A mathematician at the University of Central Missouri has discovered what is now the largest known prime number — one with more than 17 million digits.
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Largest known prime number – 17M digits long – discovered
Posted by Gsurface
on February 6, 2013
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First Known ‘Social Chromosome’ Found
Posted by Gsurface
on January 17, 2013
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sciencehabit writes “To humans, all fire ants may look alike. But the tiny, red, stinging bugs known as Solenopsis invicta have two types of social organization, and these factions are as recognizable to the ants as rival football teams are to us. Researchers once thought that the groups’ distinct physiological and behavioral profiles stemmed from a variant in a single gene. Now, a new study provides the first evidence that the gene in question is bound up in a bundle of some 600 other genes, versions of which are all inherited together. This ‘supergene’ takes up a large chunk of what may be the first known social chromosome, analogous to the chromosomes that determine sex in humans.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Alt-week 12.08.12: The oldest known dinosaur, lighting up a space station and the black marble
Posted by Gsurface
on December 8, 2012
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Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
While some refer to it as a lonely planet, we prefer to think of it as unique. Where else can you find such diverse biology that dates back millions of years, that also has a space station hovering delicately above it. A planet where several millennia of human evolution gave birth to the comedy animated gif? Precisely. One of a kind. This is alt-week.
The Earliest Known Dino?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 5, 2012
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sciencehabit writes “A team of paleontologists thinks it may have identified the earliest known dinosaur — a creature no bigger than a Labrador retriever that lived about 243 million years ago. That’s at least 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinos and could change researchers’ views of how they evolved. But some scientists, including the study’s authors, caution that the fossils could instead represent a close dino relative.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA Discovers Most Distant Galaxy In Known Universe
Posted by Gsurface
on November 18, 2012
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An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from cbc.ca: “‘NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes (not to be outdone by the Kepler Space Telescope) have discovered the most distant galaxy identified so far in the universe… the galaxy is 13.3 billion light years away and only a tiny fraction of the size of the Milky Way. Due to the time it takes light to travel through space, the images seen from Earth now show what the galaxy looked like when the universe was just 420 million years old, according to a press statement released from NASA. The newly discovered galaxy (is) named MACS0647-JD.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yes, Apple Is In Discussions With Cable Operators, And Everyone Has Known This For Months
Posted by Gsurface
on August 16, 2012
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August Journalism, anyone? Just because some outlets have a short memory, let’s get this out of the way right up front: Yes, Apple is in discussions with cable operators, and has been for months. Of course, just because Apple’s strategy hasn’t actually changed recently won’t stop some other sites from acting like the heavens have opened up and Steve Jobs himself is negotiating these deals.*
Anyway, just to bring everyone up to speed about why I’m even writing this today: The latest non-news in the Apple TV saga comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that Apple is “is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators” about getting them to deliver live TV through one of its products — maybe a next-generation set-top box or even (gasp!) a TV.
TechCrunch
You Can’t Bypass the UI Formerly Known As Metro On Windows 8
Posted by Gsurface
on August 11, 2012
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colinneagle writes with this excerpt from Network World: “The final build of Windows 8 has already leaked to torrent sites, which is giving the propellerheads a chance to dig through the code. One revelation will probably not sit well with enterprise customers: you can’t bypass the don’t-call-it-Metro UI. Normally, you have to boot Windows 8 and when the tiled desktop UI (formerly known as Metro) came up, you had to click on one of the boxes to launch Explorer. Prior builds of Windows 8 allowed the user to create a shortcut so you bypass Metro and go straight to the Explorer desktop. Rafael Rivera, co-author of the forthcoming Windows 8 Secrets, confirmed to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet that Microsoft does indeed block the boot bypass routine from prior builds. He also believes that Microsoft has blocked the ability for administrators to use Group Policy to allow users to bypass the tiled startup screen. There had been hope that Microsoft would at least relent and let corporate users have a bypass, if only for compatibility’s sake.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Archaeologists Find Oldest Known Mayan Calendar
Posted by Gsurface
on May 11, 2012
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sciencehabit writes “A team of American researchers has discovered a small trove of ancient Mayan texts in a surprising place. In a paper published online today in Science, researchers report finding Mayan astronomical tables and other texts painted and incised on the walls of a 1200-year-old residential building at the site of Xultún in Guatemala. The newly discovered astronomical tables are at least 500 years older than those preserved in the Maya codices, giving researchers a new glimpse of science at the height of the Maya civilization. ‘I think we are all astonished by this find,’ says Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University who was not part of the team.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Largest known crocodile likely ate early man
Posted by Gsurface
on May 9, 2012
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Mysterious animal-shaped structures are oldest known
Posted by Gsurface
on April 1, 2012
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Well who’d have known?!
Posted by Gsurface
on September 17, 2011
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submitted by miso-soupy to reddit.com
[link] [567 comments]
reddit: the front page of the internet
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/sWhO4.jpg){kind=link}
TIL Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of LSD, lived to be 102 years old and continued to say he believed in the therapeutic benefits of LSD up until his death.
Posted by Gsurface
on September 14, 2011
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