Nerd News

Lots of nerd news today, some good, some bad.  First the bad, Francis Crick, the discoverer of the double-helix DNA structure has passed away at 88.  Base10 always admired Crick not only for his tremendous discovery, but also for the fact that he put James Watson's name on their paper.  Watson was a 24 year-old graduate student at the time.  Best story:

After making the discovery, Crick walked into a Cambridge pub and announced that he and Watson had "found the secret of life." But only a few people at the time "even thought it was interesting," Crick once said, and it took years before the groundbreaking discovery was firmly accepted.

 
And then there's bad news for Apple.  Real Networks (which Base10 personally despises and hopes goes out of business--but I digress) released software to allow music to be downloaded from the Real Network Music Store to play on the Apple iPod.  Apple is quite pissed off about this and is exploring its legal options.  An apple spokesman said Real had "the ethics of a hacker."  Base10 thinks that's insulting to hackers everywhere.

And then there's good news for Bill Ruttan.  Ruttan's company has announced that it will make a formal attempt to claim the X-Prize.  SpaceshipOne's maiden flight for the prize will be on September 29.  SpaceshipOne will need to make it's second flight--a condition of the prize--by October 13.  Meanwhile, another organization called the da Vinci Project has stated that they will unveil their balloon launched product in August.  Base10 likes this kind of space race.

Meanwhile in California, scientists have created a synthetic prion--a rogue protein--and then used this prion to give a brain wasting disease to lab mice.  Prions have been linked to Mad Cow Disease and the human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.  Lets hope that this new prion doesn't cause the mice to become murderously violent zombies.

- posted by Base10 @ 6:42 PM