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kaszz writes:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley report that graphene can be used to build superior speakers (paper). They made their loudspeakers from a 30 nm thick, 7 mm wide sheet of graphene that they had grown using chemical vapour deposition (CVD). They then sandwiched this diaphragm between two actuating perforated silicon electrodes coated with silicon dioxide to prevent the graphene from accidentally shorting to the electrodes at very large drive amplitudes. The device was found to be comparable, if not better, at 20 Hz to 20 kHz than a high-quality commercial earphone of similar size, the Sennheiser® MX-400. This speaker technology can be driven with a few nano-amps because it does not need to be artificially damped. The technique for fabricating the speaker could easily be scaled up to produce even larger-area diaphragms and thus bigger speakers. This speaker also works as a microphone too.

An anonymous coward writes:

It's been a widely held assumption that urine is sterile. But now researchers have obtained evidence that urine is not sterile even when collected directly from the bladder of healthy women.

More than 70 percent of the urine samples contained bacteria, including at least 33 types of bacteria (at the genus level) in normal urine. Women with overactive bladders had more types of bacteria in their urine (77 genera), including four species found only in overactive bladder patients.

Similar for other parts of the body:

Last year, in fact, researchers reported finding soil bacteria in people's brains. The researchers were studying whether people with a compromised immune system from HIV/AIDS might be prone to brain infections. Instead, they found that all the brains they looked at contained bacteria, regardless of HIV status.

lhsi writes:

A survey of registered randomised trials on vaccines found that there was often a delay before publication of the results, and sometimes no publication found at all. Delay to publication between non-industry and industry sponsored trials did not differ, but non-industry sponsored trials were 4.42-fold (P=0.008) more likely to report negative or mixed findings. Negative results were reported by only 2% of the published trials.

Trials not sponsored by industry were more likely to report negative or mixed results than industry-sponsored trials (32% (7/22) vs. 7% (11/154)).

Our empirical evaluation found that after a median of 26 months from completion, about half of the registered randomized trials on five vaccines had been published, and no information was available in the peer reviewed literature for almost two thirds of the entire sample of patients who had been randomized in these vaccine trials.

el_oscuro writes:

It not often you see an article on skateboards on SN. If you are one of the 27 people who happen to ride skateboards and read SN, another geeky website for skateboarders, siverfishlongboarding.com has a story on it.

This not about that story, it is about another skateboard invention, a 10 pound electric skateboard with 20MPH max speed, 6 mile range and regenerative braking. Silverfish Longboarding has a nice review on it.

Angry Jesus writes:

Stop the Cap! reports that Comcast has beefed up their DC lobbying to include at least 40 different firms. Their mission: to pressure legislators and overwhelm regulators to accept the merger deal and ignore the critics.

"Though Comcast is not alone in its revolving door lobby strategy, what is unprecedented is the gravity of the revolving door abuse now being employed by a small handful of very wealthy communications firms," said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen.

Ethanol-fueled writes:

Wikileaks revealed Friday that Afghanistan is the second of two countries, the first being The Bahamas, to have every phone call recorded by the NSA.

My personal opinion: While this may not come as a surprise to many (given Afghanistan's recent history and strategic location) one must not forget the ramifications of having an NSA hub in the Middle-East, as that may have been a contributing factor to Hamid Karzai's animosity towards America and its continuing involvement in Afghanistan.

Another note: I was the first person to guess the country here, based on an unusual experience years ago as outlined in the linked post -- I was told in a bong shop by the daughter of an NSA employee stationed in Afghanistan years ago!

Cf SN's earlier story: Wikileaks Threatens to Name NSA-target

Fluffeh writes:

If you think that early animals started out simple and gradually evolved new features, and things like sponges branched off before the new features were added, you wouldn't be alone. Over the years, lots of researchers argued the same thing. But a recent genome sequence indicated that the oldest branch of the animal family tree that led to the comb jellies, with muscles, nerves, and tentacles, were an older branch than sponges. Now with a new paper on the comb jelly, researchers are starting to argue over what this actually tells us about the earliest animals.

The comb jellies' genome contains a variety of other indications that they are exceptional. Most of the innate immune system, which broadly recognizes pathogens like bacteria and viruses, is missing. So is the machinery that processes micro RNAs, which are used to control the expression of other genes. Key regulators of development, like hedgehog and JAK/STAT proteins, are also absent. So are key genes involved in the formation of muscles, suggesting that these, too, may have evolved separately in the ctenophores.

taylorvich writes:

From IEEE Spectrum:

California, eager to retain its role as legal arbiter to the auto world, in July will begin taking applications for driving licenses for self-driving cars. The licenses take effect in September.

The car will merely have to bring along a sane, sober, attentive, insured, licensed human driver to sit behind the wheel and quickly take over if need be. And the license will cost US $150 a pop. And the insurance policy must be for $5 million.

mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

Five Chinese hackers were indicted by the United States Justice Department this week, charged with being part of a Chinese military unit that has hacked the computers of prominent American companies to steal commercial secrets, presumably for the benefit of Chinese companies.

Much about them remains murky. But Chinese websites, as well as interviews with cybersecurity experts and former hackers inside and outside China, reveal some common traits among those and other hackers, and show that China's hacking culture is a complex mosaic of shifting motivations, employers and allegiances.

scruffybeard writes:

Best Buy is blaming sagging sales on a recent lack of innovation. Sears is also making a similar claim, that their sales numbers would have been higher if not for the poor performance of their electronics department. The few areas that do offer potential are console game systems and next-gen TV's. While this might sound good, consoles don't offer very high margins, and next-gen TV's have price tags that make many consumers wonder if upgrading is really necessary.

Anonymous Coward writes:

Facebook has added a new feature to its mobile app as of Wednesday that uses a phone's microphone to identify ambient TV shows, music, or movies and include them in status updates. The feature is off by default, though the app offers to turn it on in an intro screen that it pops up for users.

If it is left on by mistake, or 'switches itself on' without notifying you - who is listening to everything in your home? It's a hacker's dream come true.

fliptop writes:

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, consists of an array of 180 crossed dipoles that are spaced over an area of about 30 acres. Collectively, the array can transmit up to 3,600 kW of radiated power, which has made it possible for scientists to study the basic physics of how charged particles behave in the ionosphere, 55 to 370 miles above the Earth. Constructed in the early 90's and a favourite target of conspiracy theorists, it's being dismantled this summer. From TFA:

David Walker, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering, said this is "not an area that we have any need for in the future" and that research funds would be better spent elsewhere. "We're moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere," Walker explained.

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.