benfrog writes "New York City comptroller John Liu has accused HP of overcharging New York City $163 million on upgrades to its 911 system. According to a statement put out by Liu, an audit of the project revealed that HP did not perform up to spec on the contract between April 2005 and April 2008 and did not bill the city correctly for time and materials on its portion of the contract to upgrade the 911 system. According to Liu's reading, the contract was supposed to cost no more than $378 million over five years, but in January the city projected it would have already spent $307m by mid-April and had to award Northrop-Grumman an additional $286m to do a second part of the original contract, ballooning the cost to $632m, and Liu's office is now estimating that cost overruns beyond this could be as high as an additional $362m. NYC's deputy mayor for operations was quoted defending the contract."

miller60 writes "HP Labs is developing a concept for a 'net zero' data center — a facility that combines on-site solar power, fresh air cooling and advanced workload scheduling to operate with no net energy from the utility grid. HP is testing its ideas in a small data center in Palo Alto with a 134kW solar array and four ProLiant servers. The proof-of-concept confronts challenges often seen in solar implementations, including the array's modest capacity and a limited window of generation hours – namely, when the sun shines. HP's approach focuses on boosting server utilization, juggling critical and non-critical loads, and making the most of every hour of solar generation. Can this concept work at scale?"

sciencehabit writes "China and India are some of the world's top polluters, with countless cars, factories, and households belching more than 2 million metric tons of carbon soot and other dark pollutants into the air every year. The pall hanging over the region has come to be known as 'the Asian brown cloud.' These pollutants aren't just bad news for the countries themselves. A new study reveals that they can affect climate thousands of kilometers away, warming the United States by up to 0.4C by 2024, while cooling other regions (abstract)."

benfrog writes "The core of HP's Enyo team (responsible for webOS's HTML5-based app framework) is heading to Google. What they will be doing at Google is unclear right now, but everyone is speculating that they might be active in developing something webOS-based for Android."

1sockchuck writes "Cloud provider Rackspace is looking to the emerging open source hardware ecosystem to transform its data centers. The cloud provider spends $200 million a year on servers and storage, and sees the Open Compute Project as the key to reducing its costs on hardware design and operations. Rackspace is keen on the potential of the new Open Rack program, and its buying power is motivating HP and Dell to develop for the new standard — partly because Rackspace has also been talking with original design manufacturers like Quantra and Wistron. It's an early look at how open source hardware could have a virtuous impact on the server economy. 'I think the OEMs were not very interested (in Open Compute) initially,' said Rackspace COO Mark Roenigk. 'But in the last six months they have become really focused.'"

sciencehabit writes "Peer inside an antique radio and you'll find what look like small light bulbs. They're actually vacuum tubes — the predecessors of the silicon transistor. Vacuum tubes went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1960s, but researchers have now brought them back to life, creating a nano-sized version that's faster and hardier than the transistor (abstract). It's even able to survive the harsh radiation of outer space."

sciencehabit writes "A project to drill deep into the heart of a 'supervolcano' in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep. The project’s organizers originally intended to bore a 4-kilometer-deep well in the area of the caldera late in 2009, but the plan was put on hold by then-mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino after scientists expressed concerns about the risks."

Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times: "China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers." An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.

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."

sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that, by disrupting your body's normal rhythms, your alarm clock could be making you overweight. The study concerns a phenomenon called 'social jetlag.' That's the extent to which our natural sleep patterns are out of synch with our school or work schedules. When we wake up earlier than we're supposed to — or spend all weekend sleeping in and then get up at 6 am on Monday — it makes our body feel like it's spending the weekend in one time zone and the week in another. For people who are already on the heavy side, greater social jet lag corresponds to greater body weight."

sciencehabit writes "Three years ago, a stone-throwing chimpanzee named Santino jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that non-humans could plan ahead. Santino, a resident of the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, calmly gathered stones in the mornings and put them into neat piles, apparently saving them to hurl at visitors when the zoo opened as part of angry and aggressive 'dominance displays.' But some researchers were skeptical that Santino really was planning for a future emotional outburst. Now Santino is back in the scientific literature, the subject of new claims that he has begun to conceal the stones so he can get a closer aim at his targets—further evidence that he is thinking ahead like humans do."

