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Phoenix666 writes:

Based on every horror/sci-fi movie I've ever seen, squishing an actual fleshy human brain into a robot would make it unstoppable. And probably evil. Sooner or later, I'm sure someone is going try it for real. Until they do, what's almost as good is letting a robot borrow an actual fleshy human brain to help it balance and complete tasks requiring sensing and dexterity. It's like teleoperation, except the user's brain and body are controlling the robot directly, from inside a haptic suit.

HERMES is a disaster response robot from MIT based on the Cheetah Robot, developed by Professor Sangbae Kim and his group at the MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Basically, imagine that Cheetah could stand on two legs and use its front legs like arms, and you've got HERMES: a 12-degrees-of-freedom 25-kilogram biped with those ultra powerful, custom high-torque-density electric actuators that allow Cheetah to sprint and jump. HERMES is about 90 percent of the size of an average human, which is big enough to let it naturally interact with human environments.

The other half of MIT's system, and what makes it so interesting, is the control interface. It's got cameras in the head to provide an immersive view for a human teleoperator, which is not uncommon, and the robot's arms and grippers are controlled directly, using a master-slave Waldo-like system. We've seen this sort of thing before. What's brand new, though, is the Balance Feedback Interface (BFI), which is a sort of force-feedback belt that provides physical force to the human based on ground reaction forces on the robot's feet (the center of pressure, to be precise), and also uses the movement of the human to balance the robot

One step closer...

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A change in Pax6 gene expression allows neural progenitor cells in mice embryos to undergo multiple rounds of cell division, and increases the number of neurons in the neocortex:

The developing neocortex contains different types of neural stem and progenitor cells, but one particular class, the basal progenitors, behave differently in small-brained animals such as mice than in large-brained animals such as humans. In humans, basal progenitors can undergo multiple rounds of cell division, thereby substantially increasing neuron number and ultimately the size of the neocortex. In mice, these progenitors typically undergo only one round of cell division, thus limiting the number of neurons produced. A potential cause underlying this difference in the proliferative capacity of basal progenitors could be the differential expression of Pax6 between species. Mouse basal progenitors, in contrast to human, do not express Pax6. "We were very curious to see what would happen if we were to change the expression pattern of Pax6 in developing mouse brain to mimic that observed in large-brained animals", says Fong Kuan Wong, a PhD student in the lab of Wieland Huttner and first author of the [open access] study.

To this end, another PhD student in the lab, Ji-Feng Fei, generated a novel transgenic mouse line. This line provided the basis for altering the expression of Pax6 in the cortical stem cell lineage such that it would be sustained in basal progenitors. The researchers then introduced the Pax6 gene into the stem cells of these mouse embryos. Strikingly, sustaining Pax6 expression in mouse basal progenitors increased their capacity to undergo multiple rounds of cell division, as typically observed in primates. This not only expanded the size of the basal progenitor population in a way somewhat reminiscent to what is seen in large-brained animals. It also resulted in an increase in cortical neurons, notably those in the top layer, another characteristic feature of an expanded neocortex.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has fished up the following:

Original URL: Ocean threat from Hong Kong's taste for seafood

A seafood lunch in Hong Kong is enjoyed by locals and visitors alike, but with threatened species on the menu and fishing practices that endanger marine life, campaigners want to change the city's appetite.

Hong Kong is the second-largest consumer of seafood per capita in Asia—an average resident consumes 71.2 kilos (157 pounds) of seafood each year, more than four times the global average, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature Hong Kong.

Yet the city of seven million has been forced to become one of the biggest seafood importers in the world as local waters are depleted of fish stocks.

Whether in high-end restaurants or waterside eateries, seafood is ubiquitous in the southern Chinese city, where customers often choose their fish live from a tank.

Baked lobster with noodles in cheese and deep-fried prawns in salted egg yolk are among local favourites.

But a "fish tank index" compiled by WWF Hong Kong found that more than 50 percent of the species available in the city's traditional restaurant tanks were from "highly unsustainable" sources.

"Overfishing is driving the collapse of the world's ocean fish stocks and edging many types of fish towards extinction, yet they are still on our menus," WWF Hong Kong conservation director Gavin Edwards told AFP.

"Hong Kong has a special responsibility to turn the tide as one of the biggest consumers of seafood."

