FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know
Jood Jod, jrumble disjruntled Tumblr hardlinrs
The internet - and especially the recently-sold content sausage machine Tumblr, epicentre of the animated gif rebirth - is reeling today at the news that when referring to image files formatted as .gifs one should pronounce it "jif".
That's according to no less an authority than Steve Wilhite, the man who invented the Graphics …
EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream
'Disused' animal products ideal for sick, elderly
Brussels-funded boffins say they have hit upon a brilliant method of creating "enriched" ice-cream, fortified with "disused" animal products which are normally thrown away by the meat industry as being unfit for human consumption.
A press release issued by an EU-funded "research media centre" breaks the news of the stunning …
Garden fertilised by Twitter output wins Gold at Chelsea
Larger than the hashtag of my aunt
A garden conceived by an alliance of trick-cyclists, architects and professors of "social computing" - and enabled by the wondrous power of Twitter - has won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show.
This is how the garden goes:
The garden is divided diagonally by an autonomous-panelled screen which separates the planting of …
Global perils of dirt, glaciers and lizardocalypse overblown, say boffins
Another three ways the world isn't ending right now
A trio of new studies out this week have undermined three of the basic ideas underpinning the belief that the world is facing imminent doom as a result of human carbon emissions and perhaps-associated global warming in past decades. It would seem that the menaces of a runaway feedback loop driven by carbon belching from …
Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? NO, actually
Ice sheets DIDN'T melt 3 million years B.C., say boffins
OK, so levels of atmospheric CO2 are rising through 0.0004 (or 400 parts per million) at the moment. Disaster, right? The last time the world saw carbon levels like this, some three million years ago, the mighty ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic had melted from the heat and the seas were 35 metres higher than they are …
Massive EXPLOSION visible to naked eye SEEN ON MOON
Vid 'Equivalent to 5 TONNES of TNT going off', says NASA
Sensational news today from the Moon, as skywatchers say a huge explosion - as bright as a star, and visible from Earth with the naked eye - has been seen on the lunar surface.
"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," splutters Bill Cooke, a top NASA boffin. According to NASA, the …
Your Flying Car? Delayed again, but you WILL get it, says Terrafugia
Analysis And the VTOL hybrid job to follow, promise engineers
Not long ago the famous Massachusetts startup Terrafugia caused something of a stir by releasing details of a new electric hybrid flying-car design, the TF-X - though the company is now very late in delivering even its less-radical Transition design.
The Terrafugia Transition in flight tests accompanied by chase plane …
'Liberator': Proof that you CAN'T make a working gun in a 3D printer
Comment No need to pry this piece of crap out of my fingers
People are missing one important point about the "Liberator" 3D-printed "plastic gun": it isn't any more a gun than any other very short piece of plastic pipe is a "gun".
Parts for the Liberator 3D printed pistol1 You can take my Liberator ... and shove it
Seriously. That's all a Liberator is: a particularly crappy pipe, …
US Army engineer wins Air Assault wings after repairing hi-tech leg twice
Air valve came off on obstacle course
A hard-as-nails engineer has successfully completed the US Army's tough Air Assault school despite twice having to stop and fix breakdowns in his prosthetic leg.
Sergeant Robinson (left), making an effort not to tread on any toes at his graduation from Air Assault school
"A disability is only a disability if you let it hold …
Scramjet X-51 finally goes to HYPER SPEED above Pacific
Success after 3 violent crackups, says report
The US military may have finally achieved its goal of powering a sustained hypersonic flight on relatively ordinary jet fuel, according to a report.
The first X-51A and its booster rocket mounted ready for release from B-52 mothership. Credit: USAF Fourth time lucky, maybe?
Aviation Week says that the fourth and final X-51A …
Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'
Pop bottle top pop blown out of proportion in Florida
Controversial decisions by officials in Florida to arrest, charge and expel from school a teenage girl (and model student) for causing a totally harmless "explosion" by mixing household products in a plastic bottle are attracting widespread condemnation.
Kiera Wilmot, 16, a student at Bartow High School in Florida, is no …
CLIMATE CHANGE forces women into PROSTITUTION - US politicians
Is there anything bad it doesn't cause?
A group of American politicians has introduced a resolution into Congress saying that climate change (among many other bad things it does) forces women into prostitution, and that as a result the USA should use "gender sensitive frameworks" in battling the scourge of global warming.
House Concurrent Resolution 36 of the 113th …
Another negative climate feedback: Warmer plants cool the planet
Tree hugging really does fight global warming
Another powerful negative-feedback mechanism which acts to reduce the effects of global warming has been identified, as scientists say that rising temperatures cause plants to emit higher levels of planet-cooling aerosols.
"Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models," explains Pauli Paasonen …
CURSE you, EINSTEIN! Humanity still chained in relativistic PRISON
'Collapsar jump' from Forever War seemingly not on cards
Disappointing news on the science wires today, as new research indicates that a possible means of subverting the laws of physics to allow interstellar travel apparently doesn't work.
Curses! Can nothing pierce this damned rubber sheet?
As we are told in a new paper just published in hefty boffinry mag Science:
Neutron stars …
Announcement of 'churnalism detector' gets furiously churned
From the secretive mob who gave you the Min of Truth
"Churnalism" - it's terrible stuff, isn't it? When so-called journalists pick up a press release or announcement from an organisation and simply reprocess it (perhaps even cutting and pasting chunks or the whole thing verbatim), adding nothing and doing no useful analysis or investigation before placing it in front of their …
Climate-cooling effect 'stronger than volcanoes' is looking solid
Could be time to massage those hot models again
A newly discovered mechanism for cooling the planet - potentially, according to its discoverers, more significant even than the well-known chilling effects of volcanic eruptions - has now been further investigated.
The mechanism in question is the action of difficult-to-study atmospheric molecules known as "Criegee intermediates …
The fast-growing energy source set to replace oil: Yes, it's COAL
Renewables have had virtually no effect on CO2 emissions
The emergence of renewable power has had essentially no effect on the amount of carbon emissions involved in energy generation, according to a new report.
The new analysis is from the International Energy Agency. According to the IEA:
The Energy Sector Carbon Intensity Index (ESCII) shows how much carbon dioxide is emitted, on …
Cutting CO2 too difficult? Try these 4 simple tricks instead
There ARE other factors, admits Wendy Schmidt statistician
Climate researchers - including one working for Wendy Schmidt, the campaigning wife of Google overlord Eric - have published research suggesting that there are other things apart from cutting CO2 emissions which would help to avoid disastrous rises in sea levels this century.
According to Dr Claudia Tebaldi:
"Without …
Antarctic ice sheet melt 'not that unusual', latest ice core shows
Warm slushy spells like the 1990s have happened before
The latest ice-core analysis from the Antarctic shows that nothing unusual in terms of melting is occurring.
In research published yesterday, a large team of scientists used a deep ice core from the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide to produce records going back some 2,000 years. Their analysis shown that recent melting in that …
Want to know if that hottie has HIV? Put their blood in the DVD player
Crafty boffins hack sitting-room boxes into lab kit
Cunning Swedish boffins have come up with a new use for the cheap technology in optical DVD drives: it can be used to carry out complex biochemical tests, even to the point of detecting HIV in a blood sample.
See? It is basically a DVD player
This isn't hyperbole - an actual DVD player has been converted into a laser scanning …
German boffins aim to burn natural gas - WITHOUT CO2 emissions
Der Flüssigmetall-blasensäulenreaktor kommt
Top boffins based in Germany - including a Nobel Prize laureate - believe they may be able to largely eliminate carbon emissions while nonetheless permitting the human race to use cheap and convenient fossil fuels as much as it likes: and this doesn't involve any tricky and probably expensive capturing of CO2 which must then be …
Google offers Adwords deals - but you can't trust their numbers
A load of balls from Mountain View's maths wizards
Google's Adwords platform has always been something of a mystery, to put it mildly - the only certainty about it is that it makes a lot of money for Google - but nobody has caught it out using numbers which are definitely, verifiably untrue.
Until now.
Simples
An eagle-eyed Reg reader has broken this long run of success. This …
RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'
Per ardua ad ... terra
The Royal Air Force is chuffed this week to announce the graduation of its first class of "remotely piloted air system pilots", who have the job of piloting aircraft they are not actually in.
'Differ only slightly' from the normal ones. Visually, anyway
As regular readers of these pages will know, the RAF (with some …
You know how your energy bills are SO much worse than they were?
Analysis Green.gov: It was gas prices! <Cough>Actuallyitwasmainlyus
The government's Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet - or anyway reduce carbon emissions - and it not only costs …
No, really: Austrians develop hi-tech jewellery made out of concrete
Mmm, darling, it's just so ... grey
A Viennese designer has just snagged a prestigious international award for his new line of jewellery, which uses a new high-tech process to fashion the ornaments out of concrete.
Can it be that I hold here in my mortal hands ... a lump of purest grey?
