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Phoenix666 writes:

Thync is a consumer product. And that's exactly how we're reviewing it – much like we would a new iPhone or laptop. We share our experience and make our recommendations, but we aren't writing any research papers or conducting any double-blind studies on it (though the company does link to some of those on its website).

After using Thync every day for the last week and a half, I'm convinced that it's one of the most exciting new tech products of 2015. Like taking a hit of Mary Jane, it can push me from an anxious, over-thinking mood to one where I'm cool, collected and laid-back like a THC-infused Rastafarian. And if I'm feeling sluggish or unmotivated, Thync can also peel that layer away, like the sun burning a morning fog off of my consciousness.

I heard about the brain-mod crowd a couple years ago at the New York Maker's Faire. A team from DARPA gave a talk on an electro-stimulation cap they said was meant to fight Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans. This seems to follow. Has anyone from Soylent experimented with trans-cranial electro-stimulation?

Original Submission

Johanna Kamermans has written to us:

[Janrinok says: You may remember this story from a few weeks ago. Basically, the relevant bodies in Munich had decided that e-books of an extreme sexual nature could only be sold online between the times of 2200 and 0600. We discussed it, laughed at the concept of 'time' restrictions on something that covered the entire globe, and then we moved on... Well, yesterday we received a submission/letter from Joanna Kamermans, the author of the e-book in question, pointing out that she had read our story and comments and that she was appreciative of the publicity that her book had received. Not just the publicity from our site but from others that had also decided to publish or comment on the story. I will not print her letter here as it (and the links within it) are most definitely NSFW - but, of course, it can be found via the Original Submission link at the bottom of this story. It just goes to show that what we write and say here can travel far further than we might initially imagine. Those of you who wish to communicate further with Ms Kamermans may do so away from this site, but I should warn you that she describes herself as Johanna Kamermans (1938) - perhaps it is just a very common name in Bavaria or, perhaps not...]

Don't worry, the next story will be along in a moment.

Original Submission NSFW

Arthur T Knackerbracket offers this:

Coating the inside of glass microtubes with a polymer hydrogel material dramatically alters the way capillary forces draw water into the tiny structures, researchers have found. The discovery could provide a new way to control microfluidic systems, including popular lab-on-a-chip devices.

Capillary action draws water and other liquids into confined spaces such as tubes, straws, wicks and paper towels, and the flow rate can be predicted using a simple hydrodynamic analysis. But a chance observation by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology will cause a recalculation of those predictions for conditions in which hydrogel films line the tubes carrying water-based liquids.

"Rather than moving according to conventional expectations, water-based liquids slip to a new location in the tube, get stuck, then slip again – and the process repeats over and over again," explained Andrei Fedorov, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. "Instead of filling the tube with a rate of liquid penetration that slows with time, the water propagates at a nearly constant speed into the hydrogel-coated capillary. This was very different from what we had expected."

The findings resulted from research sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through the BIONIC center at Georgia Tech, and were reported earlier this month in the journal Soft Matter.

When the opening of a thin glass tube is exposed to a droplet of water, the liquid begins to flow into the tube, pulled by a combination of surface tension in the liquid and adhesion between the liquid and the walls of the tube. Leading the way is a meniscus, a curved surface of the water at the leading edge of the water column. An ordinary borosilicate glass tube fills by capillary action at a gradually decreasing rate with the speed of meniscus propagation slowing as a square root of time.

But when the inside of a tube is coated with a very thin layer of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), a so-called "smart" polymer (PNIPAM), everything changes. Water entering a tube coated on the inside with a dry hydrogel film must first wet the film and allow it to swell before it can proceed farther into the tube. The wetting and swelling take place not continuously, but with discrete steps in which the water meniscus first sticks and its motion remains arrested while the polymer layer locally deforms. The meniscus then rapidly slides for a short distance before the process repeats. This "stick-slip" process forces the water to move into the tube in a step-by-step motion.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

An interesting conspiracy theory on Business Insider:

A Business Insider reader claiming to be a former ad tech executive at a really huge, well-known news publisher then sent me a fascinating email, in which he claimed that ad tech companies deliberately serve ads slowly because everyone makes more money that way.