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/08/obama-to-putin-stop-hacking-me.html

The U.S. is calling out Russia for a "dramatic rise" in cyber espionage against America. It's part of a veiled threat to the Kremlin: We know what you're doing online. Ever since the U.S. government hit Russia with economic sanctions last year, Russian hackers have started new cyberspying campaigns to steal information from U.S. government agencies and corporations, according to current and former American intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts. Now, American officials are fighting back—by outing the hackers and issuing what some see as veiled threats to Moscow.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Platform reports on IBM's updated POWER CPU roadmap. Next year's POWER8+ will add Nvidia's NVLink interconnect to boost bandwidth. POWER9 will move down to a 14nm process node around 2017, and POWER10 will move to 10nm around 2020. A 7nm POWER chip would likely appear around 2023 at the earliest:

The interesting thing about these roadmaps is that the Power8+ processor will come out next year and will have NVLink high-bandwidth interconnects just like the forthcoming "Pascal" GP100 Tesla coprocessor from Nvidia. With NVLink, Nvidia is putting up to four 20 GB/sec ports onto the GPU coprocessor to speed up data transfers between the high bandwidth memory on the GPU cards and to improve the performance of virtual addressing across those devices. With the addition of NVLink ports on the Power8+ processor, those creating hybrid systems will be able to implement virtual memory between the CPU and GPU in an NVLink cluster without having to resort to IBM's Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), which debuted with the Power8 chip last year and which offers similar coherence across a modified PCI-Express link.

[...] We think that IBM could be adding some form of high bandwidth memory to the Power9 chip package, particularly variants aimed at HPC and hyperscale workloads that are not intended for multi-processor systems. But IBM has said nothing about its plans to adopt 3D stacked memory on its processors thus far, even though it has done plenty of fundamental research in this area. We also wonder if IBM will use the process shrink to lower the power consumption of the Power9 chips and perhaps even simplify the cores now that it has officially designated GPUs and FPGAs are coprocessors for the Power line. (Why add vector units if you want to offload to GPUs and FPGAs?)

What is new and interesting on the above roadmap is confirmation that IBM is working on a Power10 processor, which is slated for around 2020 or so and which will be based on the 10 nanometer processes under development at Globalfoundries. With the Power10, as with the Power7, Power8, and Power9 before it, IBM is changing the chip microarchitecture and chip manufacturing process at the same time. This IBM roadmap above does not show a Power9+ or Power10+ kicker, but both could come to pass if the market demands some tweaks to the microarchitecture around half-way between those three-year gaps between Power generations.

IBM's POWER9 chips and Nvidia's Volta GPUs will be featured in Summit and Sierra, two upcoming U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers that will reach 100-300 petaflops.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket joins up the dots to bring us this story:

Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the recent Adam Sandler film "Pixels," has gone on the warpath, targeting independent films on Vimeo that use the word "pixels" in the title, TorrentFreak reports.

According to a DMCA complaint lodged with Vimeo by anti-piracy organisation Entura International on behalf of Columbia Pictures, with which Vimeo has complied, 10 videos were targeted by the production company.

These include: "Pixels -- Life Buoy," filmmaker Dragos Bardac's project for his degree at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania, uploaded in 2010; a dance music video called "Detuned Pixels -- Choco" uploaded in 2014; a short film called Pantone Pixels, uploaded in 2011; a video by graphic designer Franz Jeitz, announcing that he'll be speaking at the 2015 Pixels Festival; and, ironically, the award-winning short film "Pixels" by Patrick Jean which served as the inspiration for the Sandler film.

While Jean's film has been removed from his own account, it remains untouched on the account of One More Productions, which produced it.

The sweep also caught two unofficially uploaded copies of the Columbia Pictures film's trailer. A search for the word "pixels" on Vimeo reveals that some targeting may have been applied, returning some 9,050 results still live on the site at time of writing.

According to a complaint by NGO NeMe, which uploaded a video called "Pixels" in 2006, video creators are also being issued "strikes" along with the takedown. When a content creator receives three of these strikes, their channel will be suspended from the site.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nuclear fusion... ten and a few years away?

Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it's one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils "just ripples through the whole design," says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "It changes the whole thing."

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

[...] While most characteristics of a system tend to vary in proportion to changes in dimensions, the effect of changes in the magnetic field on fusion reactions is much more extreme: The achievable fusion power increases according to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Thus, doubling the field would produce a 16-fold increase in the fusion power. "Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win," Sorbom says. While the new superconductors do not produce quite a doubling of the field strength, they are strong enough to increase fusion power by about a factor of 10 compared to standard superconducting technology, Sorbom says. This dramatic improvement leads to a cascade of potential improvements in reactor design.

They are calling it an affordable, robust, compact (ARC) reactor. Presentation [PDF].

