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tonyPick writes:

Spotted on Science Blogs is a link to a posting on the Origami Microscope, Foldscope received by the author under the beta test program:

It’s a bit like the original Leeuwenhoek microscope, which you held up to your eye to see a magnified image.

The differences are that Leeuwenhoek used a drop of water to form a spherical lens; this comes equipped with a pre-printed lens. Leeuwenhoek used brass and little thumbscrews to move the specimen around; Foldscope comes on a sheet of thick paper, and you punch it out and fold it, and then move a slide around under the lens. Leeuwenhoek just aimed the back of his scope at a candle, or sunlight. You can do that with Foldscope, too, or it comes with a little LED source and battery that you can attach to the back

The Foldscope site has further details, including links to instructions and related projects, and a sample image gallery

Foldscope is an origami-based print-and-fold optical microscope that can be assembled from a flat sheet of paper. Although it costs less than a dollar in parts, it can provide over 2,000X magnification with sub-micron resolution (800nm), weighs less than two nickels (8.8 g), is small enough to fit in a pocket (70 × 20 × 2 mm3), requires no external power, and can survive being dropped from a 3-story building or stepped on by a person. Its minimalistic, scalable design is inherently application-specific instead of general-purpose gearing towards applications in global health, field based citizen science and K12-science education.

thewalkindude writes:

This Business Insider article showed up while searching for information about The Pirate Bay:

There's more good news for filesharing site The Pirate Bay. The site's moderators have agreed to come on board with the relaunched site, ending a mutiny that has lasted for weeks. The Pirate Bay went offline on December 9 after police in Sweden raided its servers.

After that, a mysterious countdown was the only sign of life on The Pirate Bay for weeks. Eventually, a code on the site was cracked which hinted at a return. Everything was looking good.

But The Pirate Bay was dealt a blow when many members of staff launched a major mutiny, slamming the decision to slim down the number of people working as moderators policing content listed on the search engine.

[...] A post on the Supr Bay forum, a site where Pirate Bay staff and users discuss site matters, makes it clear that the original moderators have settled their differences with the administrators.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports:

Limpets – a type of aquatic snail – [...]need high strength teeth to scrape algae off rocks. [...] Scientists used atomic force microscopy to pull the teeth apart at the atom level. They found the teeth contain a hard mineral known as goethite, which forms in the limpet as it grows.

[...]Professor Asa Barber from [Portsmouth] University's School of Engineering said: "Until now we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bullet-proof vests to computer electronics but now we have discovered that limpet teeth exhibit a strength that is potentially higher."

The research also discovered that limpet teeth are the same strength no matter what the size. Usually, the bigger a structure, the more prone it is to flaws. Limpet teeth break this rule, as their strength is the same no matter what the size.

These structures could be mimicked and used in high-performance engineering applications such as Formula 1 racing cars, the hulls of boats, and aircraft structures.

[...]The research was published [February 18] in the Royal Society Journal Interface.[1]

[1] That may hold the record for the most scripts on a page with just 38kB of content.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

After being treated at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center, nearly 180 people may have been exposed to a potentially dangerous bacteria that's resistant to antibiotic treatment, the Los Angeles Times reported [February 19]. Two deaths have been linked to the outbreak so far. And federal officials are warning that the source of the "superbug" spread is probably a commonly used medical scope.

Seven patients at UCLA have been officially infected with CRE [Carbapenem resistant enterobacteriaceae], the deadly superbug that's been rapidly spreading throughout the United States' hospitals over the past several years. CRE bacteria are virtually untreatable with our current antibiotics. In the medical community, CRE are known as "nightmare bacteria" because they have a particularly high mortality rate compared to other bugs.

The medical scope in question is called a duodenoscope, a tool in the field of gastroenterology that offers a less invasive way(PDF) to examine a patient's digestive tract.

The flexible nature of the duodenoscope makes it hard to effectively sterilize, and medical investigators have linked the tools to an increased risk of CRE infections. In previous outbreaks in Chicago and Seattle, duodenoscopes have infected dozens of people with CRE. At the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, eleven people died.

tonyPick writes:

UK readers may have heard of Peter Oborne, formerly the chief political commentator of UK Newspaper The Telegraph.

Oborne recently resigned from the paper, and has since published his reasons. The Conversation has an article discussing the issue, and further implications for traditional media.