"Concrete has incredibly beautiful aesthetics. As a material it can do a lot …
Space probe spies MYSTERY 'Cold Spot' in very fabric of cosmos itself
Cosmic soup glow anomaly 'weirder than we ever thought'
Top international boffins poring over a newly-produced sky map of the microwaves released when the entire universe exploded into being out of soup have confessed themselves baffled by a mysterious "cold spot" on the chart whose existence today's science cannot explain.
MYSTERY of the cosmic soup blast shine cold spot enigma …
UK's 'Nobel prize for engineering' given to 'inventors of the interwebs'
Update Nothing more important has been done lately
The would-be British based "Nobel Prize of engineering" - aka the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, whose recipients can be of any nationality - has been awarded for the first time. The winners are described as the "five engineers who created the internet and the World Wide Web".
According to the official announcement: …
Drunk driving: No more dangerous than talking on handsfree mobe
'Should be allowed', advise researchers
Driving with an illegal or almost-illegal level of blood alcohol is often no more dangerous than taking a call using a hands-free device at the wheel, according to new research by scientists in Australia and Spain.
Sumie Leung Shuk Man of Barcelona uni carried out the study in cooperation with colleagues Down Under. He and his …
HEAVILY ARMED SEX CRAZED DOLPHINS on RAMPAGE in Black Sea
Updated Naval cetaceans with guns on heads 'seeking females'
Worrying news today for any Register readers who may be in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, as news has emerged that three elite Ukrainian navy killer dolphins, possibly armed with deadly weapons attached to their heads, have gone absent without leave in the region, apparently intent on nookie.
As all habitués of these pages …
Elon Musk's 'Grasshopper' hover rocket scores another test success
Vid Another hop closer to the reusable-booster future
SpaceX, the radical upstart startup rocket firm helmed by PayPal hecamillionaire and geek visionary Elon Musk, has announced a further successful trial of its hovering "Grasshopper" test vehicle.
According to the company:
On Thursday, March 7, 2013, SpaceX’s Grasshopper doubled its highest leap to date to rise 24 stories or …
Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was HOTTER THAN NOW, without CO2
And yet ... Alexandria was NOT a flooded island. Weird
A new study has confirmed that at the time of the Pharaohs the world's climate was significantly hotter than it now is for thousands of years - and yet the seas don't appear to have risen, nor did the various other doomsday scenarios foretold by climate alarmists take place.
The new research, funded by the US government's …
Strategic SIEGE ROBOTS defeated by 'heavily intoxicated' man, 62
Epic battle in Ohio: Fall of the Machines™
In yet another sign of the continued supremacy - for the moment at least - of humanity over its machines, reports are coming in that a duo of powerful police robots has been bested in combat by an elderly American man who was "heavily intoxicated" at the time after the "strategic" enforcement machines attempted to storm his …
World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done
It's the economy, stupid - and it always was
Seventeen years of continuous surveys covering countries around the world show that people not only do not care about climate change today - understandably prioritising economic misery - they also did not care about climate change even back when times were good.
The new information comes in a study released by the National …
Look out! PEAK WIND is COMING, warns top Harvard physicist
Last out of the windpower future turn out the lights … Oh
The realistic limits on wind power are probably much lower than scientists have suggested, according to new research, so much so that the ability of wind turbines to have any serious impact on energy policy may well be in doubt. Even if money were no object, the human race would hit Peak Wind output at a much lower level than …
Tesla vs Media AGAIN as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway
'Car is shutting down'
Californian electric car maker Tesla Motors - well known for tangling repeatedly with the BBC (and the Register) over coverage of battery vehicles which it did not deem positive enough - is now in a row with the New York Times after one of the paper's journalists wrote a stinging review of its new Model S.
Tesla Model S sports …
British games company says it owns the idea of space marines
Amazon pulls ebook over Games Workshop trademark idiocy
British company Games Workshop, well known for producing tabletop wargames and other products set in various fantasy universes, has claimed that it owns the idea of future space marines and that nobody can write books featuring astro-bootnecks* without its consent.
Last December the company succeeded in getting the novel Spots …
The truth on the Navy carrier debacle? Industry got away with murder
Analysis Sold 'adaptable' ships which couldn't be adapted
The Ministry of Defence is in the pillory again today, being corporately pelted for the recent unedifying sequence of events in which the Coalition government decided in 2010 to fit the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers with catapults - and then abruptly changed its mind in 2012, reverting to the former plan which will see them …
Under cap-and-trade, flying is greener than taking the bus
Don't bother saving 'leccy either: It'll have no effect
Under so-called "cap and trade" schemes designed to reduce carbon emissions, individuals will actually be acting more green-righteously by taking the plane rather than the bus, according to new research.
