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tonyPick writes:

The Conversation has an article on the case for mining the moon:

This article is by Ian Crawford, Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London, and summarises a more detailed paper review of Lunar resources (preprint version available), by the same author published in Progress in Physical Geography.

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on a DIY Exoplanet Detector, using a Canon DSLR and telephoto lens.

The article goes over the construction of the star tracker mechanism using an Arduino, and the data processing, which is used to successfully detect exoplanet transits for the star HD 189733, and links to a YouTube video summary of the construction process.

AnonTechie writes:

Harvard materials scientist Jennifer A. Lewis, whose pioneering work in the field of microscale 3D printing is advancing the development of artificial organs, flexible electronics, and special new materials, has been named among Foreign Policy magazine's "100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2014." ( http://globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com/ )

Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard ( http://wyss.harvard.edu/ ), was honored among innovators "for showing how ink could reshape the future."

"With her team at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Lewis has printed materials that mimic the lightweight strength of balsa wood for potential use in wind turbines and batteries that could streamline the assembly of small electronics," the Foreign Policy editors wrote. "In February, her team reported that it had printed cellular tissue constructs with embedded blood vessels—a step toward the manufacture of artificial organs."
"Lewis's work shows that 3D printing won't just change how people make things," they wrote. "It will also change what, exactly, people can make."

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/jennifer-lewis-named-foreign-policy-global-thinker

novak writes:

I ran across this article from last year again and it got me thinking. The article is a story about how a hardware hacker was able to hack hard drive firmware, first to upload his own firmware, but also to take advantage of the embedded controller, and even install linux on the controller. If you haven't read it it's fairly impressive. [Ed's Comment: I would go further and say that it is a amazing piece of hacking, in the traditional meaning of the word.]

It seems that lately there have been a lot of vulnerabilities targeting embedded peripherals. Those in the article come to mind, also badUSB, and some IPMI vulnerabilities.

What do you think? Are the number of attack vectors targeting embedded peripherals a consequence of more powerful controllers? Worse software? More sophisticated attackers? Or just a random occurrence?

SlimmPickens writes:

Sophisticated malware called Regin has beed discovered by Symantec and Kaspersky Labs.

PC Authority reports

fliptop writes:

Life seems pretty good right now for Jolla, the Finnish mobile device maker formed in 2011 by former Nokia employees. Their tablet crowdfunding goal of $380k was reached hours after the Indiegogo campaign started. Currently they've raised just over $1.3m, prompting Jolla to add new funding targets this week:

The price is also competitive, with Indiegogo backers being charged $209 for the device and Jolla anticipating the final retail price of the device will be $249...if total funding reaches $2.5m, Jolla will begin offering HSDPA connectivity as an add-on for $30.

In answering the question to whether the market needs another tablet, Jolla CEO Marc Dillon responded:

"The great thing with this tablet we are launching is that not only is it state of the art in software, it can also be state of the art in specifications and at a very competitive price. Now we are really able to compete with the big companies on what they have traditionally dominated - the supply chain..."

"gewg_" writes:

So, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sets up a fake storefront in Milwaukee as a honeypot to buy stolen goods. They don't put a burglar alarm on the the place—or even proper locks, apparently—and the contents get stolen by the truckload. Their expensive, ineffective operation is exposed by reporters when the Feds destroy the landlord's property and won't pay damages or even rent.

Repeat for similar stories in Wichita, Portland, Oregon, Pensacola, Albuquerque, Atlanta, and Phoenix.

Great stuff from TechDirt's coverage:

When [the Milwaukee landlord] tried to collect, they didn't pay up. In fact, an ATF lawyer warned him that if he kept asking for the money, it could be seen as harassing federal agents.

The other thing that becomes clear in all of this is that these "undercover" ATF agents aren't just sloppy and stupid, they seem to go out of their way to be ineffective and dangerous.

[...]The whole effort has resulted in some attempts to actually disband the entire ATF, which might not be such a bad idea. While we hadn't been following the agency that closely (and hadn't been aware of all of these fake storefronts and the crazy stories behind them), in the past we've reported on how the ATF made up an entire robbery plot in order to entrap a group of poor young men in a "crime" that wouldn't have existed, but for the ATF's fantasy.

It would be nice to trust law enforcement officials, but they keep giving us reasons not to trust them at all.

This American Life's page

sudo rm -rf writes:

As a follow-up to the "poop-powered bus", the Univerity of Florida claims:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Buck Rogers surely couldn’t have seen this one coming, but at NASA’s request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste -- yes, that kind -- into rocket fuel.

Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry. What’s more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

[...]“We were trying to find out how much methane can be produced from uneaten food, food packaging and human waste,” said Pullammanappallil, a UF Institute Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member and Dhoble’s adviser. “The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey. Methane can be used to fuel the rockets. Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon.”

Abstract can be found here, along with the paywalled full research paper.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Phys.org has an interesting article on a study from the University of Sussex that found girls to be better than boys at not just the story creation but also the coding involved in creating story-based video games.

Teenage boys are perhaps more known for playing computer games but girls are better at making them, a University of Sussex study has found.

Researchers in the University's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English.

Dr Kate Howland and Dr Judith Good found that the girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding compared to the boys.

Now to me, simple under-representation has never been a valid argument for desiring more women in the software design field. Less women also go to prison; should we be trying to solve that? This, however, shows extremely valid and even capitalistic reasons for attempting to get more women into at least the game creation end of software design.

Leebert writes:

SpaceNews recently reported on the damage assessment of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport following the October 28th failure of an Orbital Antares rocket just after liftoff.

According to Dale Nash, executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, while the damage assessment is still ongoing, it is anticipated that the final cost estimate will not exceed $20 million. Both Virginia senators indicated that they are working to determine if federal funding sources could be tapped to help pay for the repairs.