The original article covering Oborne's reason for resigning is available online at OpenDemocracy. This is critical of the ownership of the Telegraph, and provides examples where Oborne's believes that advertising concerns led the paper to place promotional stories for some advertisers, ignore or remove stories that might offend others, and place "clickbait" style headlines in an attempt to generate traffic.

Both the original letter and the analysis article are informative and interesting reads.

There is further commentary throughout the UK media, including The Guardian, The Independent and The Spectator.

stormwyrm writes:

The Moscow Times reports that Russian Internet giant Yandex has filed a complaint against Google at the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service, alleging that its rival has an unfair advantage because it insists that Android device manufacturers set Google as the default search engine if they want to bundle Google Play. Google has yet to respond. From the article:

The regulator now has one month to consider the request from Yandex, Russia's top search engine and provider of a range of digital services, such as Yandex.Maps and Yandex.Music, a music streaming service.

Yandex's head of product distribution, Yury Vecher, wrote on news website Slon.ru that the company lodged the complaint after finding it impossible to have its services — which mirror those of Google's, but are often better tailored for the Russian market — installed on Android devices sold in Russia.

Yandex seems to want Google to unbundle Google search and its native apps from Android in the same way that EU regulators had forced Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows. There are also similar antitrust efforts by Microsoft and others concentrating on the EU.

Other coverage of the complaint is available from the BBC, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg.

jbernardo writes:

Earlier this week, KDE developer David Edmundson described in his blog how KDE would be tied to logind and timedated but not systemd itself, at least according to his claim that "The init system is one part of systemd that doesn't affect us at all, and any other could be used.".

Later, in the blog comments, he clarifies that starting with plasma 5.5, in 6 months, they'll drop "legacy" support, according to a decision taken in the plasma sprint.

Even if one can only guess why there is no formal announcement, it seems clear - unless somehow there is a shim or emulator, not only for logind but also for timedated, in 6 months KDE will be unusable unless you are running systemd. And the blog entry makes it clear that the plan is to remove more and more functionality from KDE and use systemd instead.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and the author of many books, has a beautifully written op-ed in the NYT where he reflects on his own mortality and the fact that at 81 he is faced with terminal cancer and a few months left to live. Some excerpts:

"I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

stormwyrm writes:

A study by scientists from Stanford University and Swarthmore College has shown that since the Cambrian period, sea creatures have been steadily growing in size, and not by chance. From coverage of the findings from the BBC:

In the past 542 million years, the average size of a marine animal has gone up by a factor of 150.

It appears that the explosion of different life forms near the start of that time window eventually skewed decisively towards bulkier animals.

Today's tiniest sea critter is less than 10 times smaller than its Cambrian counterpart, measured in terms of volume; both are minuscule crustaceans. But at the other end of the scale, the mighty blue whale is more than 100,000 times the size of the largest animal the Cambrian could offer: another crustacean with a clam-like, hinged shell.

Dr. Noel Heim of Stanford University, who led the research effort, enlisted the help of many colleagues, undergraduate, and even high school students, to scour scientific records for body size data of 17,208 genera of marine creatures over the past 542 million years, representing roughly 60% of all such animals to ever have lived. Detailed analysis of this data revealed a clear trend toward increasing size, giving credence to the old hypothesis known as Cope's rule.

dw861 writes:

As reported by the CBC, Electric-car battery maker A123 Systems has sued Apple Inc for poaching top engineers to build a large-scale battery division. The CBC's source is a court filing related to this case that offered further evidence that the iPhone maker may be developing a car. Hmm, the iCar?

In any event, at issue for A123 Systems, is that the engineers jumped ship to pursue similar programs at Apple, in violation of their employment agreements.

Apple has also hired engineers away from Tesla. Those switched allegiances were purchased by $250,000 starting bonuses and 60% pay bumps for folks who have expertise in this field. Investment analysts are even speculating that Apple will eventually buy Tesla. Current projected prices for such a deal start at $75 Billion. If such a deal were to happen, it would actually be the tenth most expensive acquisition in corporate history. To put this in perspective, when Exxon acquired Mobil, it paid $80 billion. So, Soylentils, are these just rumours? If not, what does it all mean?

AnonTechie writes:

Research by New York University Biology Professor Michael Rampino ( http://www.biology.as.nyu.edu/object/MichaelRampino.html ) concludes that Earth's infrequent but predictable path around and through our Galaxy's disc may have a direct and significant effect on geological and biological phenomena occurring on Earth. In a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, he concludes that movement through dark matter may perturb the orbits of comets and lead to additional heating in the Earth's core, both of which could be connected with mass extinction events.

The Galactic disc is the region of the Milky Way Galaxy where our solar system resides. It is crowded with stars and clouds of gas and dust, and also a concentration of elusive dark matter--small subatomic particles that can be detected only by their gravitational effects.

Previous studies have shown that Earth rotates around the disc-shaped Galaxy once every 250 million years. But the Earth's path around the Galaxy is wavy, with the Sun and planets weaving through the crowded disc approximately every 30 million years. Analyzing the pattern of the Earth's passes through the Galactic disc, Rampino notes that these disc passages seem to correlate with times of comet impacts and mass extinctions of life. The famous comet strike 66 million ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs is just one example.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/nyu-ddm021815.php

[Also Covered By]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/dinosaurs/11422695/Dark-matter-may-have-killed-the-dinosaurs-claims-scientist.html

An Anonymous Coward writes with an article from The Guardian:

American and British spies hacked into the world’s largest sim card manufacturer in a move that gave them unfettered access to billions of cellphones around the globe and looks set to spark another international row into overreach by espionage agencies.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent GCHQ hacked into Gemalto, a Netherlands sim card manufacturer, stealing encryption keys that allowed them to secretly monitor both voice calls and data, according to documents newly released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Is there any point even discussing this?

c0lo writes:

An EFF brief to Supreme Court argues that the 4th amendment also protect people against warrantless DNA analysis.

EFF is asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Raynor v. State of Maryland, a case that examines whether police should be allowed to collect and analyze "inadvertently shed" DNA without a warrant or consent, such as swabbing cells from a drinking glass or a chair. EFF argues that genetic material contains a vast amount of personal information that should receive the full protection of the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"As human beings, we shed hundreds of thousands of skin and hair cells daily, with each cell containing information about who we are, where we come from, and who we will be," EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch said. "The court must recognize that allowing police the limitless ability to collect and search genetic material will usher in a future where DNA may be collected from any person at any time, entered into and checked against DNA databases, and used to conduct pervasive surveillance."

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that Carnegie Mellon University just emailed 800 applicants to their graduate computer science program that they were accepted, only to email them later in the day to say, in effect: Oops, not really.

“It was heart-shattering. The hardest part for me was telling my family and friends that congratulated me on my acceptance that I was not,” said one 26-year-old applicant while another wrote on Facebook that in the hours between her Carnegie Mellon acceptance and rejection, she quit her job and her boyfriend proposed marriage, ending her post, “What do I do now?” Carnegie Mellon declined to comment beyond a prepared statement that acknowledged and apologized for the error. “When you’re a high-tech school like Carnegie Mellon or M.I.T., the egg on your face is that much worse,” said Anna Ivey. Carnegie Mellon’s statement struck some as falling far short of a real explanation. “This error was the result of serious mistakes in our process for generating acceptance letters," wrote Carnegie-Mellon.

Or in the words of Gilda Radner playing Emily Litella on “Saturday Night Live” - "Never mind."

AnonTechie writes:

Long the domain of science fiction, researchers are now working to create software that perfectly models human and animal brains. With an approach known as whole brain emulation (WBE), the idea is that if we can perfectly copy the functional structure of the brain, we will create software perfectly analogous to one. The upshot here is simple yet mind-boggling. Scientists hope to create software that could theoretically experience everything we experience: emotion, addiction, ambition, consciousness, and suffering.

“Right now in computer science, we make computer simulations of neural networks to figure out how the brain works," Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist and research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, told Ars. "It seems possible that in a few decades we will take entire brains, scan them, turn them into computer code, and make simulations of everything going on in our brain.”

Everything. Of course, a perfect copy does not necessarily mean equivalent. Software is so… different. It's a tool that performs because we tell it to perform. It's difficult to imagine that we could imbue it with those same abilities that we believe make us human. To imagine our computers loving, hungering, and suffering probably feels a bit ridiculous. And some scientists would agree.

But there are others—scientists, futurists, the director of engineering at Google—who are working very seriously to make this happen.

In a recent article ( http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2014.895113#.VNT3UkKmAwM [Signup Required]) in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Sandberg dives into some of the ethical questions that would (or at least should) arise from successful whole brain emulation. The focus of his paper, he explained, is “What are we allowed to do to these simulated brains ?” If we create a WBE that perfectly models a brain, can it suffer ? Should we care ?

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/if-software-looks-like-a-brain-and-acts-like-a-brain-will-we-treat-it-like-one/1/
[Related]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence