Orangeriet i Helsingborgs djurpark brinner. Larmet ska ha inkommit strax före 22-tiden och det är i nuläget oklart om några djur är skadade. En stor räddningsstyrka med tre tankbilar och 25 personer finns på plats enligt hd.se. Orangeriet hyser bland annat en krokodil, spindlar av olika slag liksom fiskar, bland annat pirayor.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, AKA FIRST, holds annual robot challenges, in which student teams build robots, then operate them to the cheers of an adoring crowd. Slashdot watched the Dexter Dreadbots build their 2014 contender. (The Dreadbots are Slashdot's home team.) And we've watched other FIRST competitions before, but this is the 2014 Michigan state championships. The next step after the state finals is an appearance at the National Championship Competition, which starts today, April 23, in St. Louis, although the first day is speeches and such, not actual competition. Keep an eye on usfirst.org to see who wins. And before that, you can watch the matches themselves, streamed live courtesy of NASA. (Alternate video link.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader sends this story from Wired: "The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader sends this story from Wired: "The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Egyptian police brigadier general killed after a bomb explodes under his car, in the fifth targeted attack in a week.

Den tidigare soldaten Bradley Manning, som dömts till ett 35-årigt fängelsestraff i USA för att ha läckt hemliga dokument till Wikileaks, kan nu officiellt kalla sig Chelsea i förnamn. En domstol i delstaten Kansas godkände på onsdagen transexuella Chelsea Mannings förfrågan om att få ändra namn och beaktade därmed hennes begäran om att bli betraktad som kvinna.

Minst fyra människor, varav två poliser, dödades i samband med att en bilbomb exploderade utanför en polisstation i Kenyas huvudstad Nairobi på onsdagen, uppger landets inrikesdepartement. Polisen hade stoppat en personbil vid ett rödljus och tog in personerna i fordonet till förhör när bomben utlöstes.

I was talking with NakedJen today and it occurred to me that she might not know about word wrapping. She was putting hard returns at the end of every line in Fargo. This meant that when she wanted to remove a few words, she had to manually rewrap the lines below. I showed how, if she just continued to type at the end of a line, the computer would do the wrapping for her. It was a revelation! She had been using computers 25 years without knowing they could do this.

When you think about it, it makes sense -- if you learned how to write on a typewriter it might never occur to you. That's how I learned to write, and the early Unix text editors I used couldn't wrap. But the first writing tool I developed on the Apple II did it automatically. I remember the code was hard to write esp on a low-power machine like the Apple II. But I've never even documented the feature it seemed so basic to me.

You might check with friends to be sure they know about word wrap. Be sure you know about it.

I was talking with NakedJen today and it occurred to me that she might not know about word wrapping. She was putting hard returns at the end of every line in Fargo. This meant that when she wanted to remove a few words, she had to manually rewrap the lines below. I showed how, if she just continued to type at the end of a line, the computer would do the wrapping for her. It was a revelation! She had been using computers 25 years without knowing they could do this.

When you think about it, it makes sense -- if you learned how to write on a typewriter it might never occur to you. That's how I learned to write, and the early Unix text editors I used couldn't wrap. But the first writing tool I developed on the Apple II did it automatically. I remember the code was hard to write esp on a low-power machine like the Apple II. But I've never even documented the feature it seemed so basic to me.

You might check with friends to be sure they know about word wrap. Be sure you know about it.

Minst fyra människor har dött i samband med att en bilbomb har exploderat utanför en polisstation i Kenyas huvudstad Nairobi, uppger landets inrikesdepartement.

Minst fyra människor har dött i samband med att en bilbomb har exploderat utanför en polisstation i Kenyas huvudstad Nairobi, uppger landets inrikesdepartement.

Partikamrater och representanter från andra partier tar avstånd från Lennart Holmlunds (S) uttalande om tiggare i sin blogg, som under onsdagen väckte starka reaktioner.