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AnonTechie writes:

If you throw a gecko at Teflon, will he stick? University of Akron researchers found the answer.

That little lizard that has become so effective selling car insurance - the gecko - can climb across glass windows and across the ceiling. You knew that, right? The science of that ability has intrigued researchers at the University of Akron for several years because it has so much potential for application in such areas as construction materials and medicine. They're so intrigued, they're asking tougher questions of the 50 little lizards kept in two labs at the Auburn Science Center. "OK, buddy, how about this one: Can you walk on Teflon?"

The answer: "Not very well." The popular DuPont nonstick product not only resists cheese omelets, but it also presented a significant challenge to the hairy toes of the gecko.

lhsi writes:

Research has shown that smartphone sensors leave trackable fingerprints. Due to imperfections in the hardware manufacturing process, it is possible to distinguish different devices just from sensor data.

The researchers tested more than 100 devices over the course of nine months: 80 standalone accelerometer chips used in popular smartphones, 25 Android phones and two tablets.

The accelerometers in all permutations were selected from different manufacturers, to ensure that the fingerprints weren't simply defects resulting from a particular production line.

With 96-percent accuracy, the researchers could discriminate one sensor from another.

"We do not need to know any other information about the phone - no phone number or SIM card number," Dey said. "Just by looking at the data, we can tell you which device it's coming from. It's almost like another identifier."

Maybe this explains why Facebook would be interested in a fitness app.

danomac writes:

Apparently a bug in a Microsoft Security Essentials update caused XP computers to bluescreen. After rebooting once updates were installed the XP machines would bluescreen with "MsMpEng.exe application error".

Microsoft has fixed the error by releasing a definitions update for Security Essentials. From the article:

Many point-of-sale systems, which some businesses are protecting using Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) as a way to meet the antivirus requirement of the Payment Card Industry PCI), still use Windows XP or related operating systems, including Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems and Windows Embedded POSReady 2009. Those systems were affected by the update as well, according to one New England value-added reseller with more than 500 clients in the hospitality industry.

Woods writes:

Announced today on StarWars.com:

Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film.

Director J.J. Abrams says, "We are so excited to finally share the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. It is both thrilling and surreal to watch the beloved original cast and these brilliant new performers come together to bring this world to life, once again. We start shooting in a couple of weeks, and everyone is doing their best to make the fans proud."

Star Wars: Episode VII is being directed by J.J. Abrams from a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and Abrams. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, and Bryan Burk are producing, and John Williams returns as the composer. The movie opens worldwide on December 18, 2015.

Second source because StarWars.com seems to be struggling with increased traffic.

lhsi writes:

Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she's pregnant as marketing data for a pregnant woman is particularly sought after by advertisers. She ensured there was no mention on social media, used cash when buying baby related items and even used Tor to browse baby related websites.

Purchases on Amazon were done using gift cards and delivered to nearby lockers, although buying $500 of Amazon gift cards using cash did raise a red flag. When her husband tried to buy the Amazon gift cards with cash in order to get a stroller, a notice at the Rite Aid counter said the company had a legal obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities."Those kinds of activities, when you take them in the aggregate ... are exactly the kinds of things that tag you as likely engaging in criminal activity, as opposed to just having a baby," she said.

Blackmoore writes:

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing is trying to get the word out on the costs of gutting net neutrality.

The ISPs say they only want to get paid for the use of their service, but the problem is, they're already getting paid. You pay your internet bill every month. Netflix, Google, Yahoo, the Guardian and Boing Boing all pay their internet bills every month. The ISPs aren't seeking to get paid, they're seeking to get paid twice: once by you, and a second time because you are now their hostage and the companies you want to do business with have to get through them to get to you.

You're paying for your line. The phone company exists solely to connect people to the numbers they dial. But because there are "natural monopolies" in phone service (because there are only so many mobile frequencies and underground cable space), they can abuse their position to extort additional payments from the services you want to talk to. And the more popular a service is, the better it is, the more the ISP stands to profit from this racket.

AnonTechie writes:

Phys.org has an article covering research that shows birds are adapting to radiation in Chernobyl.

Birds in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are adapting to — and may even be benefiting from — long-term exposure to radiation, ecologists have found. The study, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, is the first evidence that wild animals adapt to ionising radiation, and the first to show that birds which produce most pheomelanin, a pigment in feathers, have greatest problems coping with radiation exposure.

According to lead author Dr Ismael Galvan of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC): "Previous studies of wildlife at Chernobyl showed that chronic radiation exposure depleted antioxidants and increased oxidative damage. We found the opposite that antioxidant levels increased and oxidative stress decreased with increasing background radiation."

