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Daz writes:

A little less than a year ago HackADay featured the start of a world-wide collaboration around an open source offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. The device enumerates as a keyboard and uses a PIN-locked smartcard to read an AES-256 key required to decrypt its credentials database. All password accessing operations need to be approved on its physical user interface to prevent impersonation.

As its beta testing phase is over, the Mooltipass crowdfunding campaign is now live and already achieved 44% of its $100k goal in less than four days.

Hugh Pickens writes:

IBM has recently delivered a string of disappointing quarters, and announced recently that it would take a multibillion-dollar hit to offload its struggling chip business. But Will Knight writes at MIT Technology Review that Watson may have the answer to IBM's uncertain future.

IBM's vast research department was recently reorganized to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data. “We’re betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on it,” says John Kelly, director of IBM Research, said of cognitive computing, a term the company uses to refer to artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson.

tonyPick writes:

Over at Wired is a story on determining the optimal way to board a plane.

Jason Steffen is an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, and several years ago he modeled different airline boarding methods to see what made them so slow. He also figured out how airlines could get us on board much faster.

Jason Steffen has a page with more detail on the algorithm.

(Spotted via Scientific American's physics week in review, where it is noted this work is actually a few years old — having previously been covered in 2008 and 2011 — before the current Wired article).

tonyPick writes:

The Guardian's Science section has a series of photos of the mathematical art of Simon Beck.

For the past decade, Simon Beck has been decorating the Alps with his stunning mathematical drawings, created by running in snowshoes across freshly laid snow. Each image takes him up to 11 hours to make and covers an area about 100m x 100m, requiring him to travel up to 25 miles as he marks out the pattern

Simon Beck's gallery site also has images (and a book for sale, which is the reason for the article).

AnonTechie writes:

Last year CERN announced the finding of a new elementary particle, the Higgs particle. But maybe it wasn't the Higgs particle, maybe it just looks like it. And maybe it is not alone.

Many calculations indicate that the particle discovered last year in the CERN particle accelerator was indeed the famous Higgs particle. Physicists agree that the CERN experiments did find a new particle that had never been seen before, but according to an international research team, there is no conclusive evidence that the particle was indeed the Higgs particle.

frojack writes:

Sciencetimes is reporting on a study that a certain bacterium (Christensenella minuta), one of many types of naturally-occurring bacteria in the stomach, could fight off quick weight gain that usually leads to obesity.

The study was also covered by The BBC. Both in human studies and in mice, the presence and prevalence of this type of bacteria leads to far less weight gain given the same diet.

Study leader Dr. Ruth Ley, associate professor in the department of microbiology at Cornell University, said that even though their initial findings had suggested the bacterium could be contributing to a lean phenotype, they had been fairly stunned to see its effect in mice and had repeated the experiment several times, according to reports from BBC.

The group is also working to identify what genes influence the presence of Christensenellaceae bacteria and why it would have this effect on weight.

"Once we have found out how it works in mice, if it seems like we can apply that to humans we can look into developing this as a probiotic to regulate weight," Ley said.

The current study appeared in Cell, (you can sign up for a free account, but you still won't be able to read the full text).

No human transplants of the bacteria have yet been attempted. The bacteria occurs naturally in some families, suggesting it is "inherited" (or passed down by some unknown means). Transfers from humans to mice were carried out and yielded dramatically less weight gain.

The BBC quotes Prof David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, as saying:

"The results took the argument further away from poor personal choice, when you realize we have millions of gut bacteria that are making these decisions for us."

Science Now also has a write up, which is in many cases slightly better than either of the above.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

'Follow the pornos' is an old truism about adoption rates of consumer technology, modeled after an even older and politically incorrect truism about real estate. But it seems the porn industry hasn't figured out how to get paid from the vast majority of downloads of its content, which people (I'm not saying SN readers do this) often find by Googling 'porn' or similar.

It turns out that many of the hits provided by Google are from pirate sites. While Google has been working with the record industry and mainstream movie industry to emphasize legal sites in the search results, the company has not engaged in similar negotiations with the adult film industry.

Porn actress Angela White expressed her frustration with Google to the BBC:

Google is perpetuating the misconception that the adult industry is not a legitimate industry. The adult industry is run like any other professional industry; we pay taxes, create jobs and contribute to the economy.

How many times a day is the word 'porn' typed into the Google search interface? Mainstream corporations like Google continue to discriminate against the adult industry despite the world being genuinely interested in seeking out pornography.

Google declined to comment on the matter.

AnonTechie writes:

Elon Musk is talking with satellite industry executives about creating smaller, less-expensive satellites "that can deliver Internet access across the globe", according to a Wall Street Journal article today.

Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is working with Greg Wyler, a former Google executive who founded a new company called WorldVu Satellite.

"In talks with industry executives, Messrs. Musk and Wyler have discussed launching around 700 satellites, each weighing less than 250 pounds, the people familiar with the matter said," the Journal wrote. "That is about half the size of the smallest communications satellites now in commercial use. The constellation would be 10 times the size of the largest current fleet, managed by Iridium Communications Inc."