ARC: A compact, high-field, fusion nuclear science facility and demonstration power plant with demountable magnets [abstract]

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

"If you're wondering, the initiative aims to establish a feasible system that can manage the flow of traffic for unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters, planes and gliders that fly 500 feet and below."

According to Richard Kelley, the group's lead scientist, they (everyone involved in the project, that is) "need to devise a system to make vehicles autonomously aware of each other so they can avoid each other, as well as a system to create traffic 'patterns' or navigation protocols that would keep aircraft away from each other in the first place." Kelley will load his software on a drone in the coming months and will begin conducting test flights while connected to a NASA server and under the space agency's supervision. That means he's not only testing his software, but NASA's traffic system itself.

Automated Air Traffic Flow would be a prerequisite for autonomous flying cars. Maybe I'll get to see some flying cars, before I die.

We provided earlier coverage of this in NASA and Air Traffic Control for Drones; there is also a story we ran about a similar effort by google: Google Wants Order in Uncontrolled Airspace So its Wing Drones Can Fly.

Original Submission

maxwell demon writes:

Weaponized drones are nothing new. However this drone is armed with digital weapons. From the phys.org article:

Hackers' arsenal was beefed up with a drone armed with weapons to crack into wireless computer networks at close range, whether they be in skyscrapers or walled compounds.

David Jordan of US-based Aerial Assault was at an infamous Def Con hacker gathering on Sunday, showing off a drone that could be dispatched on missions to land atop buildings or hover outside walls and probe for cracks in computer networks.

"There has never been this capability before," Jordan said as he showed the drone to AFP.

They conclude:

Hackers at Def Con early on turned to drones for sniffing out unprotected wireless Internet networks, but capabilities Jordan said were built into the Aerial Assault drone raised the ante with automated tools that could be flown past physical defenses.

So if you thought only camera drones could spy on you, you were clearly mistaken.

Side remark: When looking for further information, I noticed that every single article about this drone I've found uses the exactly same text. So much for journalism these days.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Presenting the opening plenary presentation at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference in San Diego, Professor Artur Chmielewski, the US Rosetta Project Manager, gave a progress report on the mission. In addition to talking about the newly re-awakened Philae lander, he concluded his talk with Thanks to the space agencies that have been helping the Rosetta Project, and a bit of very exciting news, decided just days before his presentation.

... the Rosetta scientists have now determined how they will be completing this mission: "We will be landing the Rosetta orbiter itself on the comet in 2016 so that will also be generating more exciting data. So we are very happy that the partners NASA, European Space Agency and the DLR (German Space Agency), which built the lander, have now gotten all of their ducks in a row."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes with a sense of hope:

A new genetics study of wild honeybees offers clues to how a population has adapted to a mite that has devastated bee colonies worldwide. The findings may aid beekeepers and bee breeders to prevent future honeybee declines.

The researchers genetically analyzed museum samples collected from wild honeybee colonies in 1977 and 2010; the bees came from Cornell University's Arnot Forest. In comparing genomes from the two time periods, the results – published Aug. 6 in Nature Communications – show clear evidence that the wild honeybee colonies experienced a genetic bottleneck - a loss of genetic diversity - when the Varroa destructor mites killed most of the bee colonies. But some colonies survived, allowing the population to rebound.

"The study is a unique and powerful contribution to understanding how honeybees have been impacted by the introduction of Varroa destructor, and how, if left alone, they can evolve resistance to this deadly parasite," said Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell and the paper's senior author. Sasha Mikheyev '00 [sic], an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, is the paper's first author.

More after the break.

Arthur T Knackerbracket lifts his visor and finds the following:

The British Museum [has asked] for help deciphering a medieval sword A sword on display at the British Library has an 800-year-old mystery engraved on its blade.

Dating back to between 1250 and 1330 AD, the sword was discovered in the east of England, in the River Witham near Lincoln, in the 19th century. The sword is a particularly fine double-edged steel weapon of English design. It was most likely forged in Germany and belonged to a wealthy man or a knight. The hilt is cross-shaped, which is normal for swords from this period of the Middle Ages, and is heavy enough to have cloven a man's head in twain if swung with sufficient strength.

But the sword, on loan to the library from the British Museum, does have a couple of highly unusual features. Down the centre of the blade, it has two grooves known as fullers, where most blades only have one. On one side, it also bears an inscription:

It's not the presence of the inscription that has researchers nonplussed, but its content: Experts don't know what the inscription means.

"An intriguing feature of this sword is an as yet indecipherable inscription, found along one of its edges and inlaid in gold wire," wrote curator Julian Harrison on the library's blog. "It has been speculated that this is a religious invocation, since the language is unknown."