The study can be found here.

Angry Jesus writes:

The Verge has an an article on the implications of a recently published study indicating that lab mice have a stress response to the scent of male researchers but not female researchers.

The lead author of the study said, "People have not paid attention to this in the entire history of scientific research of animals. I think that it may have confounded, to whatever degree, some very large subset of existing research."

The article does, however, go on to say 'And the effect wasn't just prompted by human males, either. Rats and mice "are afraid of the smell of males of any species," Mogil says, because the mice in this study reacted to the smell of male dogs, guinea pigs, and cats as well'.

Papas Fritas writes:

The Boston Globe reports that two MIT students have raised half a million dollars for a project to distribute $100 in bitcoin to every undergraduate student at MIT this fall aimed at creating an ecosystem for digital currencies at MIT. "Right now there is not a geographic place that you can go to and assume that people have relatively broad access to bitcoin," says Daniel Elitzer, suggesting that that could change with their experiment, which might make for an interesting case study. "What might the world look like if bitcoin, or something like bitcoin, were widely accepted?" The bulk of funding for the project is being provided by MIT alumni who plan to distribute the $500,000 already pledged to all 4,528 undergraduates.

lhsi writes:

A look at personal performance and assisting teammates in a highly competitive environment has found that personal performance increases at the expense of working together as a team. While bad for the team as a whole, it often awarded the non-team-player with better future contracts.

High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the "I" in "Team" when cooperation is most critical.

Angry Jesus writes:

In the debut of John Oliver's weekly comedy news show on HBO, Last Week Tonight, he interviews former head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander. An extended cut of the interview is available on youtube. Unlike the interview Alexander did with 60 Minutes a few months ago, there aren't quite so many softball questions this time.

Fluffeh writes:

VODO recently packaged up a few items into an Otherworlds bundle and popped it up for sale. One of the places they advertised was The Pirate Bay, with the folks there being generous enough to replace their site banner with the link. There were a few payment options (beat the average, pay what you want, be generous) and the bundle was advertised through a number of sites as well as social media.

Interestingly, Pirate Bay users mostly picked the latter option. In total, 232 Pirate Bay visitors chose the most expensive "beat the premium" option, paying $18.11 on average. Another 72 visitors went for the cheapest option with an average payment of $1.78, and 67 people ended up in the middle with an $10.61 average.

Across all paying Pirate Bay visitors the average payment was $13.52. Interestingly enough, this is more than the average paid by people who came from other sites, or social media.

That said, TPB users weren't clicking through as heavily "... King notes that the ratio of incoming visitors to buying visitors was relatively low, about a tenth of that from other sites." but per user, they paid the most.

Papas Fritas writes:

Ars Technica reports that the US government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

Woods writes:

Remi Soummer, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., led his team to reanalyze images that have been captured by Hubble to search for planetary disks:

The stars were initially targeted with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) based on unusual heat signatures obtained from NASA space-based telescopes, including IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The previous data provided interesting clues that dusty disks might exist around these stars. Such disks might be seen in scattered light from small dust particles. But when Hubble first viewed the stars between 1999 and 2006, no visible-light disks were detected in the NICMOS pictures.

Recently, with improvements in image processing including algorithms used for face-recognition software Soummer and his team reanalyzed the archived images. This time, they could unequivocally see the debris disks, and they could even determine their shapes.

"We are also working to implement the same techniques as a standard processing method for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope," said STScI teammate Laurent Pueyo. "These disks will also be prime targets for the Webb Telescope."

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to be launched in 2018, and with a collecting area about five times larger than that of Hubble, JWST will have unprecedented resolution.

lhsi writes:

Wired reports on the opening to third parties of England's national-pupil-database:

Data relating to every school pupil in England is now available for use by private companies thanks to a change in legislation implemented last year. The move is part of a wider government initiative to "marketise" data, which includes initiatives such as the much-criticised Care.data and the selling off of taxpayer data by HMRC.

broken writes:

Junhao Lin from Vanderbilt University et al. have created three atom wide nanowires and published his results as a letter in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Full text is behind a paywall but an Article Preview is available.

He created these nanowires using scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). The wires were made from transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDC), chosen because they form monolayers (much like graphene). Neither the article nor the Nature Article Preview specify precisely which TMDCs were constructed, but mentions molybdenum, tungsten, sulfur, and selenium as example constituents of chemicals in this group with the appropriate electrical properties. Some amazing images in the linked Article Preview suggest these wires are on the order of 0.6nm in width.

