Sexy Jihad

It seems that some cavers have gone deeper than any (wo)man has gone before. This by travesing the unkown depths of Krubera in Abkhazia, Georgia. Excerpt:
A Ukrainian team has reached a record depth of 2,080m (6,822ft), passing the elusive 2,000m mark at Krubera, the world’s deepest known cave.
The nine-strong group were part of a project […]

Slashdot, GeekCoffee and InformatonWeek are all reporting on a new deal between the UAE & IBM to track drivers to monitor speeding. Excerpt:
IBM said it has signed a four-year, $125 million deal to build an automobile-monitoring system and install a device in cars to track drivers in the United Arab Emirates, making it the largest […]

Phys.org reports that scientists have finally managed to freeze light. This by using ultra-cold atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). Excerpt:
This new research could be a major breakthrough in the quest to create super-fast computers that use light instead of electrons to process information. Professor Lene Hau is one of the world’s foremost authorities on “slow […]

It’s now possible to upload videos to Googles Video Service. For those of you who have been living in a cave these past few weeks, here’s an excerpt:
# What is Google Video?
Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Currently, Google Video lets you search a growing […]

Good news for all of us wanting to live in a free virtual world. Eweek reports that SCO’s revenue is continuing to decline. Excerpt:

The SCO Group Inc. has been locked in battles with IBM and other companies over its Unix intellectual property rights, whether any of its Unix code has been stolen into the popular […]

The BBC is reporting that Saudi Arabia has taken another step towards finally joining the civilised world. Of course, which countries constitute the civilised world is a matter for discussion (For all you people that assume the west, I suggest you watch the news some time). Anyway, an excerpt:

Saudi Arabia’s top religious authority has banned […]

The BBC reports that the japanese are devloping ingenious ways to keep old people happy:

By 2050, the over 65s in Japan are expected to make up a third of the population… and it’s likely that technology will be relied upon to help look after them.
…..
Akino has been introduced to Primo Puel, an interactive doll that […]

The BBC reports that some morons have started a hacking school in Barcelona:
Barcelona is home to an innovative new project designed to combat hacking.
The Hacker High School is at the University of La Salle, in the same department that churns out some of the best of Barcelona’s designers.
The scheme is not the “devil’s workshop” it […]

The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season.

The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races.

Officials say a prototype of the robot was successfully tested on Saturday.

Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia.

The issue of child camel jockeys has been an embarrassing one for the Emirates, says the BBC’s Gulf correspondent Julia Wheeler.

Camel racing is one of the UAE’s traditional sports and an important part of the region’s heritage.

Ramanujan noticed that whole numbers can be broken into sums of smaller numbers, called partitions. The number 4, for example, contains five partitions: 4, 3+1, 2+2, 1+1+2, and 1+1+1+1.

He further realised that curious patterns - called congruences - occurred for some numbers in that the number of partitions was divisible by 5, 7, and 11. For example, the number of partitions for any number ending in 4 or 9 is divisible by 5.

“But in some sense, no one understood why you could divide the partitions of 4 or 9 into five equal groups,” says George Andrews, a mathematician at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US. That changed in the 1940s, when physicist Freeman Dyson discovered a rule, called a “rank”, explaining the congruences for 5 and 7. That set off a concerted search for a rule that covered 11 as well - a solution called the “crank” that Andrews and colleague Frank Garvan of the University of Florida, US, helped deduce in the 1980s.