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mendax writes:

The New York Times published a story about a close encounter Mars will have with comet Siding Spring—and the equipment on the surface of and in orbit of the red planet:

The comet was well beyond Jupiter when [it was first sighted], but ... so-called comet modelers were nonetheless able to predict its 125,000-mile-per-hour path into the inner solar system. To their surprise and consternation, it appeared to be heading straight for Mars, and some of their most precious equipment.

Comet trajectories are notoriously changeable, and more recent projections suggest the comet, named Siding Spring, is highly unlikely to strike the planet or to do much damage to the two NASA rovers on its surface or the five research satellites orbiting it.

Still, on Oct. 19, the comet is expected to pass within 82,000 miles of Mars, a stone’s throw in astronomical terms — one-third the distance between Earth and the moon, and much closer to Mars than any comet has come to Earth in recorded history.

The dust, water vapor and other gases spewed by a comet can spread for tens of thousands of miles, so the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere are expected to be showered by Siding Spring — perhaps briefly, perhaps more extensively. Shock waves may rock the atmosphere.

The sweet thing about this cometary encounter is this:

The satellites and rovers — along with ground and space observatories such as the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes — will offer a front-row seat to the event, which may provide important images and science for days.

We may be in for some very interesting pictures in the next few days and weeks, folks!

kaszz writes:

The battery uses a radioactive isotope Strontium-90 to produce energetic particles that boost electrochemcial energy in a water based solution with a nanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO2) electrode with a platinum coating that collect and effectively directly convert the energy into electrons. The ionic solution is not easily frozen at very low temperatures. Beta particles produce electron-hole pairs in semiconductors via their loss of kinetic energy which contributes electrical energy.

The problem so far with solid beta decay battery design has been the serious radiation damage to the semiconductor lattice structures. The major benefit of utilizing a liquid-phase material is it's well known ability to efficiently absorb the kinetic energy of beta particles. The fluid absorbs the energy and passes much of it to the semiconductor. The radiation generated free radicals produced can be converted into electricity by using a plasmon-assisted, wide band gap oxide semiconducting material. Strontium 90 has a half life of 28.79 years and the maximum energy conversion efficiency of the battery is approximately estimated to be 53.88%.

There's also a publication in Nature called "Plasmon-assisted radiolytic energy conversion in aqueous solutions".

gewg_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

Nintendo: It protects what it believes it owns with great vigor. The company has rarely missed an opportunity to make sure that other people are not allowed to alter or mess with the stuff Nintendo insists is Nintendo's. In an apparent effort to maximize the irony combo-meter, Nintendo also has been known to make sure that customers don't mess with or alter the properties those customers actually own, such as online support for games that Nintendo decided to alter long after purchase... just because.

But the cold grip of Nintendo's control over its customers' property is apparently no longer limited to games. Nintendo recently released an update for the Wii U that forces you to "agree" to a new end-user license agreement, or else it simply [locks up] the console altogether.

This is how Nintendo's update to its end-user license agreement (EULA) for the Wii U works, as described by YouTube user "AMurder0fCrows" in this video. He didn't like the terms of Nintendo's updated EULA and refused to agree. He may have expected that, like users of the original Wii and other gaming consoles, he would have the option to refuse software or EULA updates and continue to use his device as he always had before. He might have to give up online access, or some new functionality, but that would be his choice. That's a natural consumer expectation in the gaming context--but it didn't apply this time. Instead, according to his video, the Wii U provides no option to decline the update, and blocks any attempt to access games or saved information by redirecting the user to the new EULA. The only way to regain the use of the device is to click "Agree."

gewg_ objects to the use of "brick" to describe something that can be set right with a software tweak and does not require soldering equipment to correct the condition.

AnonTechie writes:

Silicon Valley just won a major victory in the war over patents.

On Thursday, the White House announced that it has nominated former Google patent lawyer Michelle Lee as the next director of the USPTO. Lee, who holds a master’s degree from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and a JD from Stanford Law School, has served as acting director of the office since she was appointed deputy director last year. If approved by the Senate, Lee will be the first woman to officially hold the USPTO’s top position, according to The Hill.

The nomination could signal the end of a nearly two year political struggle between the technology and pharmaceutical sectors over the directorship of the USPTO. The technology industry, plagued by “patent trolls”—companies that acquire patents for the sole purpose of suing others—has been fighting to reform the patent system for years. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has generally sought to preserve the status quo.

gewg_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

The impact of the Supreme Court's ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank continues to reverberate around the industry. We've already noted that courts have been rapidly invalidating a bunch of patents, and that related lawsuits appear to be dropping rapidly as well. And, now, a new analysis from a (pro-patent) law firm suggests that the US Patent Office is rejecting a lot more software patents as well.

