you had to be careful to say Windows NT and not just NT for the same reason. You see, the name NT is a registered trademark of Northern Telecom, and part of the agreement with "the other NT" is that the Windows product would always be used with the word Windows in front.

If you took a close look at the Windows 2000 box, you may have seen the phrase "Built on NT Technology." I don't know how hard it was to do, but I suspect a good amount of negotiations with Northern Telecom took place to allow Microsoft to use that alternate formulation without the word Windows in front. Indeed, if you looked really closely at the box, you'd have found a trademark acknowledgement for Northern Telecom deep in the fine print.

Lawyers by training are very cautious people. After all, a new lawsuit against Microsoft gets filed approximately once every thirty seconds.¶ They're probably also responsible for all your Office# shortcuts on the Start menu being named Microsoft Office This 2007 and Microsoft Office That 2007 instead of This 2007 and That 2007, or even (shocking!) just This and That. It's a daring move, and lawyers don't like to be daring. Nobody ever got sued for playing it safe.††

Nitpicker's corner (guest appearance)

*Just burning off a footnote marker because I don't like asterisks.

†I myself violate some of these guidelines because I try to write like a human being and not a robot. Only robots say Windows-based programs.‡

‡That statement is not literally true. Here's a reformulation of that statement for the benefit of robots:§ "People who say Windows-based programs sound like robots."

§That statement is also not literally true. Here's a reformulation of that statement for the benefit of people who take a robotic approach to reading: "Here's a reformulation of that statement for the benefit of people who take a robotic approach to reading:"

||Burning off another footnote marker because I don't like parallel lines either.

¶An exaggeration, not a statement of fact.

#s/Office/Microsoft® Office™ System/**

**I have not researched whether that's the correct way of writing it.

††Okay, maybe somebody somewhere has gotten sued for playing it safe. It was just a catchy sentence, not a statement of fact.

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944119-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9944119-37.html

jwz

This reminds me of the "censorship" pixelization code in The Sims that prevents you from ever seeing their little 1×2-pixel SimRogenous zones. (Don Hopkins once told me a long story about how hard that was to implement...)

There are also now Wikipedia links in the maps (checkbox on the "More" tab). There aren't very many of them, though. Anyone know what triggers their presence?

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943945-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1040_3-0-5

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943945-7.html

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/the_ethics_of_v.html

The standard way to take control of someone else's computer is by exploiting a vulnerability in a software program on it. This was true in the 1960s when buffer overflows were first exploited to attack computers. It was true in 1988 when the Morris worm exploited a Unix vulnerability to attack computers on the Internet, and it's still how most modern malware works.

Vulnerabilities are software mistakes--mistakes in specification and design, but mostly mistakes in programming. Any large software package will have thousands of mistakes. These vulnerabilities lie dormant in our software systems, waiting to be discovered. Once dis