Basically, his theory is, when a reader clicks to read a story, the page calls for bids from advertisers on the ad space available. This bidding is supposed to take place in a few milliseconds. But, my correspondent says, ad tech companies hold open the bids much, much longer, so more bids come in, driving up the price. Publishers hate this because it makes pages load really slowly, giving readers a terrible experience. But it's hard to stop because everyone — publisher included — is taking a cut of the winning bid. So publishers and ad tech companies actually have an incentive to make pages load slowly.

[...] Generally, other sources in the ad tech business tell us that this is rubbish. But a couple also admitted that there are some shady practices out there, and it is possible for this happen. "In theory he is basically correct. Publishers and the ad networks they work with have pretty effectively gamed each other. Lots of crazy s--- happens," one source told us. "It's a wild world out there and publishers are not generally very technically competent so ad networks get away with a lot."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket provides us with this story:

CERN, home of the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is developing a new particle accelerator just two metres long.

The miniature linear accelerator (mini-Linac) is designed for use in hospitals for imaging and the treatment of cancer. It will consist of four modules, each 50cm long, the first of which has already been constructed. "With this first module we have validated all of the stages of construction and the concept in general", says Serge Mathot of the CERN engineering department.

Designing an accelerator for medical purposes presented a new technological challenge for the CERN team. "We knew the technology was within our reach after all those years we had spent developing Linac4," says Maurizio Vretenar, coordinator of the mini-Linac project. Linac4, a larger accelerator designed to boost negative hydrogen ions to high energies, is scheduled to be connected to the CERN accelerator complex in 2020.

The miniature accelerator is a radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ), a component found at the start of all proton accelerator chains. RFQs are designed to produce high-intensity beams. The challenge for the mini-Linac was to double the operating frequency of the RFQ in order to shorten its length. This desired high frequency had never before been achieved. "Thanks to new beam dynamics and innovative ideas for the radiofrequency and mechanical aspects, we came up with an accelerator design that was much better adapted to the practical requirements of medical applications," says Alessandra Lombardi, in charge of the design of the RFQ.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel and Micron have announced a new type of non-volatile memory called "3D XPoint", which they say is 1,000 times faster (in terms of latency) than the NAND flash used in solid-state disks, with 1,000 times the endurance. It also has 10 times the density of DRAM. It is a stackable, 20nm, technology, and is expected to be sold next year in a 128 Gb (16 GB) size:

If all goes to plan, the first products to feature 3D XPoint (pronounced cross-point) will go on sale next year. Its price has yet to be announced. Intel is marketing it as the first new class of "mainstream memory" since 1989. Rather than pitch it as a replacement for either flash storage or Ram (random access memory), the company suggests it will be used alongside them to hold certain data "closer" to a processor so that it can be accessed more quickly than before.

[...] 3D XPoint does away with the need to use the transistors at the heart of Nand chips... By contrast, 3D XPoint works by changing the properties of the material that makes up its memory cells to either having a high resistance to electricity to represent a one or a low resistance to represent a zero. The advantage is that each memory cell can be addressed individually, radically speeding things up. An added benefit is that it should last hundreds of times longer than Nand before becoming unreliable.

It is expected to be more expensive than NAND, cheaper than DRAM, and slower than DRAM. If a 16 GB chip is the minimum XPoint offering, it could be used to store an operating system and certain applications for a substantial speedup compared to SSD storage.

This seems likely to beat similar fast and non-volatile "NAND-killers" to market, such as memristors and Crossbar RRAM. Intel and Micron have worked on phase-change memory (PCM) previously, but Intel has denied that XPoint is a PCM, memristor, or spin-transfer torque based technology. The Platform speculates that the next-generation 100+ petaflops supercomputers will utilize XPoint, along with other applications facing memory bottlenecks such as genomics analysis and gaming. The 16 GB chip is a simple 2-layer stack, compared to 32 layers for Samsung's available V-NAND SSDs, so there is enormous potential for capacity growth.

