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Dr Spin writes:

Inspired by octopus arms, a robotic arm that can bend, stretch and squeeze through cluttered environments has been created by researchers in Italy.

Soft robotics is a promising technology in the medical field, particularly for surgical applications. This arm was designed for surgical operations which need to access remote, confined regions of the body and, once there, manipulate soft organs without damaging them, and relies on coffee grounds as a control mechanism!

More details available from Sclog

fliptop writes:

Touting the technology as a replacement for IDs, part of your laptop's login, or able to let cops know if the person they just pulled over is dangerous, the first effective long-range iris scanner has been developed by Marios Savvides, a Carnegie Mellon engineering professor:

"Fingerprints, they require you to touch something. Iris, we can capture it at a distance, so we're making the whole user experience much less intrusive, much more comfortable," Savvides [said]. Unlike other scanners, which required someone to step up to a machine, his scanner can capture someone's iris and face as they walk by.

"There's no X-marks-the-spot. There's no place you have to stand. Anywhere between six and 12 meters, it will find you, it will zoom in and capture both irises and full face," he said.

Iris scanning currently works only at close range, so it requires a level of cooperation of the person being scanned:

"It requires a level of cooperation that makes it very overt—a person knows that you're taking a picture for this purpose,"...If it succeeds, long-distance scanning will change all that. Savvides says his team has secured a patent for his invention and will continue to work to make it easier and cheaper. He continues, too, to look for positive implementations of it.

Spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Phoenix666 writes:

IBM has demonstrated a chip that can take advantage of photonics' higher bandwidth and lower energy consumption:

Engineers have long known that fibre-optic links are more desirable than copper wires for shuttling data around—the available bandwidth is higher, the distances that signals can be squirted over are longer, and energy consumption is lower. On the other hand, when it comes to actually doing stuff with that data, electronics are where it's at. This dichotomy has resulted in a very pronounced split between optical and electrical technologies: optics are used for networking between computers, but inside the chassis it's electronics all the way.

This approach has worked well so far, but as bandwidth and energy requirements continue to soar, research labs around the world have been looking at ways of bringing the optics ever closer to the electronics. The first step is to bring optical channels onto the motherboard, then onto the chip package, and ultimately onto the die so that electrical and optical pathways run side-by-side at a nanometer scale.

Quantum computing has also made a lot of gains recently. Perhaps in 5 years we'll be looking at a higher order of magnitude in processing power. What would you do with it?

takyon writes:

WikiLeaks has published transcripts of 10 months of German Parliamentary hearings into the National Security Agency and Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The 1,380 pages cover 34 witnesses from May 2014 to February 2015. "WikiLeaks has also written summaries of each session in German and English as the inquiry, due to its subject matter, is of international significance." For example, there is a synopsis of William Binney and Thomas Drake's appearance before the Bundestag inquiry in July. The inquiry calendar lists hearings with documents and synopses indicated by paper clips and hourglasses respectively. Some hearings are labelled "Synopsis to follow". Although the transcripts are of public hearings, WikiLeaks claims that "despite many sessions being technically public, in practice public understanding has been compromised as transcripts have been withheld, recording devices banned and reporters intrusively watched by police."

The Register reports:

The inquiry was set up in March 2014, tasked with investigating surveillance activities by the United States on German soil and to what degree German agencies have been complicit in this spying. During the inquiry it emerged that the German Chancery sent a letter to the chief exec of Deutsche Telekom calling for help with the continuous mass surveillance of German and international internet and telecommunications data at Deutsche Telekom's Frankfurt exchange point. This operation, codenamed "Eikonal", saw these intercepts then pass from the BND to the NSA.

More recently, it emerged that the NSA was passing on selectors – IP addresses, emails, and mobile phone numbers – for spying. Targets included members of the French government and European industry, including the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and Eurocopter. Airbus, another target of alleged spying, has launched a lawsuit.

The NSA also reportedly wanted the BND to spy on Siemens over its alleged business with Russian intelligence. The BND-NSA co-operation on surveillance was ostensibly about fighting international terrorism but much of what happened in practice seemed to be about harvesting geo-political intelligence, if not downright economic espionage.

Some weeks into the inquiry, a German intelligence agency staffer was arrested after allegedly being caught spying on behalf on the US.

Highlights of the leaked files include how the BND tap fibre optic cables from the German intelligence officer who does the tapping. WikiLeaks is saying it released the files in order to inform the debate.

AnonTechie writes:

A security research firm is warning that a new bug could allow a hacker to take over vast portions of a datacenter -- from within. The zero-day vulnerability lies in a legacy common component in widely-used virtualization software, allowing a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine across a datacenter's network.

Most datacenters nowadays condense customers -- including major technology companies and smaller firms -- into virtualized machines, or multiple operating systems on one single server. Those virtualized systems are designed to share resources but remain as separate entities in the host hypervisor, which powers the virtual machines. A hacker can exploit this newly-discovered bug, known as "Venom" -- an acronym for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation" -- to gain access to the entire hypervisor, as well as every network-connected device in that datacenter.

The cause is a widely-ignored, legacy virtual floppy disk controller that, if sent specially crafted code, can crash the entire hypervisor. That can allow a hacker to break out of their own virtual machine to access other machines -- including those owned by other people or companies.

The bug, found in open-source computer emulator QEMU, dates back to 2004. Many modern virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, and Oracle's VirtualBox, include the buggy code. VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Bochs hypervisors are not affected.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/venom-security-flaw-millions-of-virtual-machines-datacenters/

The Linux Foundation security advisory: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-3456

National Cyber Awareness System: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2015-3456

takyon writes:

You can now tweet a 🍕 emoji to Domino's in order to initiate a pizza transaction.

Emoji use differs by country. "Canadians lead the charge in their use of money, violence, sports-related, raunchy, and even the poop emoji," says SwiftKey's chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood.

Americans are second behind Canada in their love of violent emojis, such as guns.

But one thing Americans also really, really love is pizza.

"Pizza was one of the most frequently used [emojis] in the U.S., as well as the chicken drumstick ... and I think it shows you that, versus other nations, you guys have particular food habits," Braidwood says.

Be careful with 🔫s and 🍆.

Emoji In the Unicode standard at Wikipedia.
Draft Emoji Data at the Unicode Consortium.

💩/10.

[ED NOTE: The &#####; markup for these characters are legit. Are you able to see them, or are you seeing unknown character boxes? What font are you using? -LaminatorX]

takyon writes:

The United States House of Representatives passed the USA Freedom Act after an hour of debate with no amendments allowed:

The USA Freedom Act was approved in a 338-88 vote, with approximately equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans voting against. The bill's supporters say it will disallow bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata, in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has regularly ordered phone companies to turn over such data. The Obama administration claims such collection is authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which is set to expire June 1. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently held that Section 215 does not provide such authorization.

Today's legislation would prevent the government from issuing such orders for bulk collection and instead rely on telephone companies to store all their metadata — some of which the government could then demand using a "specific selection term" related to foreign terrorism. Bill supporters maintain this would prevent indiscriminate collection. [...] However, the legislation may not end bulk surveillance and in fact could codify the ability of the government to conduct dragnet data collection.

"We're taking something that was not permitted under regular section 215 ... and now we're creating a whole apparatus to provide for it," Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., said on Tuesday night during a House Rules Committee proceeding. "The language does limit the amount of bulk collection, it doesn't end bulk collection," Rep. Amash said, arguing that the problematic "specific selection term" allows for "very large data collection, potentially in the hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions."

The measure now goes to the Senate where its future is uncertain. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declined to schedule the bill for consideration, and is instead pushing for a clean reauthorization of expiring Patriot Act provisions that includes no surveillance reforms.

Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have threatened to filibuster any bill that extends the Patriot Act without also reforming the NSA.

Conservative GOP Congressman Credits Snowden For Changing His Position on Patriot Act
In Landslide Vote, House Overwhelmingly Passes USA Freedom Act without Amendments

takyon writes:

Streaming hasn't completely killed the optical disc. The Blu-ray Disc Association has completed the Ultra HD Blu-ray specification. New Ultra HD Blu-ray discs will support 3840×2160 "4K" resolution at up to 60 FPS using H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding. It also supports the larger Rec. 2020 color gamut, which allows for colors of greater saturation to be reproduced. 10-bit per channel color depth is supported, increasing the number of possible colors to ~1.07 billion (1024³) from ~16.8 million (256³).

The specification defines discs with capacities of 66 GB and 100 GB. This means that the 33 GB per layer, triple-layer technology of 100 GB BDXL discs will reach consumers.

Tom's Hardware notes:

With a new spec also comes new Ultra HD Blu-ray players, which is a bit of a concern. Fortunately, these new players will have backwards compatibility with Blu-ray discs. However, those who have been using a traditional Blu-ray player for some time will just have to replace it with a model that plays Ultra HD Blu-ray, and those who use the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One for Blu-ray content are stuck unless they want to add another space-hogging box to the living room.

Licensing for Ultra HD Blu-ray begins this summer, but just like 4K content and TVs, it will take some time to see wide adoption. The TVs are already here, but the amount of content needs to increase in order for users to justify the cost of purchasing new 4K devices.

[More After the Break]

AnonTechie writes:

From the University of Toronto:

"Cloudy for the morning, turning to clear with scorching heat in the afternoon." While this might describe a typical late-summer day in many places on Earth, it may also apply to planets outside our solar system, according to a new study by an international team of astrophysicists from the University of Toronto, York University and Queen's University Belfast.

Using sensitive observations from the Kepler space telescope, the researchers have uncovered evidence of daily weather cycles on six extra-solar planets seen to exhibit different phases. Such phase variations occur as different portions of these planets reflect light from their stars, similar to the way our own moon cycles though different phases.

Among the findings are indications of cloudy mornings on four of them and hot, clear afternoons on two others. "We determined the weather on these alien worlds by measuring changes as the planets circle their host stars, and identifying the day-night cycle," said Lisa Esteves, a PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and lead author of the study published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

"We traced each of them going through a cycle of phases in which different portions of the planet are illuminated by its star, from fully lit to completely dark," said Esteves.

[Paper]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2245

AnonTechie writes:

For the most part, attorney Tyler Ayres practices criminal law in Draper, Utah. If you Google him, the first result reads “Utah DUI Attorney.” But recently, Ayres has grown into a de facto voice against the third-party doctrine and Utah’s drug database, a combination allowing authorities to access citizens' prescription drug histories nearly carte blanche. Ayres has represented at least a dozen people with unforeseen issues because of this arrangement. The worse abuse he’s seen involves two of his clients: Candy Holmes and Russell Smithey.

Both Holmes and Smithey have extensive criminal histories. In a recent interview, Smithey conceded that he was an intravenous drug user and has since completed a drug court program. In 2011, his partner, Holmes, was picking up her prescription at a pharmacy near their home in Vernal, Utah. Both Holmes and Smithey regularly took Oxycodone and Methadone.

Ben Murray, an officer with the Vernal City Police Department, watched this Holmes encounter with the pharmacist, according to Smithey and confirmed by deposition documents. Murray says that “she was so intoxicated that she couldn’t even get her money out.”

Smithey tells the story differently. He says Murray saw Holmes take some of the medication and get into her car to drive home. It would have taken longer than the drive home for the pills to set in, he explains. Either way, the undisputed facts are that Murray contacted dispatch and Holmes was arrested in her driveway after failing a sobriety test.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/ill-never-ask-for-another-pain-pill-again-℞-database-damage-in-utah/

[Related]: The big drug database in the sky: One firefighter’s year-long legal nightmare

takyon writes:

Samsung has unveiled three new systems-on-a-chip (SoC) at the Internet of Things World 2015 conference in San Francisco.

The Artik line consists of the Artik 1, Artik 5, and Artik 10. The Artik 1 is a dual-core chip with an area of 12 mm × 12 mm. Artik 5 is a more powerful dual-core chip with an area of 29 mm × 25 mm. The Artik 10 is an octo-core chip with an area of 39 mm × 29 mm. The Register reports:

Each of the three units comes with a different level of capabilities in order to meet the needs of a variety of applications. Final pricing wasn't discussed, but murmurings from the show floor suggest the modules will range from $10 on the low end to more than $100 for the top performer.

The tiniest of the three, the Artik 1, is just 12mm square, which Samsung says makes it the industry's smallest IoT module. Sammy is targeting wearable applications with this one and has pared down its specs accordingly. Inside, it packs an unspecified dual-core processor with one core running at 250MHz and the other clocked at 80MHz – so it's no speed demon but it knows how to sip power. Samsung says a smartwatch based on it could run for three weeks on a single charge. The unit includes 1MB of on-chip memory plus 4MB of flash storage, and it can output graphics at up to WVGA resolution (800-by-480). Rounding out the package are a Bluetooth Low Energy radio with an on-chip antenna and a nine-axis motion sensor with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer.

If you want even more oomph for your devices, however, Samsung offers the Artik 10. This one comes in a package that's once again physically larger than the Artik 5, but it includes features that give it power comparable to a high-end smartphone. For CPU, it's got eight cores: four ARM A15s clocked at 1.3GHz apiece and four ARM A7s clocked at 1.0GHz each. For memory it has 2GB of LPDDR3+ RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage. Graphics are handled by an ARM Mali T628 MP6 GPU, which lets it push full 1080p HD video at 120fps. The Artik 10 has similar communications capabilities to the Artik 5, but more and better, including a USB 3.0 port in addition to the Artik 5's USB 2.0 port. It supports multi-channel hardware audio decoding, which makes this module well suited to multimedia applications.

Where OS is concerned, the Artik 1 is the oddball of the three Artik modules. It runs the Nucleus OS, a realtime operating system (RTOS) developed by Mentor Graphics that Samsung has used in its Touch phones in the past. The Artik 5 and Artik 10, meanwhile, are running Yocto 1.6, a customized embedded Linux distribution based on Fedora.

cmn32480 writes:

On May 11, the critical design review of the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) kicked off in Huntsville, Alabama.

This new rocket will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. It is designed to be sustainable and evolve to carry crew and cargo on deep space missions, including an asteroid and ultimately to Mars.

Milestone reviews like the critical design review are just that -- critical. The critical design review demonstrates that the SLS design meets all system requirements with acceptable risk, and accomplishes that within cost and schedule constraints. It also proves that the rocket should continue with full-scale production, assembly, integration, and testing and that the program is ready to begin the next major review covering design certification.

In the critical design review, there are literally thousands of pages of documentation that are reviewed and every part of the system is put under the design microscope by the best minds and engineers at NASA and their contractors. According to the article, all the subsystems have already been gone over in their own critical design reviews, but this one is for the complete project.

This review follows the somewhat more exciting successful booster tests from early March and the first Orion flight test from last December.

"gewg_" writes:

Washington's Blog reports

The Pew Research Center on Religion & Public Life is reporting, in their poll of 35,000 Americans, that during the seven years from 2007 to 2014, the numbers of religiously "Unaffiliated" were soaring, the numbers of Christians were plunging, and the numbers of adherents to non-Christian faiths were rising substantially but not nearly as much as were the numbers of "Unaffiliated".

This report, issued on May 12th, is headlined, "America's Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow".

It shows that: the percentage of Americans who are unaffiliated rose from 16.1% in 2007 up to 22.8% today.

[...][The USA] is becoming a less [religious], and a more religiously diverse, country.

AnonTechie writes:

Ars reports on the most recent blogger death in Bangladesh:

Assailants with cleavers and machetes on Tuesday killed another blogger in Bangladesh, the third blogger in that country murdered in as many months, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Another blogger killed in Bangladesh earlier this year used Facebook as his medium, the committee said.

The committee said that Ananta Bijoy Das, who wrote about science and railed against religious fundamentalism, was killed Tuesday by four masked men in the northeastern city of Sylhet in broad daylight.

The death of Das brings to at least 20 the number of writers murdered globally this year, according to CPJ statistics. Bangladesh is ranked 13th globally with at least 16 killed since 1992.

An American blogger (of Bangladeshi origin) was an earlier victim this year.

AnonTechie writes:

Say hello to the hunk of plastic that could replace your anesthesiologist. Right now, only four U.S. hospitals are using the Sedasys anesthesiology machine to sedate patients before surgery. Johnson & Johnson has been cautiously rolling out the machine after winning approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2013. The FDA originally rejected the machine in 2010, but later approved after Johnson & Johnson agreed it would only be used for simple screenings--like colonoscopies or endoscopies--and only when an anesthesiology doctor or nurse was on-call.

The machine administers a measured dose of propofol to the patient, and the drug acts quickly. To keep patients safe, the machine is programmed with conservative parameters. Even the slightest problem--for example, if the patient has low blood oxygen or a slow heart rate--slows or stops the drug's infusion. According to the Washington Post, the machine has stricter limits than a human anesthesiologist would have.

http://www.popsci.com/meet-machine-could-replace-anesthesiologists