AnonTechie writes:

Last year, Congress held a vigorous debate over so-called "patent trolls". One of the poster children repeatedly held up as an example of patent abuse was MPHJ Technology, owned by a Texas lawyer named Jay Mac Rust. Working with the law firm Farney Daniels, Rust sent out more than 9,000 patent demand letters to small businesses around the country, telling recipients that their networked scanner system infringed on MPHJ patents and asking them to pay a royalty of around $1,000 per employee.

Congress ultimately didn't pass a patent reform bill, but MPHJ became mired in legal battles with state and federal authorities. Rust's company was investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and then it took the surprising step of actually suing the FTC first.

That lawsuit got thrown out, and now Rust, MPHJ, and Farney Daniels have reached a settlement with the FTC. Under the terms of the settlement, Rust and his lawyers are barred from making "misleading or unsubstantiated representations" in any letters they send out. There is no monetary penalty.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/ftc-ends-first-case-against-a-patent-troll-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/

Blackmoore writes:

New solar power material converts 90 percent of captured light into heat

A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy.

By contrast, current solar absorber material functions at lower temperatures and needs to be overhauled almost every year for high temperature operations. ...

Current CSP plants are shut down about once a year to chip off the degraded sunlight absorbing material and reapply a new coating, which means no power generation while a replacement coating is applied and cured. That is why DOE's SunShot program challenged and supported UC San Diego research teams to come up with a material with a substantially longer life cycle, in addition to the higher operating temperature for enhanced energy conversion efficiency. The UC San Diego research team is aiming for many years of usage life, a feat they believe they are close to achieving.

[Eds Note: Attempts to locate the original submission to Nano Energy did not succeed]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Well, not the processors, per se, but the belief that such processors exist. So says David Chisnall (who frequents SN so don't call him an idiot :): "There is an increasing trend in computer architecture to categorize processors and accelerators as "general purpose." Of the papers published at this year's International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2014), nine out of 45 explicitly referred to general-purpose processors; one additionally referred to general-purpose FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and another referred to general-purpose MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) supercomputers, stretching the definition to the breaking point. This article presents the argument that there is no such thing as a truly general-purpose processor and that the belief in such a device is harmful."

frojack writes:

An article on the Miami Herald site explores the status of the former "East Germany" 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Told by an American reporter from the point of view of a 62 year old former East German citizen, Warnick, who was there in the days the wall came down 25 years ago. Warnick is not absolutely able to say that he is better off today. "It's a matter of perspective".

The article goes on to explain the differences in perception of land ownership, and the abandonment of land by fleeing easterners before the wall went up. But the records of ownership remained, and after reunification, those that had moved west started reclaiming property, sometimes impoverishing the current residents. Warnick explained how this affected him personally when his East German "99 year lease" was suddenly interrupted by the return of the former owner.

Its an interesting read, and I'd like to know the views of any Soylentils from that area.

tonyPick writes:

Several sites are running a story on the solar roadway installation in the Netherlands, including phys.org and IFLScience.

However over at EEV Blog is a thorough critical review by Dave Jones which runs through the numbers and finds it doesn't add up as a practical proposal. There's references to Dave's original review of an earlier proposal, for some background on the calculations.

From the associated forum posting:

AnonTechie writes:

Privacy has been a prickly topic at Harvard ever since it was revealed last year that the university had searched the email accounts of some junior faculty members, prompting a major self-examination and promises by the administration to do better.

But this week, that sore spot was poked again. The university acknowledged that as part of a study on attendance at lectures, it had used hidden cameras to photograph classes without telling the professors or the students.

While students and faculty members said that the secret photography was not as serious as looking through people’s email, it struck many of them as out of bounds — or, at least, a little creepy. And it set off more argument about the limits of privacy expectations.

“I wouldn’t call it spying,” as some people have, said Jerry R. Green, a professor of economics and former university provost. “But I don’t think it’s a good thing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/us/secret-cameras-rekindle-privacy-debate-at-harvard.html

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Eric Raymond has thrown his hat into the ring of version control systems. "I wrote a version-control system today. Yes, an entire VCS. Took me 14 hours.

Yeah, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. “Why,” you ask, quite reasonably, “would you want to do a thing like that? We’re not short of powerful VCSes these days.

That is true. But I got to thinking, early this morning, about the fact that I haven’t been able to settle on just one VCS. I use git for most things, but there’s a use case git doesn’t cover. I have some document directories in which I have piles of things like HOWTOs which have separate histories from each other. Changes in them are not correlated, and I want to be able to move them around because I sometimes do that to reorganize them."

Then, the idea that made it inevitable. “I bet.” I thought, “I could write this thing as a Python wrapper around RCS tools. Use them for delta storage but hide all the ugly parts.” Thus, SRC. Simple Revision Control, v0.1.

So, what are you writing this weekend?