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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

I recently came across this article about "Innovations...to pre-empt the counterfeit threat of 3D printing" and I thought "Does 3D printing need DRM?" The article talks about 3D printing files falling into the hands of people would infringe on the original creator's intellectual property (which is a thing that I am sure will happen), but it focuses on mass production of 3D printed objects. This seems particularly odd to me, since 3D printing's primary use today is for one-off or small runs of objects that would be difficult, impossible, or prohibitively costly to manufacture through other means. Does anyone else think that these "innovations" are a solution looking for a problem?

cafebabe writes:

From RT:

Pope Francis in an address to Italian students has called for people to respect nature and called the destruction of South America's rainforests, as well as other environmental destruction, "our sin."

The Argentine-born Pope was addressing a gathering of students, farmers and laid-off workers at the University of Molise in southern Italy.

"When I look at America, also my own homeland, so many forests, all cut, that have become land... that can no longer give life. This is our sin, exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her," the Pope said in an apparently off-the-cuff speech.

"This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation," he told the university meeting.

janrinok writes:

Ars Technica are reporting that video game and 3D engine developer Crytek, responsible for the original Far Cry game and the Crysis and Ryse series, became attached to a wave of rumors about unpaid workers last week. Kotaku's original report pointed to late paychecks at its Frankfurt office, and it wrote that in-development games, including Ryse 2, were seeing sudden cancellations. Kotaku's follow-up post on Thursday didn't paint a prettier picture.

According to Kotaku's latest report, employees at the company's UK studio confirmed that their latest paychecks had not arrived on time and in full. In response, "around 100" Crytek UK staffers "handed in formal grievance letters and went home" on Wednesday.

AnonTechie writes:

The digital age has created a host of new etiquette dilemmas.

What should you do when your boss sends a Facebook friend request? Is it OK to take and share smartphone pictures at a friend's wedding? When should you take off Google Glass, rather than just turn it off?

Etiquette mavens say the book on manners must be rewritten, literally, to take into account new technologies and social media.

"Technology is such an area of anxiety for people," says Steven Petrow, an author of etiquette books who last month began a digital manners column for USA Today.

In recent columns, Petrow addressed the question of mass emails that reveal the names of all recipients (not OK, he says), and how to deal with wedding guests who want to share smartphone pictures before the official photos are available (he urges the couple to make their wishes clear in the invitation).

"Fundamentally, I come back to my core values, which are about respect, kindness and civility," Petrow told AFP.

The full story is available via Yahoo! News

cafebabe writes:

From ScienceDaily:

Ras is a family of membrane-anchored proteins whose activation is a critical step in cellular signaling, but almost everything we know about how Ras signals are activated has been derived from bulk assays, in solution or in live cells, in which information about the role of the membrane environment and anything about variation among individual molecules is lost," says Jay Groves, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and UC Berkeley's Chemistry Department. "Using a supported-membrane array platform, we were able to perform single molecule studies of Ras activation in a membrane environment and discover a surprising new mechanism though which Ras signaling is activated by Son of Sevenless (SOS) proteins.

Specifically:

For cellular signaling networks involving large numbers of protein molecules, the outcome can be directly determined by the process of averaging. Even though the behavior of an individual protein is intrinsically variable, the average behavior from a large group of identical proteins is precisely determined by molecular level probabilities. Ras activation in a living cell, however, involves a relatively small number of SOS molecules, making it impossible to average the variable behavior of the individual molecules. This variation is referred to as stochastic "noise" and has been widely viewed by scientists as an error a cell must overcome.

"Our study showed that, in fact, an important aspect of the SOS signal that activates Ras is encoded in the noise," says Groves. "The protein's dynamic fluctuations between different states of activity transmit information, which means we have found a regulatory coupling in a protein signaling reaction that is entirely based on dynamics, without any trace of the signal being seen in the average behavior."

BradTheGeek writes:

Lawrence Lesssig's Super PAC to end Super PACs met its second goal of 5 million. It may be ironic (using the power of citizen-funded big money to fight the big money of crony capitalists and special interests), but it's making headway.

We launched two crowdfunded campaigns. We met our first $1M goal in only 13 days. That $1M was matched by technology entrepreneurs from all sides of the political debate.

In June, we set an even larger $5M goal, which over 48,500 of you stepped forward to meet.

cafebabe writes:

From RT:

Leonid and Sergey Plekhanov, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, claim they have spent years scrutinizing the Nikola Tesla's patents and diaries and they believe that with his most ambitious project - transcontinental wireless energy transmissions - Tesla came very close to unprecedented scientific discovery that could be brought to fruition.

The enthusiasts say they need about $800,000 to reconstruct the famous Wardenclyffe Tower once created by Tesla himself to implement his ideas and find a commercial application for his ideas on long-distance wireless energy transmission.

The Plekhanov brothers are raising money through IndieGogo croudfunding.

lhsi writes:

The Telegraph reports:

BBC journalists are being sent on courses to stop them inviting so many cranks onto programmes to air 'marginal views'.

The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation's science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues.

The report found that there was still an 'over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality' which sought to give the 'other side' of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.

cafebabe writes:

The BBC reports:

Scientists have worked out the anatomical secret to giraffes' long and spindly - but strong - legs.

Researchers from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) of London found that a supportive ligament is protected by a groove in the animals' lower leg bones.

This groove is much deeper in giraffes than in other animals, and the researchers say this helps the spindly-legged giants support their bodyweight.

The work was outlined at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting.

"Giraffes are heavy animals (about 1,000kg), but have unusually skinny limb bones for an animal of this size," explained Mr Christopher Basu, the PhD student who led the research.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

If you're a nerd (what are you doing reading this site if you're not a nerd?), and you like music (yes, there are some people that don't), you should check out Orlando Nerd Fest, where many musical nerds will be putting their skills on display. There were will be rocking, there will be rapping, there will be 8-bit bleeping and blooping, there will even be a steampunk pantomime troupe! The even is August 7th to 11th at the Orlando Airport Marriott. Check the link above for more details.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

A new record for a trapped field in a superconductor, beating a record that has stood for more than a decade, could herald the arrival of materials in a broad range of fields. Researchers managed to 'trap' a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBaCuO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla.

The research demonstrates the potential of high-temperature superconductors for applications in a range of fields, including flywheels for energy storage, 'magnetic separators', which can be used in mineral refinement and pollution control, and in high-speed levitating monorail trains.

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale (or -273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.

Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.

More here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140626213359.htm

gewg_ writes:

According to Law360 (truncated teaser)

A California federal judge has ruled that Apple Inc. may not refer to GPNE Corp. as a "patent troll", "pirate" or "bounty hunter" when it heads to an infringement trial in October against the patent-assertion entity over three GPNE patents covering data transmission.

In a Tuesday pretrial order addressing the parties' motions in limine, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh also blocked Apple Inc. from calling GPNE a "bounty hunter", "bandit", "paper patent", "stick up", "shakedown", "playing the lawsuit lottery", "corporate shell game" or "a corporate shell".

Hat tip to El Reg for the expanded version.

During a discussion last weekend, several community members suggested that at weekends we look more closely at the non-technical aspects of nerd life, so cafebabe writes:

I'm not sure if this is on topic but the other site used to cover anime quite extensively.

A new series of Sailor Moon is being released via hulu.com and neonalley.com in which the story of Sailor Moon is retold from the beginning. (This is colloquially known in the film industry as a "reboot" but such a term is probably irksome to geeks who find rebooting a computer to be tiresome.)

The series will be particularly popular with the demographic of women who watched previous incarnations of Sailor Moon and who are now in their late 20s. Laura Hudson writing for wired.com is presumably in this demographic and gives away a few spoilers despite promising not to. A trailer for the series reveals much less.

kaszz writes:

Qualcomm has forced GitHub to remove over 100 repositories due to "unauthorized publication, disclosure, and copying of highly sensitive, confidential, trade secret, and copyright-protected documents." Among the repositories taken down were repos for CyanogenMod and Sony Xperia. The issue though is that some of these "highly sensitive" and "confidential" files are Linux kernel code and reference/sample code files that can be easily found elsewhere, including the Android kernel, but GitHub has complied with Qualcomm's DMCA request.

You may wish to ban any Qualcomm WiFi from at your next purchase. Anything named ath, Atheros, AR etc. Full list of their DMCA spree. The hired gun is Cyveillance a part of the Qinetiq corporation. Which to accomplish their search for infringements use plenty of transfer capacity, denial operation through accept-read-write timeout attack, ignore robots.txt, falsified user-agent, ignore cease and desist letters, and may show up as PSINet.

dryriver writes:

The BBC reports:

'Wiping out is a fundamental part of the fun in a driving-based video game. Crashless gaming is an indication that the player is not pushing hard enough. And when the crash comes, gamers want the experience to be as realistic as possible. New work by designers and engineers means crashes are getting more spectacular and frighteningly accurate than ever.

Modelling a smash-up is a complicated physics problem for a game designer, and arguably the last frontier for driving-simulator game development. Plastics, metals, glass and other materials all deform and fracture at different rates and in different places. Every crash is unique in its destruction, and the anatomy of a crash is boggling in its complexity and speed. A modern car may have a plastic bumper, aluminium hood and a rigid steel safety cell, which all crease or fold, absorbing some of the crash energy. Then there is rebound from all these systems, as parts of them bounce back. The whole process is over in about 70 milliseconds (0.07 sec) faster than the proverbial blink of an eye (0.1 sec).

Carmakers use super-computers to run crash simulators to recreate these explosive events, and to test new vehicle designs without actually destroying anything. The idea dates back to software company ESI, which in 1978 presented a simulation at a conference of a fighter plane crashing into a nuclear power plant.'