The River Witham sword is not unique in this. According to archaeologist Marc van Hasselt of Utrecht University and Hastatus Heritage Consultancy in the Netherlands, inscribed swords were "all the rage" in Europe at the turn of the 13th century, and religious invocations would have made sense. He has studied around a dozen such swords. Most notable was a sword found in Alphen aan den Rijn in the Netherlands, likewise bearing an indecipherable inscription, this time on both sides of the blade:

"There is some debate on the language used in the inscriptions. But looking at the other European finds, it seems most likely that this language is Latin. This makes sense in the context of 13th-century Europe, as Latin was the international language of choice (like English is today)," van Hasselt wrote.

basstard writes with more information on a story that we published a few weeks back:

BBC writes that a fancy-dress retailer is appealing against a ruling it must surrender its starwars.co.uk web address to Disney.

For more than a decade, the Berkshire-based company has used the address to direct shoppers to a Star Wars section of its Jokers' Masquerade store. But in July, Nominet, which oversees .uk domains, backed Disney's ownership claim. The last time anyone successfully appealed against a Nominet ruling was in 2013.

[...]

Chief executive Mark Lewis said Abscissa had used two of the addresses for more than 12 years without being challenged. "I can't believe that over the last two decades that someone from either Lucasfilm or Disney did not do a WhoIs [search] and find that that starwars.co.uk and star-wars.co.uk were not registered to them," he told the BBC.

"There has to be a point in time, surely, where a registrant has to be able to hold some title." He added that Lucasfilm had owned star-wars.co.uk for a time prior to 2003, but had chosen not to renew it.

[...]

Nominet's initial rulings are determined by single expert, but appeals go to a three-person panel. Since 2001, just 48 cases - representing 1.8% of the body's rulings - have led to an appeal. Of those appeals, 20 resulted in the original decision being overturned.

Original Submission

miljo writes:

Brent Scott has a piece on Aeon about the transformation of the traditional "hacker ethic" as described by Steven Levy and Pekka Himanen into a means of enterprise modeling "doublethink".

Scott goes on to suggest that the hacker ethic has become a "hollowed out" form of "solutionism" as suggested by Evengy Morozov, meaning that "...the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions."

The piece ends with Scott calling for a reclaiming of the hacker ethic

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/major-firefox-vulnerability-lets-hackers-steal-your-files-using-dodgy-web-ads-20150809-givb77.html

If you needed another reason to install an ad-blocker on your web browser, read on.

Mozilla Firefox users are this week being urged to update to the latest version after an exploit was found being used in the wild which allowed the scooping up of files from users' computers via an ad without leaving a trace behind of the hack.

In a blog post, Mozilla said the ad, found on a Russian news website, was "serving up a Firefox exploit" which allowed code to be run on a user's computer to search files, which were then uploaded to a server in Ukraine. The exploit affects Windows and Linux users; Mac users weren't specifically targeted this time around, but the company warned Mac users "would not be immune" should a hacker decide to target them using the same vulnerability.

And the worst part is, if you're targeted you'll have no way of knowing, because the exploit leaves no trace it has been run on your computer.

If you're like the one million Australians who use ad-blocking software, however, you "may have been protected" from the malicious exploit depending on the type of software you use and the level of filtering, Mozilla has advised. The vulnerability relates to Firefox's PDF viewer, so products without a PDF viewer, such as Firefox for Android mobile devices, were not at risk, it said.

Mozilla is urging anyone using Firefox on Windows or Linux to install the latest Firefox — versions 39.0.3 for personal users and Firefox ESR 38.1.1 for enterprise — which include a patch for the vulnerability.

Original Submission

-- submitted from IRC

Fnord666 writes:

http://www.pymnts.com/news/2015/uk-retail-hack-hits-2-4m-consumers/

A British mobile phone retailer has fallen victim to a customer data breach.

Carphone Warehouse reported on Saturday (Aug. 8) that up to 2.4 million of its customers may have had their personal data accessed in a cyberattack, while encrypted credit card details may have been breached for as many as 90,000 of them, according to BBC News.

The retailer's owner, Dixons Carphone, told the BBC that the "vast majority" of Carphone Warehouse customers are unaffected. Via the outlet, the hack affected some of the company's separately managed divisions, including OneStopPhoneShop.com, e2save.com and Mobiles.co.uk.

The BBC adds that Dixons also provides services to iD Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile, Talk Mobile and some Carphone Warehouse customers.

Original Submission