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SuperCharlie writes:

The Opera browser has had its ups and downs but had always remained a strong and stable option in the browser wars. In the last few years, Opera took a turn for the corporate side and left Linux users in the cold, but the wait for this venerable browser is over. I am glad to share that the Opera beta 29.0 for Linux is now available for download and bug reporting from http://www.opera.com/download/linux/. Sporting a new and updated interface, functions, and basically a complete overhaul from its predecessor, this new version for Linux is a welcome addition to our Linux browser options.

sigma writes:

Doctors treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone have to work and record medical information while wearing polythene “moon suits,” gloves, face masks, and goggles to protect themselves from infection. With suits that don't let their skin breathe, and local temperatures consistently over 32 degrees Celsius [about 90° F] the medicos become uncomfortably hot, which restricts the time they can work.

To make matters worse, due to the risk of contamination, doctors would take their paper notes, then walk the paper to the edge of the enclosure and shout the information to someone on the other side of a fence. The paper could not be allowed outside the high risk zone. Dr Jay Achar, who was part of a team that traveled to Sierra Leone for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asked for help, so members of his his support group contacted Google's charitable arm, Google.org, which had already worked with MSF in Haiti.

Google helped develop a polycarbonate-encased tablet that communicates wirelessly with a battery powered server outside the high risk zone. The tablet, which runs a specialised open source medical records tool called OpenMRS, can be dunked in a chlorine-based antiseptic and taken outside for use and maintenance.

While the Ebola epidemic appears to be waning, both the technology and the collaboration techniques used to develop it could be valuable in future emergencies.

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/google-builds-new-tablet-fight-ebola/?mbid=social_twitter

cmn32480 writes:

Space.com reports that a gaseous leak in the Curiosity Rover's wet chemistry system has accidentally found organics.

Curiosity's onboard laboratory includes seven so-called "wet chemistry" experiments designed to preserve and identify suspect carbon-containing components in samples drilled out from rocks.
 
None of the foil-capped metal cups has been punctured yet, but vapors of the fluid, known as N-methyl-N-tert-butyldimethylsilyl-trifluoroacetamide, or MTBSTFA, leaked into the gas-sniffing analysis instrument early in the mission.

Samples drilled out from Yellowknife Bay were stored inside the Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM instrument, as the rover made its way over the next two years to Mount Sharp, a three-mile high mound of sediments rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

"These samples were just reacting with this MTBSTFA vapor, reacting with all that good organic stuff. That turned out to be a good thing," Glavin said.

Scientists figured out how to extract the enriched vapor, collect it and analyze it in a way that preserved the organics.

In addition to analyzing the doggy-bagged sample that had been reacting with the MTBSTFA vapors for two years, scientists also were able to compare the results with residue from a sample that had been heated twice, effectively killing off any volatiles, but which also had been exposed to the vapors for two years.

Initial results show indigenous Mars complex organics in the fresh sample, though more work is needed to definitely peg the compounds.

As Curiosity continues traveling on the surface of Mars, what are the ramifications of finding things like organics in the soil? And at what point does it qualify as life?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The latest version of TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has just had its 'emergency' release - "triggered by an unscheduled Firefox release meant to fix critical security issues" .

The next scheduled release is only a week away, due on March 31, so you may choose to gamble with your existing version until then. The download page is here, and we make the usual request that if you download via a torrent please seed afterwards.

There is a lot more information on the TAILS website regarding what has been changed, updated, and enhanced.

cmn32480 writes:

From The Register:

Apple has dropped support for Windows 7 in Boot Camp. From the article:

The Cupertino fruit factory has decided to boot old versions of Windows out of the camp, quietly not-announcing that only Windows 8 and 10 will run on the latest flavours of the dual-boot "Boot Camp" utility that ships with this year's new Macs. The new policy means that the recently-announced MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro machines won't boot into Windows 7 or prior versions.

The change emerged to the world via this post on Apple's support site, dated March 10 but largely unnoticed.

The decision is an inconvenience for sysadmins whose enterprise environments demand older browsers and therefore older versions of Windows, but no disaster because there's still the option to use a desktop virtualisation environment like Parallels Desktop, Oracle's VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion.