Following the ruling, the US Patent Office issued new rules (PDF) for examiners, and even withdrew some notices of allowances. And it appears all of this is having an impact. The link above is Vox summarizing some findings from patent lawyer Kate Gaudry of law firm Kilpatrick Townsend, who argues that the data suggests the USPTO is rejecting software patents at a much higher rate. In short, back in January, art units at the USPTO rejected applications based on Section 101 of US Patent law only about 24% of the time. Section 101 covers what is patent eligible, and was the key part in the decision in the Alice case. Effectively, in the Alice ruling, the Supreme Court said that just doing something on a generic computer wasn't patent eligible under Section 101. Following that ruling, in July, the rejection rate jumped to 78%. Yes, from 24% in January to 78% in June. That's massive. The data also shows that units that focus on "other kinds of technology saw little change in their rejection rates."

lhsi writes:

http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/10/119431/sugared-soda-consumption-cell-aging-associated-new-study
Abstract: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302151

Consumption of sugar-sweetened soda is associated with shorter telomers in white blood cells, according to a new study, which could promote disease. From the article (causation bit highlighted to avoid redundant comments):

Not mentioned in the press release, but in the abstract, was that 100% fruit juice was marginally associated with longer telomeres.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html

A Debian developer submitted a general resolution on Thursday to re-open the systemd discussion. After getting the required number of seconds, the resolution entered the 2-week discussion period.

Debian's code freeze for the next stable release was scheduled for November 5th, so if the resolution passes, the freeze could be delayed.

The rational for this general resolution (GR) is: [continued after the break.]

carguy writes:

Novel new way to generate electricity from wind. It's very low power—this isn't going to replace wind turbines. But it might find a niche for powering remote telecom or LED lighting. From Nature, http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140923/ncomms5929/full/ncomms5929.html

The triboelectric effect (which is also known as triboelectric charging) is a type of contact electrification in which certain materials become electrically charged after they come into frictive contact with a different material.

This link shows a prototype with video of the flapping "flags" mounted on a car for testing (*not* intended to power the car...): http://txchnologist.com/post/98237458365/cars-rooftop-device-makes-electricity-from-rushing

AnonTechie writes:

No tool in existence protects your anonymity on the Web better than the software Tor, which encrypts Internet traffic and bounces it through random computers around the world. But for guarding anything other than Web browsing, Tor has required a mixture of finicky technical setup and software tweaks. Now routing all your traffic through Tor may be as simple as putting a portable hardware condom on your ethernet cable.

Today a group of privacy-focused developers plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Anonabox. The $45 open-source router automatically directs all data that connects to it by ethernet or Wifi through the Tor network, hiding the user’s IP address and skirting censorship. It’s also small enough to hide two in a pack of cigarettes. Anonabox’s tiny size means users can carry the device with them anywhere, plugging it into an office ethernet cable to do sensitive work or in a cybercafe in China to evade the Great Firewall. The result, if Anonabox fulfills its security promises, is that it could become significantly easier to anonymize all your traffic with Tor—not just Web browsing, but email, instant messaging, file sharing and all the other miscellaneous digital exhaust that your computer leaves behind online. http://www.wired.com/2014/10/tiny-box-can-anonymize-everything-online/

Subsequent to the posting of the Wired article, some critics on Reddit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/2j9caq/anonabox_tor_router_box_is_false_representation/ ) have called attention to Germar’s misrepresentation of the “custom” hardware board and plastic case used for the device. They point to stock devices available on Alibaba from Chinese suppliers that appear to be nearly identical. In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers, a partial reversal of how he initially described it to WIRED.

UPDATE: This project has been pulled from kickstarter. Details at: http://hackaday.com/2014/10/17/anonabox-how-to-fail-horribly-at-kickstarter/ and http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/kickstarter-pulls-anonabox-a-tor-enabled-router-that-raised-over-585000/

and, according to Ars:

Redditors and others discovered that there was a hashed root password installed on all Anonaboxes—that password was cracked, and found to be “developer!” an obviously weak password. When asked about the password, Germar responded, "There was no way to log in from the outside anyway, you'd need physical access to the device anyway."

cafebabe writes:

There is a thriving market of Ebola tshirts, bumper stickers and plushies. With the success of various Cthulhu plushies and Dalmutations, it comes as little surprise that a line of microbe plushies (including a Lyme disease plushie, a chlamydia plushie and a bone cell oestocyte plushie) now includes an Ebola plushie.