The technology will be sampling later this year to potential customers. Both Micron and Intel will develop their own 3D XPoint products, and will not be licensing the technology.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A new Linux backdoor botnet agent is fortunately only half-baked. From the article:

[Russian malware writers] have stitched together a new Linux backdoor. Fortunately for internet hygiene the botnet agent – which packs a variety of powerful features – is faulty and only partially functional.

The backdoor, dubbed Dklkt-1 was designed to be a cross-platform nasty capable of infecting both Windows and Linux machines.

Cyber-criminals planned to equip the program with a large number of functions typical of SOCKS proxy servers, remote shells, file managers, and so on.

However, at the moment, the malware ignores the majority of incoming commands due to programming mistakes.

If successfully planted, the malware tries to register itself in the system as a daemon (system service). Thereafter it uses LZO compression and the Blowfish encryption algorithm to chat to command and control servers. Every packet contains a checksum, so that the recipient could verify data integrity.

Dklkt-1 waits for incoming commands that can include launching a DDoS attack, starting SOCKS proxy server, running a specified application, rebooting the computer, or turning it off. Other commands are either ignored or processed incorrectly.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

We have previously covered CRISPR, its rising popularity, its breakthroughs, and creations.

Now, scientists at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley have used CRISPR/Cas9 to modify human T cells in order to control immune functions:

Using their novel approach, the scientists were able to disable a protein on the T-cell surface called CXCR4, which can be exploited by HIV when the virus infects T cells and causes AIDS. The group also successfully shut down PD-1, a protein that has attracted intense interest in the burgeoning field of cancer immunotherapy, as scientists have shown that using drugs to block PD-1 coaxes T cells to attack tumors.

[In] practice, editing T cell genomes with CRISPR/Cas9 has proved surprisingly difficult, said Alexander Marson, PhD, a UCSF Sandler Fellow, and senior and co-corresponding author of the new study. "Genome editing in human T cells has been a notable challenge for the field," Marson said. "So we spent the past year and a half trying to optimize editing in functional T cells. There are a lot of potential therapeutic applications, and we want to make sure we're driving this as hard as we can."

[...] In lab dishes, the group assembled Cas9 ribonucleoproteins, or RNPs, which combine the Cas9 protein with single-guide RNA. They then used a method known as electroporation, in which cells are briefly exposed to an electrical field that makes their membranes more permeable, to quickly deliver these RNPs to the interior of the cells. With these innovations, the researchers successfully edited CXCR4 and PD-1, even knocking in new sequences to replace specific genetic "letters" in these proteins. The group was then able to sort the cells using markers expressed on the cell surface, to help pull out successfully edited cells for research, and eventually for therapeutic use.

[...] Marson stressed that, while recent reports of CRISPR/Cas9 editing of human embryos have stirred up controversy, T cells are created anew in each individual, so modifications would not be passed on to future generations. He hopes that Cas9-based therapies for T cell-related disorders, which include autoimmune diseases as well as immunodeficiencies such as "bubble boy disease," will enter the clinic in the future. "There's actually well-trodden ground putting modified T cells into patients. There are companies out there already doing it and figuring out the safety profile, so there's increasing clinical infrastructure that we could potentially piggyback on as we work out more details of genome editing," Marson said. "I think CRISPR-edited T cells will eventually go into patients, and it would be wrong not to think about the steps we need to take to get there safely and effectively."

The full paper [PDF] is available.

Original Submission

Hawkwind writes:

The current El Nino continues to strengthen and will probably end next Spring.

"All international climate models surveyed by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate El Nino is likely to strengthen, and is expected to persist into early 2016," the bureau said. Those models project the event could last until next April.

A overview of what this means for the world can be found here.

Economic winners include the U.S., China, Mexico and Europe, while India, Australia and Peru are among El Nino's biggest losers.

California does have one potential remaining issue that could cause the drought to continue: The Blob.

It was a tangled feedback process between hot, dry soil, the strong ridge, and the blob — all working together to enhance the ridge itself, leading to more hot, dry weather. The wintertime pattern has been so domineering that West Coast meteorologists dubbed it the "ridiculously resilient ridge."

As a California resident with limited oceanic-atmospheric knowledge I wonder if anyone out there can add insight to the last article. It seems that this El Nino is really strong and the most The Blob can hope to do is to weaken it. All that energy needs to go somewhere.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with a link to the launch of Windows 10:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9471/windows-10-launches-worldwide

Windows 10 gains a personal assistant in Cortana. What originally launched on Windows Phone has been brought to the PC, and it can now work across all of your Windows devices. One of the key benefits of Windows 10 over Windows 8 is that features like Cortana are easily discoverable. Cortana now lives in a search box right beside the start button, and it can keep track of your travel plans, set up reminders, and perform searches for you. Microsoft is also adding a new browser to Windows 10, with Microsoft Edge. Although based on Internet Explorer under the hood, huge chunks of code have been taken out to improve security, and the rendering and scripting engines have been optimized to make Edge one of the fastest browsers around. It adds support for new features like being able to markup web pages and share them, and Cortana is built in to provide contextual search results right in the page. It is a big step up from Internet Explorer in standards compliance, and while it’s not quite finished yet, Microsoft has promised to update it often through the Windows Store.

...

The built in Xbox app will support Game DVR, allowing you to record game sessions, edit them, and share them, all within the Xbox app. One of the coolest features coming is game streaming from an Xbox One to any Windows 10 PC, allowing you to use any PC or tablet as the display for the Xbox, as long as it is on the LAN.

Other links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/windows/11767674/Windows-10-launch-Microsoft-releases-new-operating-system.html
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/07/windows-10-released-heres-how-to-download-it/

Update (JR) - Stories about the bugs are now coming in: here and here.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) has found that a mix of pilot error and design flaws led to the crash of SpaceShipTwo last year:

The crash of a Virgin Galactic spaceship last fall in California's Mojave Desert was caused by pilot error and design problems, the National Transportation and Safety Board announced Tuesday after a nine-month investigation.

NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports the NTSB found that SpaceShipTwo broke apart during a test flight on Oct. 31 because the co-pilot prematurely unlocked a section of the space plane's tail used in braking. The pilot survived, but the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury, was killed.

"But investigators found that SpaceShipTwo's design was also to blame. NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt says proper safeguards to prevent such human error weren't in place," Geoff says.

Detailed summary at Wired. Richard Branson's statement [video] in response.

Original Submission

basstard writes:

An article in BBC Magazine notes how it now seems dinosaurs were more like birds than lizards.

"Dinosaurs are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and thin again at the other end," declared the pedantic Miss Anne Elk in the famous Monty Python sketch more than 40 years ago. Miss Elk's observation still holds fast, but many of our other opinions about these giants of the Jurassic have changed.

The word "dinosaur" is made from the combination of two Greek words, "deinos" which means terrible or fearfully great, and "saur" which means lizard. It was first used in 1842 by the palaeontologist Richard Owen who saw some similarities between huge fossil bones and the skeletons of living reptiles. He suggested "establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria".

[...] Much intellectual blood has been shed in the corridors of palaeontological research institutes over the years as evidence has been amassed to show that dinosaurs were highly varied in size and behaviour, and more like birds than reptiles. "All the evidence is that dinosaurs were warm-blooded," says Mike Benton, professor of palaeontology at Bristol University. "When you look at the bone histology [structure] you see they had growth patterns and replacement of bone very like mammals and birds... Many if not most dinosaurs had feathers." Many of those feathers were coloured ginger and white and black.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Officials from the armed forces and U.S. legislators expect wider use of directed energy weapons such as lasers and microwaves soon:

The officials described weapons that are in various stages of development and testing by the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Army, but said more work was needed to develop tactics for their use and to ensure sufficient funding. "Directed energy brings the dawn of an entirely new era in defense," Lieutenant General William Etter, Commander, Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, told a conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment in Washington.

Directed energy refers to weapons that emit focused energy in the form of lasers, microwaves, electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, sound or particle beams. Etter and other officials said such weapons could lower the cost of current weapons, speed up responses to enemy attacks and cut deaths of civilians in the battlefield, but tough policy questions remained about their deployment.

