Space anemia is tied to being in the void and can stick around awhile

Space isn’t easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable—the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density, thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE, which stands for space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity fields, and hostile and closed environments.

New research adds to the worries by describing how being in space destroys your blood. Or rather, something about space—and we don’t know what just yet—causes the human body to perform hemolysis at a higher rate than back on Earth. Read more…

Computer Life at 800MHz

Using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to care about every bit of weight we add to our bag when we leave home, so that’s a big deal! One catch: the Intel Atom inside hits a peak speed of 1.33GHz, with a normal speed of 800MHz under most thermal conditions. Oh yeah and there’s only 2GB of DDR2, GPU drivers don’t work in Linux, and it’s a 32 bit processor too did I say one catch I meant four. Read more…

Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?

Memory-mapped (MMAP) file I/O is an OS-provided feature that maps the contents of a file on secondary storage into a program’s address space. The program then accesses pages via pointers as if the file resided entirely in memory. The OS transparently loads pages only when the program references them and automatically evicts pages if memory fills up. Read more…

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