Dr Grischa Perino of the University of East Anglia uses the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) - a typical cap- …
Is your Surface Pro a bit full? Slot in an SD card, it's not from Apple
Comment iPad a bit full? Bad luck, buy a new one
There's massive internet coverage today of a major "issue" with the forthcoming Microsoft Surface Pro slab, the latest attempt by Redmond to unseat Apple's iPad line from its global tablet throne. It's being widely reported that the Surface Pro arrives with a lot of its onboard storage already full up: but this is a foolish …
Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be FINE
Doubled CO2 means just 1.9°C warming, say Norwegian researchers
New research produced by a Norwegian government project, described as "truly sensational" by independent experts, indicates that humanity's carbon emissions produce far less global warming than had been thought: so much so that there is no danger of producing warming beyond the IPCC upper safe limit of 2°C for many decades.
“In …
Greenland ice SIMPLY WOULD NOT MELT in baking +8°C era 120k years ago
Scratch off yet another IPCC doom warning
Scientists analysing ancient ice samples say that the Greenland ice sheet withstood temperatures much higher than today's for many thousands of years during a period of global warming more than 120,000 years ago, losing just a quarter of its mass. It had been widely suggested - by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change …
Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows
Unable to care or love, claims Swedish trick-cyclist
A study carried out by psychology researchers in Sweden has shown that people who go into engineering are less caring and empathetic than those who enter professions such as medicine.
Trick-cyclist Chato Rasoal and his colleagues determined this by surveying 200 students from six different study programs, using a "well- …
PR people 'put duty to the public ahead of employers' interests'
Says press release based on what PRs said in interviews
Public relations professionals, often thought generally to lie on a spectrum somewhere between Edina Monsoon (Ab Fab) and Malcolm Tucker (The Thick Of It) are actually "fervent about serving the public interest", and typically place their duty to the public above any loyalty to their employers.
We learn this from a press release …
Climate watch: 2012 figures confirm global warming still stalled
'One more year of numbers not significant', says NASA
The two major US temperature databases have released their consolidated results for 2012, and as had been expected, global warming has failed to occur for approximately the fourteenth year running. One of the US agencies downgraded 2012 to tenth-hottest ever: it had been on track to rank as 9th hottest.
The tenth-hottest result …
CIOs: Don't listen to tech vendors on ICT skills, listen to US
Computer Science should count as an actual science
An alliance of CIOs at some of the biggest companies and organisations operating in Britain has issued a call to action, saying that it's time the government stops listening to technology firms on IT issues and starts paying attention to the people that actually use the technology.
A new report from the Education and Skills …
British armed forces get first new pistol since World War II
Finally catch up with US drug dealers of the 1990s
The British regular forces are to receive their first new pistol since World War II, as the long-serving Browning 9mm sidearm is replaced by a new weapon from the well-known Austrian firm Glock.
Out with the old, in with the new
The new pistol is the Glock 17 Gen4, which fires the same NATO standard 9x19mm cartridge as its …
Drop that can of sweet pop and grab a coffee - for your sanity's sake
Tinned 'diet' swill will send you INSANE
Further proof - were it necessary - that strong unsweetened coffee is the only correct workplace beverage and that sickly imitation pop is the devil's own satanic brew has emerged this week. Boffins in the States have confirmed that sweetened and "diet" drinks are associated with a significantly heightened risk of mental illness …
First rigid airship since the Hindenburg enters trials
New tech may have solved zeppelins' great weakness
The first rigid airship to be built since the 1930s is about to commence trials in California: and the Pelican prototype also features a new technology, never yet flown, which could finally change things for lighter-than-air craft and see the leviathans of the skies make a serious comeback at last.
The 230ft-long, 18-ton …
Dawn of the X-Men? MUTANTS swarm AMONG US, say geneticists
Particularly among weirdo Europeans
Humanity has entered a new genetic era, according to a newly published study, with well over half the mutations found having occurred "recently". Potentially troublesome genetic changes are particularly common among those of European heritage compared to those with African forebears, the research shows.
"The recent dramatic …
Global warming still stalled since 1998, WMO Doha figures show
'We're looking into this thing which is NOT HAPPENING'
Figures released by the UN's World Meteorological Organisation indicate that 2012 is set to be perhaps the ninth hottest globally since records began - but that planetary warming, which effectively stalled around 1998, has yet to resume at the levels seen in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The WMO figures are produced by averaging …