[Navy Secretary Ray] Mabus said the Navy was extending deployment of the laser on the Ponce, and using lessons learned to help produce a 100-150 kilowatt laser prototype for testing at sea in 2018 or sooner. He said a powerful new railgun that could hit targets 100 miles away would also be tested at sea next year. A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher. He said the Navy would release a comprehensive road map this fall for developing, acquiring and fielding high-power radio frequency weapons, lasers and directed energy countermeasures.

More info at NextBigFuture, including the laser power needed to affect various targets and a 2011 U.S. Navy roadmap for shipboard lasers.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Thomas Elias writes in the Los Angeles Daily News that just one week before many California motorists began paying upwards of $4.30 per gallon for gasoline, oil tanker Teesta Spirit left Los Angeles headed for ports on the west coast of Mexico carrying more 300,000 barrels of gasoline refined in California. At a time when oil companies were raising prices by as much as $1 per gallon in some regions, oil companies like Chevron and Phillips 66 shipped about 100 million gallons of gasoline out of California. "Oil refiners have kept the state running on empty and now they are sending fuel refined in California abroad just as the specter of low inventories drives huge price increases," says Jamie Court, president of the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.

According to Elias as the oil companies were shipping out that fuel, they reaped unprecedented profits reportedly approaching $1.50 for every gallon of gasoline they sold at the higher prices. "Gasoline prices are determined by market forces, and individuals who understand how commodity markets work have recently testified that those markets are working as they should," responded Catherine Reheis-Boyd, President of the Western States Petroleum Association, to charges of price gouging. "All of the many government investigations into gasoline markets in recent years have concluded that supply and demand are the primary reason gas prices go up and down." Kathleen Foote, who heads up the antitrust division at the California attorney general's office, agreed that the industry operates like an oligopoly in the state. But proving price fixing is difficult in a field where only a few players exist. "This system is made to break because oil refineries keep it running on empty," concludes Court. "They have every incentive to create a price spike like this."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

tvcentury21.com has an article on the (funded) kickstarter effort produce a new Thunderbirds episode in the classic style:

Documentation producer Stephen La Riviere, the man behind the documentaries "Full Boost Vertical" and "Filmed in Supermarionation" is at it again. This time, its a project to produce filmed versions of the Thunderbird Century 21 EP stories from the 1960s. The basic idea is to retain the audio from the recordings, but film new Thunderbirds footage in the style of the original show. This means puppets and practical effects. Rather than try to fund it himself, or go to a distributor, he has taken the bold move to go directly to the fans and has created a Kickstarter project with the goal of funding the making of the first three EPs as mini-episodes.

Kickstarter page with video explanation

Original Submission

K_benzoate writes:

White House spokeswoman and Presidential Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa Monaco issued a response to the petition that Edward Snowden receive immunity from any laws he may have broken and be allowed to return to the USA as a free man. Her statement reasserted the Administration's position that Snowden is a criminal, running away from the consequences of his actions and should return to the USA to stand trial (and inevitably serve out the rest of his life in solitary confinement).

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found an interesting story:

Automattic, the company behind content management and blogging platform WordPress, has complained that it can't reveal the full extent of state intelligence agencies' requests to probe users' accounts.

The company's new National Security report reports that the company's recorded zero “national security requests” in 2015's first six months. But the report then offers this observation:

The post goes on to say “By preventing us from sharing a more precise number of requests, the current disclosure rules diminish the trust that our users place in us and our services. For now, we are disclosing the maximum amount of information allowed by law.”

Automattic's unhappy with that so has joined the Twitter-initiated effort (PDF) to get the US attorney-general to change the rules in order to allow more detailed reporting of intelligence agency requests.

That effort could take years to resolve, so until it does it seems safest to assume that even though companies list small quantities of intelligence agency action, the reality may be rather different. ®

Original Submission

pkrasimirov writes:

A very interesting attack was unveiled in Friday, 24 June by Daniel Gruss, Clémentine Maurice, Stefan Mangard. Maybe the Rowhammer is the next Hearthbleed, or worse?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.06955

Full report can be found here (PDF)

Original Submission