MikeChino sends in this excerpt from Inhabitat: "China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world, and soon that network will be connected all the way to Europe and the UK. With initial negotiations and surveys already complete, China is now making plans to connect its HSR line through 17 other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe in order to connect to the existing infrastructure in the EU. Additional rail lines will also be built into South East Asia as well as Russia, in what will likely become the largest infrastructure project in history." They hope to get it done within 10 years, with China providing the financing in exchange for raw materials, in some cases.

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Bethesda Softworks took advantage of the recent Game Developers Conference to take the wraps off a new game called Hunted: The Demon's Forge that they're partnering with development studio inXile to create. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, though no release window has been set. It's a third-person action game with a swords & sorcery setting, and it features two heroes as they fight their way through monster-filled dungeons. The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen), each controlling one of the heroes. ShackNews summed it up thus: "From what I saw, Hunted rolled up ideas from a number of different games to create its modern reinterpretation of the dungeon crawl. There was the raw action appeal of wading through waves of goblins, spiders, and related denizens. The skill system and weapon upgrades bring in the character development side from a role playing game. And the co-op design with its warrior and archer dynamic introduces the reward of playing together like an MMO."

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superapecommando writes "Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said. The copyright holders, led by Norway's performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge), have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway's supreme court."

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The big theme at Microsoft's MIX10 developer conference today was developing for Windows Phone 7 Series, and key to this was the new Silverlight 4. For the first time, Microsoft showed off third-party applications for the forthcoming phone platform, and talked about how third-party applications integrate with the platform.

Silverlight is becoming increasingly widely available for the browser, with Microsoft claiming 60 percent of all Internet devices now support it (up from 45 percent in October last year). The new version, available as a Release Candidate today with a final version next month, boasts new features to make it more useful for developing both in-browser and standalone applications, including support for microphones and webcams, printing, and the clipboard.

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We’ve featured a lot of cosplayers on this site in the past year or so, but I’m not sure we’ve ever seen one quite like this, which is why she’s getting her own post.

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

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600 Feet Below Antarctic Ice Where Nothing Complex Should Live, NASA Catches A Curious Shrimp

It’s time for America to confront China about the undervaluation of its currency, which is adding to the world’s economic problems.

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Pingping, who was 29 inches tall, was filming a television programme in Italy when he developed chest problems.

Hugh Pickens writes "At the peak of a magnetic storm, the number of highly energetic 'killer electrons' strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue can increase by a factor of more than ten times, posing a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. Killer electrons can penetrate satellite shielding, so if electrical discharges take place in vital components, a satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable. For many years, the mechanism by which killer electrons are produced has remained poorly understood, in spite of physicists' attempts at solving this puzzle. Now the ESA reports that data shows the increase in the creation of a substantial number of killer electrons is due to a two-step process. First, the initial acceleration is due to the strong shock-related magnetic field compression. Immediately after the impact of the interplanetary shock wave, Earth's magnetic field lines began wobbling at ultra low frequencies. In turn, these ULF waves effectively accelerate the seed electrons (provided by the first step) to become killer electrons. 'These new findings help us to improve the models predicting the radiation environment in which satellites and astronauts operate. With solar activity now ramping up, we expect more of these shocks to impact our magnetosphere over the months and years to come,' says Philippe Escoubet, ESA's Cluster mission manager."

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Too often, our precious airwaves are filled with children who scream and give us migraines, precocious kids who try too hard to be cute, spoiled rich teenagers and temper-tantrum-throwing brats who make us want to seriously reconsider ever procreating. These 10, we'd actually consider spending time with.

Scientists revealed Sunday for the first time how some snakes can detect the faint body heat exuded by a mouse a metre (three feet) away with enough precision and speed to hunt in the dark.

With allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests piling up in Germany and Ireland and surfacing in Austria and the Netherlands, Europe appears poised to face church abuse in the broad, wrenching way the United States did in the last decade.

Scientists are quickly putting the single-qubit system out of fashion with new setups that can simultaneously manipulate and read multiple qubits. An international collaboration recently completed an experiment involving the control of up to ten qubits at once, using hyper-entanglement and simple "cat states." While the system doesn't always read out perfectly, the approach could be further refined to produce better results.

Because qubit behavior is based in probability, it is difficult to exert a lot of control over a qubit. This problem gets a bit more significant as each additional qubit is added to the system, which has limited the number we can entangle at once. To hold down uncertainty and increase control as they add more qubits, scientists are now experimenting with hyper-entanglement, or entangling qubits on multiple levels at once. To put that another way, instead of entangling 10 different quantum objects, the authors entangled two separate properties of five items.

In this new experiment, scientists hyper-entangled sets of six, eight, and ten qubits in "cat states," or an equal superposition of two states (named after Schrodinger's cat, which occupied a superposition of the states "dead" or "alive"). The photons were entangled in two degrees of freedom: their polarization and their spatial modes. To get output from the photons once they were entangled, scientists used a special kind of interferometer that could gather information about one of the degrees of freedom without disturbing the other.

When the photons were measured, the photons produced the desired state around 60 percent of the time, with anything greater than 50% considered to be good enough to indicate that the system works at all. The eight-qubit system gave the best results, at 77.6 percent. The greatest limit of the system, according to the authors, was the photon detection efficiency, which will need to be significantly improved before implementation would be practical.

(Incidentally, the references to cat states start in the title—"Experimental demonstration of a hyper-entangled ten-qubit Schrödinger cat state"—and continue from there, with references to "ideal cat states" and "the hyper-entangled 2n-qubit cat state." "Cat" even appears as a term in some equations.

Nature Physics, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1603  (About DOIs).

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This map (infographic) shows when and where you can watch every eclipse in the next fifteen years.

Two weeks ago when Buddy Roark bought a brand-new HTC Eris smartphone from Verizon, his first Android device, it was a big step up from his feature phone.

Photographer Jon Beard, who normally photographs broken light bulbs at the exact moment the filament burns altered this still because, "What can I say? I grew up gaming and learned that if you break enough objects you'll eventually find one of these. Lesson reinforced." Check out the rest of his amazing photographs.

CWmike writes "Nokia asked a federal judge last week to toss out Apple's antitrust claims, saying the iPhone maker indulged in 'legal alchemy' when it tried to divert attention from its infringement of Nokia's intellectual property. The filing was the latest salvo in a battle that began in October 2009 when handset maker Nokia sued Apple, saying the iPhone infringed on 10 of its patents, and that Apple was trying 'to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation.' Apple countered in December with a lawsuit of its own that not only claimed Nokia infringed 13 of its patents, but that Nokia also violated antitrust law by legally attacking Apple after it declined to pay what it called 'exorbitant royalties' and refused to give Nokia access to iPhone patents. 'These non-patent counterclaims are designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia's intellectual property, a practice Apple evidently believes should only be of paramount concern when it is the alleged victim,' Nokia charged in the motion. Apple is on a legal roll, having also recently sued the maker of Google's Nexus One, HTC, for patent infringement."

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Two Britons have been sentenced to a month's imprisonment for indecency after a local woman took objection to them kissing in a restaurant.