In a slightly less tasteful matter, the steward of "disease domains" such as h1n1.com, birdflu.com, chikungunya.com, potassiumiodide.com, fukushima.com and terror.com bought the rights to ebola.com for US$13,000 in 2008 and is now selling them for US$150,000.

Hugh Pickens writes:

There has long been a clear hierarchy of intelligence in the psychology lab with monkeys are at the top, then rats, and finally mice at the bottom, "cute and fluffy but not all that bright." For at least a hundred years researchers have used rats in their psychology experiments, assuming that they were the smarter of the two lab rodents but now Rose Eveleth reports at The Atlantic that new research shows that that might not be true and that mice can perform decision-making tasks in the lab just as well as rats can. "Anything we could train a rat to do we could train a mouse to do as well," says Tony Zador. This finding is important because using mice in experiments instead of rats could open up all kinds of new research options. For one thing, scientists have been able to manipulate a mouse’s genome in really useful ways, silencing certain genes to figure out what role they play. There are mouse models for everything from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s. Being able to put those mice through the paces of a psychology experiment could help researchers connect diseases with the behaviors they impact.

So where did this idea that rats are smarter than mice come from, anyway? Zador says it’s a historical bias. “There was 100 years of practice in training rats. And basically when people tried to treat the mice in exactly the way they treated the rats, the rats seemed smarter," says Zador. In other words, "over the course of 100 years people had figured out how to train rats, and that mice aren’t rats.” You might think that mice and rats would be basically the same when it comes to these kinds of things, but Zador points out that mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees split somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago. So it's no surprise that mice behave differently than rats, and that that difference impacts their training in the lab. "The mouse is uniquely placed at the interface between experimental access and behavioral complexity, making it an ideal model for the study of adaptive decision-making. Successful behavioral paradigms, however, rely on targeting designs to the idiosyncrasies of the mouse from the outset, rather than simply assuming that mice are little rats."

lhsi writes:

The BBC is going to publish a list of its articles that have been removed from Google searches as part of a "right to be forgotten" ruling.

mattie_p writes:

Microsoft is best known as the maker of Windows operating system family. As you are aware, it often issues patches to fix issues with its software. You also probably know that Microsoft has to patch its patches frequently.

This week, Microsoft revoked one patch and re-issued another after they caused problems with the patched systems. The ongoing efforts of Microsoft to produce quality code have the expected results, again.

AnonTechie writes:

Letting go of an obsession with net neutrality could free technologists to make online services even better.

Two years ago Mung Chiang, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, believed he could give customers more control. One simple adjustment would clear the way for lots of mobile-phone users to get as much data as they already did, and in some cases even more, on cheaper terms. Carriers could win, too, by nudging customers to reduce peak-period traffic, making some costly network upgrades unnecessary. “We thought we could increase the benefits for everyone,” Chiang recalls.

Chiang’s plan called for the wireless industry to offer its customers the same types of variable pricing that have brought new efficiencies to transportation and utilities. Rates increase during peak periods, when congestion is at its worst; they decrease during slack periods. In the pre-smartphone era, it would have been impossible to advise users ahead of time about a zig or zag in their connectivity charges. Now, it would be straightforward to vary the price of online access depending on congestion and build an app that let bargain hunters shift their activities to cheaper periods, even on a minute-by-minute basis. When prices were high, consumers could put off non-urgent tasks like downloading Facebook posts to read later. Careful users could save a lot of money.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531616/the-right-way-to-fix-the-internet/

martyb writes:

Scientists at University of Cambridge, England report that they have found hidden signatures in the brains of people in a vegetative state (abstract), which point to networks that could support consciousness even when a patient appears to be unconscious and unresponsive. The study could help doctors identify patients who are aware despite being unable to communicate.

Prior research employed fMRI (functional MRI) of patients who were asked to envision playing tennis and revealed that some of the patients had brain activity comparable to that of healthy and conscious adults. Unfortunately, fMRI is relatively expensive and not very commonly available.

These researchers used high-density electroencephalographs (EEG) and a branch of mathematics known as graph theory to study networks of activity in the brains of 32 patients diagnosed as vegetative and minimally conscious and compared them to healthy adults.

The researchers showed that the rich and diversely connected networks that support awareness in the healthy brain are typically — but importantly, not always — impaired in patients in a vegetative state.

The findings could help researchers develop a relatively simple way of identifying which patients might be aware whilst in a vegetative state