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takyon writes:

In a Dec. 15 presentation at the 2014 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, Silicon Valley start-up Crossbar said that it has solved a major hurdle towards commercialization of its 3D/vertical resistive random-access memory (RRAM) product.

While 1TnR enables a single transistor to drive over 2,000 memory cells with very low power, it also experiences leakage of a sneak path current that interferes with the performance and reliability of a typical RRAM array. Crossbar's device solves that leakage problem by utilizing a super linear threshold layer. In that layer, a volatile conduction path is formed at the threshold voltage. This device is the industry's first selector capable of suppressing the leakage current at very small dimensions, and it has been successfully demonstrated in a four-megabit test memory chip.

Crossbar has previously made a number of bold claims about their potential NAND flash replacement: that it can fit 1 terabyte in an area the size of a postage stamp, while allowing 20x faster writes than NAND using 5% as much energy. Crossbar also claims 100,000 write cycles compared to NAND's 3,000-10,000. NAND endurance scaling issues have led Samsung, Hynix, SanDisk and Micron to pursue vertical-NAND in order to boost capacity and prolong endurance. Samsung has already commercialized V-NAND with the 850 EVO and 850 Pro SSD lines. Crossbar expects to produce RRAM for wearable devices starting in 2016, with RRAM-based SSDs appearing 18 months later.

In a related development also presented at IEDM, engineers at Stanford University have built a "four-layer prototype high-rise chip" using carbon nanotube transistors (CNTs) and RRAM. The researchers developed a new technique that transfers CNTs from a quartz growth medium to a silicon wafer using an adhesive metal film, "achieving some of the highest density, highest performance CNTs ever made." They fabricated RRAM layers directly atop each CNT logic layer while drilling thousands of interconnections between the layers.

sudo rm -rf writes:

The European Space Agency ESA reports:

[On December 16th,] ESA’s Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life. The spacecraft exhausted its propellant during a series of thruster burns to raise its orbit following the low-altitude aerobraking earlier this year.

The amount of data collected will occupy scientists for at least another eight years:

Studies of the planet’s ‘super-rotating’ atmosphere – it whips around the planet in only four Earth-days, much faster than the 243 days the planet takes to complete one rotation about its axis – also turned up some intriguing surprises. When studying the winds, by tracking clouds in images, average wind speeds were found to have increased from roughly 300 km/h to 400 km/h over a period of six Earth years.
At the same time, a separate study found that the rotation of the planet had slowed by 6.5 minutes since NASA’s Magellan measured it before completing its five-year mission at Venus 20 years ago. However, it remains unknown if there is a direct relationship between the increasing wind speeds and the slowing rotation.

Other data strongly hints to current volcanic activity, whose existence is still disputed today.

Marneus68 writes:

After several release candidates, the MIT licenced game engine Godot has reached Version 1.0. This version is the first stable release of the 2D and 3D game making tool that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux and that can export projects to a lot of different platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Chrome native client, html5...). A more comprehensive list of features can be found here.

The github wiki provides a handful of neat tutorials if you want to get started using the engine. As an extra incentive, a Winter Holiday Godot Game Jam is live if you want to share your creations.

Some additional coverage can be found on Blender Nation.

sigma writes:

Popular Science has noted that downloads of the Robotics Operating System (ROS) doubled in 2014, to 3.5 million, and is predicted to spike again with the release of ROS 2.0 this summer.

ROS is a flexible, open source framework that includes tools, libraries, and conventions for writing robot software, and is rapidly becoming the Android of robotics. It aims to simplify creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms.

A measure of its success can be seen in the fact that three of the most sophisticated robots ever built all run on ROS: NASA’s Robo­naut 2, Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas.

Blackmoore writes:

boing boing reports - On Mars, NASA Rover Discovers Mysterious Methane Emissions

Potentially big news from space today. NASA announces that its Mars Curiosity rover "has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill."

Original papers at NASA

"This temporary increase in methane -- sharply up and then back down -- tells us there must be some relatively localized source," said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team. "There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."

tonyPick writes:

The sad news from Dr Dobb's Journal is that it is being closed at the end of this year or, more accurately, "Sunset":

Our parent company, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset Dr. Dobb's. "Sunset" sounds like a marketing euphemism to avoid saying "closing down," but in this context, it has a specific meaning that "closing" does not convey. That is, that there will be no new content after year end; however, all current content will be accessible and links to existing Dr. Dobb's articles will continue to work correctly. It is the equivalent of a product coming to end of life. It still runs, but no new features will be added.

Although Dr Dobb's has consistently delivered extremely high quality content for programmers, it sounds like it is a victim in the decline in web advertising. Going into the reasons for the closure:

In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small.

(Additional background on Dr Dobb's is at wikipedia, if you need it.)

Spotted via Hacker News.

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica - Ars was Briefly Hacked Yesterday

At 20:00 CT on December 14, an Internet intruder gained access to one of the Ars Web servers and spent the next hour attempting to get from the Web server to a more central machine. At 20:52, the attempt was successful thanks to information gleaned from a poorly located backup file. The next day, at 14:13, the hacker returned to the central server and replaced the main Ars webpage with a defacement page that streamed a song from the band Dual Core.

In additon, juggs writes:

Given there may be some crossover between the Ars Technica community and SN, just a brief note to highlight this piece:

Log files show the hacker's movements through our servers and suggest that he or she had the opportunity to copy the user database. This database contains no payment information on Ars subscribers, but it does contain user e-mail addresses and passwords. Those passwords, however, are stored in hashed form (using 2,048 iterations of the MD5 algorithm and salted with a random series of characters).

Out of an excess of caution, we strongly encourage all Ars readers—especially any who have reused their Ars passwords on other, more sensitive sites—to change their passwords today.