Two submissions on the recent eclipse:

cmn32480 writes:

An article in The Telegraph brings some exceptional still photography of the 98% eclipse as seen in England, complete with photos of Druids sitting in lawn chairs at stone circles for the event. The timeline that the Telegraph story follows gives a fair amount of detail as to what happened when, and where.

An additional photo gallery from the Telegraph gives a view of how people actually viewed the eclipse, and there are many videos of the eclipse that run several hours to show the event in real time on youtube.

TLA writes:

Following Friday's solar eclipse, I had over 8 machine-hours of footage to sort through and I ended up with a time-lapse video that I put to music. You can see it on Youtube.

One thing that bugs me though: I've seen filtered, wide angle, and satellite images of various stages of the eclipse, yet apart from my video, not a single image using a projection of any sort. What gives?

Subsentient writes:

From the article:

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by one of the sponsors of SOPA, shows its complete disregard for both good taste and copyright in a shocking display of GIF overload.

The origins for the GIFs are as follows:

• A clip from the 2012 movie, Pitch Perfect
• A BuzzFeed-like talking head GIF of actress Jennifer Lawrence
• A clip from the 2000 movie, Bring It On
• A clip from the Disney blockbuster, The Little Mermaid
• A clip from The Office TV series
• A clip of actress Kristen Wiig, which our editors think came from Saturday Night Live
• A clip of actress Alison Brie from the NBC TV series Community
• Another clip from Bring It On
• A clip of actress Emma Stone on a TV talk show
• And, finally, a clip our editors think may be Britney Spears on the Tonight Show

For those who don't want to read TFA, the press release in question is here.

cmn32480 writes:

An article in this months Wired details how Disney spent $1 Billion developing, testing, and rolling out their Magicband system that started actually rolling out in 2013.

Disney's Magicband system is based on a wristband containing an RFID chip and a 2.4gHz wifi transmitter. To use the system, the guest simply aligns the Mickey head on the wristband with a Mickey head on the receiving antenna. These antenna are dispersed throughout the park; for example: rides, souvenir shops, restaurants, and on-property hotel rooms. Rather than having to pull out a wallet to pay for something, one simply uses the Magicband and, upon a good read of the RFID tag, your associated credit card gets charged accordingly. It is even used by their FastPass system which allows you to schedule getting on rides.

When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue, never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World.

In early 2014, "atdisneyagain.com" did an actual dissection of a Magicband to get a look at the components, complete with FCC look ups to see exactly what was going on inside.

[Update: corrected grammar and phrasing.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In France, the "Conseil consitutionnel" (Constitutional Council) just confirmed that vaccination is mandatory, and parents will have to appear in court upon refusal to get their kids vaccinated. In short, a pair of parents decided they weren't going to vaccinate their kids against polio, diphtheria, and tetanus, and they said the state didn't have the right to force them. The council disagreed:

"It is open to Parliament to define a vaccination policy to protect the individual and collective health." [google-translated]

• The source article: metronews.fr [french]
• The google translation is rather intelligible.
• An older article about the parents in question, in English.
• The thiomersal controversy article on Wikipedia
• DTP Vaccine article on Wikipedia (interestingly, the P from DPT comes from pertussis, not polio).

I feel vaccination should be obligatory, as long as there is a medical consensus, assuming well-intended doctors and vaccine makers. However, this raises inquiries into how much we can trust for-profit makers of vaccines. A note for editors: you should put some information about what languages you can read, so that submitters can figure out how much of a translation you need in order to follow the links.

"While we encourage a global community, the language of the site is English. Avoid links to non-English sources unless you can also provide a link to a good quality translation into English." (from the SN Submission Guidelines).

We strongly prefer English links, but in this case, I'm glad this was submitted. Though, I couldn't find an English report after after some searching around, I decided to run with it. My French is poor, but I examined both the translation and the original text and feel relatively confident about the information being presented. My apologies to the AC submitter, I tore apart his submission, but, I feel (as we editors always strive to do) I preserved the integrity of their intent. ~mrcoolbp

chromas writes:

From the Kernel:

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web.

Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the Internet, first via BBSes and later via Lynx through a dial-up shell sessions. (There’s nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you’re 13 years old.) What it never did was run a TCP/IP stack of its own. It was always just a dumb terminal on the ’net, never a full-fledged member.

How hard could it be to right that wrong?

The original article was posted in late 2013, but this republishing qualifies it for timeliness, so that makes it okay.

"gewg_" writes:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports via Common Dreams

Republican Governor Chris Christie has signed legislation making New Jersey the first state to require local, democratic approval before law enforcement agencies can receive surplus military equipment from the Department of Defense. The legislation--signed during Sunshine Week, a national celebration of government transparency and accountability that runs March 15-21--is a major victory for government transparency, democratic accountability, and the effort to demilitarize local police forces.

In recent decades, New Jersey law enforcement agencies have acquired nearly $33 million worth of military equipment, including armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and assault rifles. Under the new law, police departments must not only notify local governments of their intention to obtain used military gear, but also receive their explicit approval before doing so.

[...]New Jersey [...] is not alone among states grappling with the impact of police militarization.
For years, police departments in Massachusetts too have acquired surplus military equipment under the military's 1033 program, often in the dark and absent public input.

Representative Mary Keefe (D-Worcester) is leading the way by introducing legislation that will provide communities with a clear opportunity to weigh in on and shape any further militarization of their police departments: "An Act relative to military grade controlled property" (H.2144). State senator Michael Barrett (D-Lexington) introduced a Senate companion, SD1409.

AnonTechie writes:

Relativistic spacecraft must interact with the cosmic microwave background in a way that produces a unique light signature. And that means we should be able to spot any nearby, according to a new analysis.

Interstellar travel may be the stuff of science fiction, but it’s straightforward to calculate that it should be possible given the ability to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. These kinds of speeds may even be achievable with near future technologies and the tax dollars to make them work.

There are significant challenges, of course. And today, Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson at the defense contractor Raytheon in El Segundo, California, outline another that seems to have been overlooked until now.

These guys point out that any object traveling at relativistic speeds will interact with photons in the cosmic microwave background. This interaction should create a drag that imposes specific limits on how fast spacecraft can travel, they say.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536091/spacecraft-traveling-close-to-light-speed-should-be-visible-with-current-technology-say/

[Abstract]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05845

An Anonymous Coward writes:

By now you've probably heard that a class action lawsuit has been filed against 28 makers of California wines, alleging that their products were found through lab testing to contain levels of arsenic that exceed the standard for drinking water (10 parts per billion) established by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has no specific standard for arsenic levels in wine.

The lawsuit arose after Kevin Hicks, CEO of the Denver-based alcoholic beverage testing lab BeverageGrade, decided to test 1,306 California wines; 83 were found to have excessive arsenic levels. The findings were confirmed by testing at other labs.

Most of the offending wines named by the plaintiffs are inexpensive, routinely retailing for well under $10. The list includes Charles Shaw White Zinfandel (the famous "Two Buck Chuck", although Trader Joe's now sells it for $2.99) and several labels from Franzia, Sutter Home, Almaden, Beringer, Fetzer, Ménage à Trois, and Wine Cube.

tonyPick writes:

In Discover is an article on the construction of astonishingly accurate medieval maps, known as "portolan charts", and the detective work done by John Hessler of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in deducing how the maps were made.

One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it.
...
“Even with all the information he had—every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal—I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.

But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves.

Wikipedia has additional background.

Originally spotted on Scientific American's Physics Week in Review.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

According to a new French law approved [March 19], rooftops on new buildings in commercial zones across France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels.

Green roofs, which cover rooftop space with a layer of grasses, shrubs, flowers, and other forms of flora, offer a number of benefits. They create an insulating effect, reducing the amount of energy needed to heat or cool a building depending on the season. They increase local access to green space, which often comes at a premium in urban environments. They retain rainwater, thus decreasing runoff and any related drainage issues. They provide a space for urban wildlife, such as birds, to congregate and even nest, and they reduce air pollution by acting as natural filters.

Green rooftops also significantly reduce the urban "heat island" effect in which urban areas are noticeably warmer than their surroundings. The heat island effect can cause large cities to get 1.8°F to 5.4°F warmer than surrounding areas in the day, and 22°F warmer at night, according to the EPA. This effect happens when buildings, roads, and other developments replace formerly open land and greenery, causing surfaces to become moist and impermeable, and to warm up.

[...]the law was scaled back from initial proposals [made] by environmental groups [who asked that green roofs] cover the entire rooftop surface of all new buildings. The compromise gave businesses a choice to install solar panels instead or to only cover part of the roof in foliage.