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lhsi writes:

Thanks to the efforts of farmers, a species of bee that had been declared extinct in the UK wilds has been reintroduced.

A species of bee declared extinct in the UK almost 30 years ago is flying again - thanks in part to the efforts of farmers. Researchers have been restoring the short-haired bumblebee to Romney Marsh and Dungeness over the past three years, and the results are starting to come in.

Nikki Gammans and her team have travelled to Sweden each year since 2012 to collect around 100 queen bees, transport them back to Britain and, after a two week quarantine period, release them into the flower-rich countryside of Kent.

The short-haired bumblebee was once common in Britain and found as far north as Yorkshire, but was last seen in Dungeness in 1986 and has since been declared extinct in the wild in the UK. While the wet summer of 2012 meant the reintroduced bees did not fare well, following last year's warm summer Gammans found worker bees for the first time in more than 25 years. This meant the queens had survived the winter and founded colonies.

"There's lots of early flowering forage for them, so we're hopeful for a good year," Gammans said of the 46 Swedish queens released after being warmed to revive them from hibernation. What's needed is evidence of new queens descended from those released before the population can be said to be getting established.

In addition to the fact that Dungeness and Romney Marsh is designated as a national nature reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), key to the project's success so far has been the role of nearby farmers, who have planted many hectares of wildflowers in order to ensure the bees have an excellent source of pollen to sustain them.

c0lo writes:

Newegg's stance against patent trolls should be already well known (is it not?)

Now, a blog post (titled "When Will Patent Trolls Learn Not to Mess with Newegg?") on company's site announces that another patent troll (SUS) will feel the heat, despite dropping a bogus claim against 37 companies (Newegg included). Unlike the other 36 codefendants, Newegg chose to go further and recover its legal fees, an action that most companies choose not to pursue because prevailing defendants were, until recently, required to demonstrate that a plaintiff acted in bad faith.

Bad luck for SUS as it seems that Lee Cheng, Newegg's Chief Legal Officer, is pretty determined and thus obtained a first ruling on fee shifting following the Supreme Court's Octane Fitness v. Icon Health and Fitness (in the Octane case, the Supreme Court ruled that the attorneys' costs and fees could be awarded to a prevailing defendant upon a demonstration that a case merely "stands out from the others.").

AnonTechie writes:

Hewlett-Packard to cut more jobs in reorganization.

US computer giant Hewlett-Packard announced Thursday it was cutting an additional 11,000 to 16,000 jobs as part of its restructuring plan. The new cuts, announced as HP revealed a slump in revenues, come on top of 34,000 post reductions planned under a program begun in 2012. "As HP continues to re-engineer the workforce to be more competitive and meet its objectives, the previously estimated number of eliminated positions will increase by between 11,000 to 16,000," said a statement released with the company's quarterly results. The moves come with HP struggling to keep up with a shift away from traditional personal computers to mobile devices, a segment dominated by the likes of Apple and South Korea's Samsung.

Fluffeh writes:

German researchers have noticed an alarming development in the BitTorrent ecosystem. Since last week, the number of users on the BitTorrent DHT has doubled in size.

"Since 2010, the DHT size has been relatively stable. It grew from 6 million to around 10 million, but that's it," says Konrad Junemann, researcher of the Decentralized Systems and Network Services research group. "This suddenly changed last week we saw a sudden increase in participating peers. I double checked our measurement engine, but everything seems to be fine, so the DHT was indeed growing," he adds.

Arvid Norberg, one of the developers of BitTorrent's uTorrent client, explained that a recent change in client may have resulted in a bug which resulted in "flapping" node IDs. "We have some indications that this is caused by an issue in our node-ID function. We have had a mechanism to tie the node ID to one's external IP address. We've had this feature for a while but made some tweaks to it recently," Norberg wrote on a mailing list.

etherscythe writes:

The government's reaction to the Snowden leaks has consistently characterized them as having "grave impact" on America's military operations and national security.

However, a truncated (only 12 of 39 pages were made available) and heavily redacted report obtained by The Guardian through FOIA request purported to prove this assertion has no actual facts included, leaving this conclusion wide open to criticism as exaggeration. Additionally, the US government still has no idea how many documents were actually copied, muddling the issue since the assessment concerns the leak in total, not just the documents currently released to the public.

Are NSA officials hedging their bets that some damning evidence against Snowden will come to light? It's becoming difficult to believe they would expect that such cursory treatment without properly supporting the official line would work at this point.

buswolley writes:

A California-based company has a new kind of wheel for skateboards that delivers a novel shape and claims a special ride experience. This is the Shark Wheel, not circular, not square, but something more interesting. The wheels appear as square when in motion from a side view but the wheel geometry is more than that. The wheels feel circular to the rider, and viewing them along with more details may help to clear the mystique. The wheels are made of three strips each; these create a helical shape when they roll, and they form a sine wave pattern. When the wheels make contact with the ground, good things happen, say the team behind the wheels - the user gets speed, better grip, and a smoother ride.

AnonTechie writes:

The world uses tens of millions of tons of lubricant every year, from the smallest part of a micro-precision instrument to the expansion rollers on the largest bridges. Most are oil based, though others use powders, and even metals, and it's been that way for decades.

That could be changing as the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM), Nematel GmbH, and Dr. Tillwich GmbH have developed a new class of lubricants that are based on liquid crystals instead of oil. According to Fraunhofer, this is the first fundamentally new lubricant developed in twenty years. Liquid crystals are an oddity of the chemical world that most people know from digital displays and television sets, but are actually found in everything from cell membranes to soapy water. As the name implies, a liquid crystal is a substance that is neither entirely a liquid, nor a crystal, but possesses the properties of both, such as a liquid that retains the structure of a solid crystal.

mcgrew writes:

See also: circular reporting, malamanteau, and wikiality. What other examples of this have you encountered? Have you authored any? Which one(s)?

Sir Garlon writes:

The US House of Representatives has passed a gutted version of the USA Freedom Act. The bill was supposed to rein in dragnet NSA surveillance, but at the last minute, it was changed to potentially allow bulk collection of telephone metadata to continue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is "dismayed" at the amendments.

You can read the floor version of the bill at the EFF's web site.

AnonTechie writes:

New NIST guidelines aim to help IT system developers build security in from the ground up:

A new initiative by computer security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) seeks to bring widely recognized systems and software engineering principles to bear on the problem of information system security.

The goal, according to computer scientist Ron Ross, a NIST Fellow, is to help establish processes that build security into IT systems from the beginning using sound design principles, rather than trying to tack it on at the end. "We need to have the same confidence in the trustworthiness of our IT products and systems that we have in the bridges we drive across or the airplanes we fly in," says Ross.

Civil engineers employ the principles of physics and engineering to build reliable structures, Ross says. Similarly, systems security engineering processes, supported by the fields of mathematics, computer science and systems/software engineering, can provide the discipline and structure needed to produce IT components and systems that enjoy the same level of trust and confidence.

Can we trust NIST and their guidelines?

Public comments on the current draft are welcome until July 11, 2014, send your thoughts to sec-cert@nist.gov

isostatic writes:

IFLScience has a blogvertisement for a company called Solar Roadways, which replaces the decades-old tarmac way of building roads which something far more useful. As well as incorporating a solar power collector, other features such as under-road heating to clear snow, LED lighting to light the way, trunking for stormwater and utilities, and the ability to find broken segments (potholes) instantly.

Obviously it will never work, but why not?

taylorvich writes:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, Google said it could be serving ads and other content on "refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities."

zocalo writes:

TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft has successfully managed to challenge a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI that included a gag order. The gist is simple: according to Microsoft they received an NSL requesting "basic subscriber information" regarding an "enterprise" customer; i.e. the FBI was after the metadata of a large Microsoft client.

As is normal for NSLs, the letter banned Microsoft from disclosing to anyone that the data had been requested. Microsoft didn't think that reasonable and filed a challenge resulting in the FBI retracting its request. What's perhaps more interesting isn't that a single National Security Letter was beaten back, but how Microsoft argued its case which could, in theory, be used by others to defeat other NSLs.

kaszz writes:

The bulk of fusion research has so far been channeled towards plasma containment and a stabilization method. This is the approach used by the ITER tokamak reactor, the cost of which could exceed 13.7 billion (10^9) USD before it's online in the year 2027 if no further delays occurs. Researchers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) Fusion, in a project partially financed by NASA-JPL, are working in a different direction. They plan on using focus fusion, which focuses the plasma in a very small volume to produce fusion and an ion beam which could then be harnessed to produce electricity. It is small enough to fit in a shipping container and can double as a rocket engine. It would cost 50 million USD to produce the working 5 MW prototype. To reach the next hurdle and demonstrate feasibility, LPP Fusion has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise 200 000 USD and so far 53 860 USD has been raised.

AnonTechie writes:

Sorry, Levi's: you can't clean your jeans by freezing them.

Yesterday, Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Chip Bergh made headlines for giving advice his company has given repeatedly over the past few years. Levi's customers can just freeze their jeans to clean them, Bergh says, instead of washing them. Some of their jeans come with instructions that tell customers to "wash them as little as possible" and "throw them in the freezer to kill germs and stink" instead.

Washing the denim kills bacteria, as does raising its temperature to extremely high levels - at least 121 C. But freezing a pair of jeans, alas, is not likely to kill all the bacteria on them. "We freeze bacteria at -20 or -80 C and can then regrow them," says Julie Segre, a researcher at the National Human Genome Research Institute who studies the bacteria that live on human skin. Sure, overnight freezing might kill most of the bacteria. But if some remain, they'd likely be able to recolonize the denim quickly after it warmed back up. That's because the dirt and dead skin cells present in the jeans - which serve as the bacteria's substrate - are left entirely intact by freezing.