Just a heads up for infrequent Ars visitors that may have an account there.

SpaceMan writes:

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/newsentry.php?entry=2014.12.16

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new TDE R14.0.0 release. The Trinity Desktop Environment is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software.

Unlike previous releases TDE R14.0.0 has been in development for over two years. This extended development period has allowed us to create a better, more stable and more feature-rich product than previous TDE releases. R14 is brimming with new features, such as a new hardware manager based on udev (HAL is no longer required), full network-manager 0.9 support, a brand new compositor (compton), built-in threading support, and much more!

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Nearly a year after Colorado's first legal marijuana shops opened, the thriving industry's biggest problem is deciding what to do with all of its cash. Now, the state banking commission believes it has found a way to free pot entrepreneurs from the regulatory haze between federal banking laws, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) policy, and the state's right to experiment with legalization.

The nation's first bank for marijuana pushers, growers, and investors will open in January after Colorado's banking regulators approved a charter for The Fourth Corner Credit Union.

The first-of-its-kind bank will allow state business owners to move away from relying on cash for every transaction. Business has been very good for marijuana sellers since the state's carefully designed legalization regime came online in early 2014, but traditional banks have refused to do business with the industry for fear of inviting punishment from regulators that are required to enforce the federal prohibition on the drug.

[...]Colorado's banking regulators came to view [the problem of mounds of cash] as justification for approving a pot bank. Their rationale hinges on a detail from the Department of Justice's 2013 announcement that prosecutors should scale back prosecutions of marijuana offenses and stop pursuing cases against pot businesses that operate in compliance with their state's drug laws.

edIII writes:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

According to Mr. England life is inevitable property of matter when subjected to the right conditions. It's not invalidating Darwinian evolution, but provides an underlying foundation of how it could start. I must admit I'm quite fascinated by this. If Mr. England can eventually show proof, it might make life a much easier phenomenon to find in our universe.

Article is at Quanta Magazine - A New Physics Theory of Life

Scientific American - A New Physics Theory of Life

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Spain recently revamped its copyright law and the changes take effect (PDF, Spanish) on 1 January. Law-makers threw newspapers a bone: the right to be remunerated by news aggregators.

According to academic Eleonora Rosati, writing at the IP Kat blog, the law is spectacularly clumsy: publishers who want to appear in Google News can't waive the right to a fee.

Google responded that, "as Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable."

[...]Last year, Germany introduced something similar. The "Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverlege" (or "Lex Google") granted publishers an ancillary right in the German Copyright Act that forbade aggregators from displaying excerpts without paying a fee. Google refused, and made the German Google News "opt in" to avoid paying the fee. Some major magazine and newspaper publishers refused, effectively boycotting the service. Then, one by one, they returned. The final hold-out, giant Axel Springer, finally caved in a month ago.

The following day, TechDirt reported

Surprise: Spanish Newspapers Beg Government And EU To Stop Google News Shutting Down

In a move that will surprise no one--except, perhaps, at how little time it took to happen--the newspapers association is now begging the Spanish government to do something about the damage the new law, which the publishers lobbied for, is about to wreak on the newspaper industry.

hemocyanin writes:

I didn't realize that the 4th Amendment coffin could take any more nails, but the Supreme Court has ruled that "A police officer can stop a car based on a mistaken understanding of the law without violating the Fourth Amendment." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/politics/justices-find-no-rights-violation-in-officers-misreading-of-law.html?_r=0 The vote wasn't even close, 8-1. Only Sotomayor dissented. Link to the actual opinion: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-604_ec8f.pdf

From the NYT article:

Chief Justice Roberts conceded that the court’s decision at first blush ran afoul of the maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

On reflection, he said, the maxim holds the government and its citizens to the same standard where it counts.

“Just as an individual generally cannot escape criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “so too the government cannot impose criminal liability based on a mistaken understanding of the law.”

Huh? Either I'm going crazy or words have lost all meaning, because what he just ruled is that cops who don't know the law, make valid arrests because they are mistaken about the law while if in the same circumstance, the cop knew the action was not consistent with law, the arrest would not be valid -- thus ignorance of the law benefits the cops immensely, a real person has been subjected to criminal liability because of this ignorance, and now the law can mean whatever the dude with the badge and gun says.

frojack writes:

ScienceMag has a short report on a new theory presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting that the gullies leading down the slopes of dunes each Martian spring (see image at link) may be caused by surfing chunks of dry ice.

During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide ice freezes over parts of the planet’s surface and sublimates back into a gas during the spring thaw. But according to the model, chunks of warming dry ice may also break off from the crests of dunes and skid down slopes. This is no ordinary tumble; the bases of the chunks are continually sublimating, resulting in a hovercraft-like motion that gouges the dune while propelling the ice down slopes.

This theory explains why no rocks were ever seen at the bottom of the gullies, and no alluvial fan appeared at the bottom. Experiments in similar land forms in Utah show similar patterns of gullies getting smaller as they go down hill.

The presentation took place at the on going Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union and have not been published yet.

Blackmoore writes:

It's a slow news day - and so we're seeing a lot of Gift guides posted on other sites..

But we're not going to give you a gift guide - We'll leave this for everyone to discuss here.

So what are you giving, or what would like to give out this holiday season?


(if you want to gift SoylentNews you can Subscribe here or get some swag at The Soylent News Swag store

frojack writes:

The Register says that for the second year in a row scientists from a variety of fields have joined together to urge the world to embrace nuclear power instead of the single minded focus on renewable energy. Last year the group included four scientists. This year it includes 66 from a far more diverse set of disciplines.

This year's letter pleads with the "green movement" to get over their objections to nuclear power, and face the facts that the "renewables only" approach cannot possibly succeed.

Their open letter reads in part: