Should Parents Support Teens Who Want To Become Professional Gamers?

A family physician warned about a new problem this week in the New York Times: As a family doctor, I often hear from parents about how their kids push back at any attempt to limit how much time they spend playing video games. The parents will say, it’s after midnight, maybe it’s time to turn off the video game and get…

Will Amazon Poach CS Profs Needed To Produce CS Grads Promised For Amazon HQ2?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: To make good on the proposal that snagged it a share of the Amazon HQ2 prize last year, the State of Virginia pledged to produce an additional 25K-35K grads annually with computer science or closely related degrees. And while university leaders in the Greater Washington DC area appear to be on the same page with Amazon…

A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies

Scientists have uncovered a glitch in a piece of code that could have yielded incorrect results in over 100 published studies that cited the original paper. From a report: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a…

Python Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In Over 100 Published Studies

Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii. An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:
The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged…

Florida Man Arrested For Cutting Electric Scooter Brakes

A man in Florida has been arrested for cutting the brake lines on dozens of public scooters. The man has been identified by police as 59-year-old Randall Thomas Williams of Ford Lauderdale, though a possible motive has not yet been released. The BBC reports: According to Fort Lauderdale police, a surveillance operation was set up over the weekend after more than…

XKCD Author Challenges Serena Williams To Attack A Drone

In just 16 days XKCD author Randall Munroe releases a new book titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He’s just released an excerpt from the chapter “How to Catch a Drone,” in which he actually enlisted the assistance of tennis star Serena Williams. An anonymous reader writes:
Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI…

NASA Made a Rare Flight Right Through a Thundercloud Formed by a Wildfire

For years, Naval Research Laboratory meteorologist David Peterson has been obsessed with one of Earth’s rarest atmospheric spectacles: thunderclouds formed by raging wildfires. Last week, he became one of the only people on Earth to fly straight through one. From a report: Peterson is the lead forecaster for Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ), a joint…

Climate Crisis May Be Increasing Jet Stream Turbulence, Study Finds

The climate crisis could be making transatlantic flights more bumpy, according to research into the impact of global heating on the jet stream. From a report: Jet streams are powerful currents of air at the altitudes which planes fly. They result from the air temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics, and reach speeds of up to 250mph (400kmph). They…

Breakthrough Listen’s new search for alien lasers

For the last few decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused on detecting radio signals. But a new collaboration between Breakthrough Listen and VERITAS will focus on looking for laser-like flashes of light. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/breakthrough-listen-seti-optical-beacons-technosignatures…