By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's google-docs-for-the-rest-of-us department:
oever (233119) writes with news that WebODF (an
Open Document Format editor written entirely using Javascript and natively rendering the XML document using CSS) 0.5.0 has been released, and the developers are declaring this release stable enough for every day use.
TheMukt chides Google for not supporting the OpenDocument Format well and claims that the newly released WebODF 0.5.0 in combination with ownCloud is the answer to this deficiency.
A WebODF developer blog highlights all the goodies in the first WebODF release where the text editor is considered stable and made available as an easy to use component. These include extensive benchmarking, unit testing, and advanced HTML5 techniques to give the editor a native feel.There's also touch screen support, and better support for real-time collaborative editing. A
demo shows off a few of the features.
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By Soulskill from
Slashdot's film-at-never department:
sciencehabit writes:
In North America, they're called Bigfoot or Sasquatch. In the Himalayan foothills, they're known as yeti or abominable snowmen. And Russians call them Almasty. But in the scientific laboratory, these elusive, hairy, humanoid creatures are nothing more than bears, horses, and dogs. That's the conclusion of a new study—the first peer-reviewed, genetic survey of biological samples claimed to be from the shadowy beasts. To identify the evolutionary source of each sample, the team determined the sequence of a gene—found inside the mitochondria of cells—that encodes the 12S RNA, which is often used for species identification. Unlike standard DNA, mitochondrial genes are passed only from mother to offspring.
Seven of the samples didn’t yield enough DNA for identification. Of the 30 that were sequenced, all matched the exact 12S RNA sequences for known species, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Ten hairs belonged to various bear species; four were from horses; four were from wolves or dogs; one was a perfect match to a human hair; and the others came from cows, raccoons, deer, and even a porcupine. Two samples, from India and Bhutan, matched polar bear 12S RNA—a surprising finding that Sykes is following up on to determine whether some Himalayan bears are hybrid species with polar bears.Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's i-don't-need-twitter-on-my-fridge-but-a-smarter-oven-would-be-nice department:
Tekla Perry writes:
We cook our food today using technology invented to bake bricks. We can do a lot better. Nathan Myhrvold explains what's wrong with today's ovens and challenges oven designers make them better. He says, "Oven designers could do a lot to make ovens heat more evenly by taking advantage of the different ways ovens transfer heat at different cooking temperatures. At 200 C or below, convection moves most of the heat. But at 400 C, radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer. At 800 C, radiation overwhelms convection. Why couldn't we have an oven designed to cook primarily by convection at low temperatures that switches to radiant heating for high-temperature baking? ... The shiny skin of raw fish reflects heat, but as the skin browns, it reflects less and less energy. That’s why food under a broiler can seem to cook slowly at first and then burn in the blink of an eye. But technology offers a fix here, too. Oven designers could put optical sensors in the oven chamber to sense the reflectivity of the food, and then the oven controller could adjust the heat automatically or at least alert the cook as the surface browns. And a camera in the oven could feed to a color display on the front panel, giving the chef a clearer view of the food than a small window in the door can. Indeed, a decent optics system could allow designers to dispense with the glass in the door altogether, reducing the gap between the hottest and coolest corners of the oven and obviating the need to open the door and rotate the food midway through cooking.Read Replies (0)
By Roblimo from
Slashdot's an-important-work-that-only-a-few-people-will-ever-care-about department:
The original
Mayday PAC goal was to raise $1 million. Now Larry is working on a second -- and more ambitious -- goal: To raise $5 million by July 4. We
called for your questions on June 23, and you sent a bunch of them. This time, instead of using email, we used Google Hangout to ask via video, with an attached transcript for those who can't or won't watch the video. In today's video, Larry tells us that some of the impetus for Mayday PAC came from the late
Aaron Swartz, and goes deeper into the group's goals and hopes than he did in
yesterday's video. (
Alternate Video Link)
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