Nash also was "optimistic" that the repairs could be completed prior to the next Antares launch, currently targeted for early 2016.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Wherever there is a buying frenzy of unsophisticated investors, scammers and con artists are certain to follow. And in the case of crowdfunding, well-meaning but incompetent dreamers. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

Nick Shchetko has written a piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizing several recent cases of crowdfunding apparently gone bad. The companies soliciting the funds on Kickstarter or Indiegogo were either ridiculously overconfident in their abilities to deliver, or perhaps weren't especially ethical in the first place. Since the two sites each collect a portion of the proceeds of a successful fundraising campaign (5 percent for Kickstarter; between 4 and 9 percent for Indiegogo), they aren't necessarily incented to thoroughly vet projects. It's the projects' backers who can end up out of luck.

All five projects Shchektko mentions are consumer gadgets, and four are wearables.

Ritot, a bracelet that projects the time in a large font onto the back of the wearer's hand (Indiegogo). The team drew heat when it was revealed that they initially provided fake names for their founders, and falsely implied that the company is based in the USA; they are actually in the Ukraine. More serious concerns were raised by netizens regarding the technical feasibility of the device; while the project is not yet late, it has been noted that no working prototype has been demonstrated.

GoBe, a bracelet that automatically measures caloric intake by monitoring glucose levels (Indiegogo). The product has been declared to be a scam by some in the tech press and medical community; the company, based in Russia, defends its product.

Eyez (aka Zioneyez, Zeyez), eyeglasses with a high-def recording camera that automatically uploads video streams to Facebook (Kickstarter). The team collected $340K from 2100 backers in July 2011, but has yet to deliver a product; they've also been unresponsive to their backers and to the press.

Scribble, a pen that reproduces any color, mixing matching color ink on the fly (Kickstarter). A fundraising campaign in August 2014 was cancelled, but the team promised a new campaign at a later date after they finished the prototype. One blogger thought that the physical dimensions of the product was impossible, given that the ARM chip mentioned in the product's specifications.

Kreyos, a smartwatch with voice and gesture control, and many other promised features (Indiegogo). They did deliver a product to backers, but it was immediately derided as an expensive piece of junk. This is officially a failed project; CEO Steve Tan has written a blog apologizing for the failure, which he blamed on a poor choice of suppliers.

tonyPick writes:

Science is reporting on a plan by the European Commission to divert science research funds into a new economic investment package.

In his first big move after about three weeks in office, Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed diverting €2.7 billion from Horizon 2020, the bloc's €70-billion, 7-year research funding program, into a new "Investment Plan for Europe.”

The launch of the investment fund is covered in this EU Commission press release.

The response from research organisations has not been positive. The League of European Research Universities (LERU) in a statement responding to the announcement, quoted in the Science article:

Money diverted from Horizon 2020 could in theory lead to more private R&I investments and outcomes. In practice however we all know this is unlikely to happen, as money will be diverted to quick win projects that may please politicians and citizens but that will not invest in Europe's future. If we want to survive as a forward looking continent, we must invest in research, innovation and technology.

"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports:

According to the 2014 Index(pdf) released [by the Legatum Institute in London] earlier this month, in the measure of personal freedom, the United States has fallen from 9th place in 2010 to 21st worldwide--behind such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.

The scores are based on 2013 polling data provided by Gallup, which questioned citizens' satisfaction with the nation's handling of civil liberties, freedom of choice, tolerance of ethnic minorities, and tolerance of immigrants.

According to the Legatum researchers, "evidence suggests that the greater the level of freedom in society the greater the satisfaction with life."

jcd writes:

The Independent is currently displaying a message that "You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)." So are several other high profile sites.

The Guardian reports:

A portion of visitors to all those sites are presented with a blank screen and a javascript popup telling them “you have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army”. The group apparently exploited a fault with a content delivery network (CDN).

Blame fell on the ad network due to the sporadic nature of the outages, which are difficult to replicate and spread over a number of sites.

Such symptoms are common for attacks delivered through an ad or content delivery network, which serves third-party code across a number of websites.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

On Tuesday evening, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, the country's first-ever legislation aimed at improving life for retail employees.

The new rules will require retail chains that have 11 or more locations across the country and employ 20 or more people in San Francisco to provide advance notice of schedules, improve the treatment of part-time employees, and give current workers the opportunity to take on more hours before hiring new people. Employers will have to give their workers at least two weeks' advance notice of their schedules, and if they fail to do so they will have to give those workers additional "predictability pay." Workers also get paid if they're required to be on call but their shifts are canceled. Employers will have to give part-time employees the same starting wage as those working full time in the same position and access to the same benefits.

The bill's passage comes at a time when erratic schedules are increasingly wrecking havoc on people's lives, particularly in retail. Nearly half of part-time workers and just under 40 percent of full-time ones only find out their schedules a week or less in advance.(NYT paywall) In a survey of more than 200 retail employees in New York City, nearly 40 percent said they don't get a set minimum of hours they'll work each week and a quarter are required to be on call for shifts, often finding out just hours ahead of time that they'll have to go to work. Many say schedules are posted on Saturdays for workweeks that start on Sunday.

Workers also show up just to be told to go home thanks to computer software that uses algorithms to determine if there are too many employees compared to sales volume. McDonald's employees have sued the company over its use of exactly this technology.

At the same time, workers often struggle to get enough hours to survive. [...] getting more hours or full-time status is treated like a reward and docking hours is used as a punishment.

[...]Bills similar to its Retail Workers Bill of Rights are being pushed in Milwaukee, New York, and Santa Clara, California. Federal lawmakers have taken notice as well. In July, Reps. George Miller (D-CA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Schedules that Work Act(PDF).