Transistors and flash memory have already been created using this class of material so it looks like complete integrated circuits using this material are a possibility. The article suggests that this technique may be adapted to construction using electron beam lithography, increasing its potential for future commercial feasibility.

mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who provided journalists a trove of classified documents, retained a well-known Washington defense lawyer last summer in hopes of reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors that would allow him to return to the United States and spare him significant prison time.

The lawyer, according to people familiar with the investigation, is Plato Cacheris, who has represented defendants in some of the highest-profile cases involving Espionage Act charges, including the convicted spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen and the convicted leaker Lawrence Franklin.

But nearly a year after Mr. Cacheris became involved, no agreement appears imminent, and government officials said the negotiations remained at an early stage.

frojack writes:

A woody vine, Boquila trifoliolata, has been discovered in Chile that has the amazing ability to change the shape of its leaves depending on what tree it is climbing. Further, the same single vine can drape different species of tree, and it will match the shape and size of its leaves to those of each host, but only along that portion of its length.

Other vines are known to mimic one species of host, as a defense against herbivores, but this vine can mimic many, along its length. Biologists say "It is unclear how B. trifoliolata vines discern the identity of individual trees and shape-shift accordingly." Speculation is that chemicals or microbes might trigger gene-activating signals that trigger leaf differentiation. But left unsaid is how the vine would "learn" how to match the shape of its new host's leaf, how it would know it had succeeded, where it would acquire the genes to do so, and how many different trees it can mimic.

Wouldn't you need eyes to do that?

AnonTechie writes:

Discovery reports on a new mineral that has been found in Australia.

A new purple-pink mineral that has a chemical composition and crystalline structure unlike any of the known 4,000 minerals has been discovered at a mining site in Western Australia, researchers report.

Now called putnisite, the mineral was discovered in a surface outcrop of Polar Bear Peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan, north of Norseman. While workers with a mining company were prospecting for nickel and gold, one of them noticed the bright-pink grains and sent the mineral to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and then it was sent to Peter Elliott, a research associate with the South Australian Museum, for examination.

A reader named Repli C8tor writes:

One hardware hacker who documents their project on Hackaday will win a ride to space on his or her choice of space company. The alternative is a just short of $200,000USD cash prize.

The winner can hitch a ride on any galactic space company, including Virgin Galactic or SpaceX. Other prizes include team sky diving, a paid trip to the Akihabara electronics district in Japan, and hardware hacking tools such as milling and tooling machines and 3D printers.

"We launched The Hackaday Prize because we want to see the next evolution of hardware happen right now, and we want it to be open," said Mike Szczys, managing editor of Hackaday.com.

Papas Fritas writes:

The NYT writes in an editorial that for the last few months, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy by pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive.

The coal producers' motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses. That might seem distant at the moment, when nearly 40 percent of the nation's electricity is still generated by coal, and when less than 1 percent of power customers have solar arrays. But given new regulations on power-plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants, and the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions, the future clearly lies with renewable energy.

For example, the Arizona Public Service Company, the state's largest utility, funneled large sums through a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama. Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. "Like Obamacare, it's another government mandate we can't afford," the narrator says. "That line might appeal to Tea Partiers, but it's deliberately misleading," concludes the editorial. "This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change."

Woods writes:

Google gives us an update on their latest self-driving car escapades. Make sure you check out the video in the article for a look at how the car handles various situations thrown at it.

Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. At a busy time of day, a typical city street can leave even experienced drivers sweaty-palmed and irritable. We all dream of a world in which city centers are freed of congestion from cars circling for parking (PDF) and have fewer intersections made dangerous by distracted drivers. That's why over the last year we've shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving.

We've improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously-pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can't-and it never gets tired or distracted.

lhsi writes:

A look at how people respond to inconclusive reports on whether video games make people violent has found that those who previously believed they did make people violent had a stronger belief, and those who were sceptical of this were more sceptical.

Essentially, after reading something conflicting, readers became more stubborn with what they had previously believed.

These results suggest that biased assimilation of new information leads believers and skeptics to become more rather than less certain of their views. Hence, even when confronted with mixed and inconclusive evidence, the perceived gap between both sides of the argument increases.

AnonTechie writes:

According to Glassdoor's Q1 2014 Employment Confidence Survey, the average U.S. employee (of those who receive vacation/paid time off) only takes half (51%) of his or her eligible vacation time/paid time off. In addition, when employees do take paid time off, three in five (61%) admit doing some work. Each quarter, the Glassdoor Employment Confidence Survey monitors four key indicators of employment confidence: salary expectations, job security, the job market and company outlook. This quarter's survey also took a look at employee vacation time, including the percentage of eligible vacation time/paid time off employees actually take, how much they work and why while on vacation, among other realities.