angry tapir writes "HP has unveiled an all-in-one thin client capable of being powered by an Ethernet cable. The t410 AiO supports the Type 1 Power over Ethernet (PoE) standard, which means it is capable of drawing its power from a network connection, although it can be powered by standard AC power. It uses an ARM-based processor and has an integrated 18.5-inch monitor, and it is capable of being used for virtual desktops through Windows RDP, VMware View and Citrix ICA."

sciencehabit writes "Tiny and efficient, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are supposed to be the bright future of illumination. But they perform best at only low power, enough for a flashlight or the screen of your cellphone. If you increase the current enough for them to light a room like an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, their vaunted efficiency nosedives. It's called LED droop, and it's a real drag on the industry. Now, researchers have found a way to build more efficient LEDs that get more kick from the same amount of current—especially in the hard-to-manufacture green and blue parts of the spectrum."

sciencehabit writes "Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus on words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste."

sciencehabit writes "A new study reveals that people who grow up in more rural environments are less likely to develop allergies. The reason may be that environments rich with species harbor more friendly microbes, which colonize our bodies and protect against inflammatory disorders." From the article: "To test whether or not biodiversity does indeed create a shield against such conditions, the team investigated the microbial diversity of 118 teenagers. The study participants, who had lived in the same houses their whole lives, were chosen at random from a 100-by-150-kilometer block in eastern Finland. Some kids lived on rural, isolated farms, while others lived in larger towns. ... surveyed all of the types of plants growing around the adolescents' homes. The participants were part of a separate long-term allergy study, so the researchers took advantage of that data to investigate the connection between biodiversity and allergies. ... Whether there is just something special about Finland's native plants or whether this finding can be applied around the world is still an open question, Hanski says. 'Many research groups worldwide could easily attain these data from their study populations, and then we'd know how general these results might be.'"

sciencehabit writes "A team of researchers has zoomed in on two spots on the body of the Iceman, a mummified, 5300-year-old hunter found frozen in the Alps in 1991: a shoulder wound found with an embedded arrowhead and a hand lesion resembling a stab wound. The scientists used atomic force microscopy, a visualization method with resolution of less than a nanometer, to scan the wounds for blood residue. They discovered red blood cells — the oldest in the world to be found intact — as well as fibrin, a protein needed for blood to clot. The presence of fibrin indicates that the Iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, didn't die immediately after being wounded."

sciencehabit writes "In a world where we've tamed our environment and largely protected ourselves from the vagaries of nature, we may think we're immune to the forces of natural selection. But a new study finds that the process that drives evolution was still shaping us as recently as the 19th century (abstract). 'The finding comes from an analysis of the birth, death, and marital records of 5923 people born between 1760 and 1849 in four farming or fishing villages in Finland. ... Natural selection was alive and well in all of the villages the researchers surveyed."

astroengine writes "There are 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are the same size as our sun. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that astronomers have identified a clone to our sun lying only 200 light-years away. Still, it is fascinating to imagine a yellow dwarf that is exactly the same mass, temperature and chemical composition as our nearest star. In a recent paper reporting on observations of the star — called HP 56948 — astronomer Jorge Melendez of the University of San Paulo, Brazil, calls it 'the best solar twin known to date.' Using HP 56948 as a SETI target seems like a logical step, says Melendez."

sciencehabit writes "Traumatic experiences in early life can leave emotional scars. But a new study suggests that violence in childhood may leave a genetic mark as well. Researchers have found that children who are physically abused and bullied tend to have shorter telomeres — structures at the tips of chromosomes whose shrinkage has been linked to aging and disease."

Eponymous Hero writes "Does dark matter exist or doesn't it? It seems these results don't shed as much light as we'd hoped. 'Moni Bidin says he's not sure whether dark matter exists or not. But he says that his team's survey (PDF) is the most comprehensive of its type ever done, and the puzzling results must be reckoned with. "We don't have a good comprehension of what is going on," he says.' This has the smell of a Neutrinogate scandal, but at least we've been warned about the shoulder shrugging. 'As an example, Newberg notes that the researchers assumed that the group of stars they examined were smoothly distributed above and below the plane of the Milky Way. But if the distribution turns out to be lumpier, as is the case for stars in the outer parts of the galaxy, then the resulting calculations of dark matter density could be incorrect. Flynn agrees that there are a number of ways that the method employed by Moni Bidin and his co-authors "could get it wrong."'"