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Phoenix666 writes:

The Hyperloop, detailed by the SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk in a 57-page alpha white paper in August 2013, is a transportation network of above-ground tubes that could span hundreds of miles. With extremely low air pressure inside those tubes, capsules filled with people would zip through them at near supersonic speeds. Musk published the paper encouraging anyone interested to pursue the idea, since he's kinda a busy guy.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced today that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom. The two companies will lend their expertise in exchange for stock options in the company, joining the army of engineers from the likes of Boeing and SpaceX already lending their time to the effort.
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The startup plans to start construction on a full-scale, passenger-ready Hyperloop in 2016. The prototype will run 5 miles through Quay Valley, a planned community rising from nothing along Interstate 5, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ahlborn says he's got several potential investors.

The hyperloop would certainly redefine the concept of commuting.

Related: SpaceX will hold a Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2016.

takyon writes:

From the EFF Press Release:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI to gain access to documents revealing the government's plans to use Rapid DNA. The FBI said it found no records responsive to EFF's FOIA requests, even though it's been working to roll out Rapid DNA and lobbying Congress to approve nationwide use for more than five years.

Rapid DNA analyzers—laser printer-sized, portable machines that allow anyone to process a DNA sample in as little as 50 minutes—are the newest frontier in DNA collection and profiling in law enforcement. With Rapid DNA, the police can collect a a DNA sample from a suspect, extract a profile, and match that profile against a database in less time than it takes to book someone—and it's all done by non-scientists in the field, well outside an accredited lab.

"EFF has long been concerned about the privacy risks associated with collecting, testing, storing and sharing of genetic data. The use of Rapid DNA stands to vastly increase the collection of DNA, because it makes it much easier for the police to get it from anyone they want, whenever they want. The public has a right to know how this will be carried out and how the FBI will protect peoples' privacy," said Jennifer Lynch, EFF senior staff attorney. ''Rapid DNA can't accurately extract a profile from evidence containing commingled body fluids, increasing the risk that people could be mistakenly linked to crimes they didn't commit.''

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall.

The Beloit College Mindset List, which this year is as old as the entering students themselves, is created by Ron Nief, Emeritus Director of Public Affairs; Tom McBride, Emeritus Professor of English; and Charles Westerberg. Additional items on the list as well as commentaries and guides are found
here and at www.themindsetlist.com Regular updates and discussions are on Facebook and Twitter.

See the Mindset List for the Class of 2019

Previous lists are available online dating back to the Class of 2002.

Among the 50 entries I found it interesting that, from their perspective, there's always been Google, South Park, and mass-produced hybrid vehicles. What is/are your favorite(s) and why? What did they leave out?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As online giant Amazon.com Inc. charges into the $300 billion U.S. apparel market, Macy's Inc. is running for the dressing room.

Even Macy's acknowledges there's little it can do to keep customers from shopping online for basic clothing -- like T-shirts, men's jeans and tighty whities. Yet the department store chain is clinging to the idea that many consumers will want to try on other kinds of apparel, such as bikinis, bras and high-fashion items, before making a purchase.
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As part of its effort, Macy's recently revamped its fitting rooms in the women's swimsuit and athletic department at its Manhattan Beach, California, store. Macy's is using technology - - smartphones and company-provided tablets -- to make it easier for customers to try on items without having to leave the dressing room or ask a sales clerk for more help.
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Shoppers browse swimsuits and yoga pants displayed on mannequins. When a style looks interesting, they use a Macy's app on their smartphones or the tablets to select their sizes. The items are delivered to a fitting room through a chute. Once in the fitting room, customers can request more sizes and other items using the app.

The result is that shoppers spend more time browsing and less time undressing, redressing and rummaging through racks, increasing the likelihood they'll find something to buy.

The article does not explain how selected items find their way from the rack to the delivery chute--whether by sales employees manually finding the items or some automated process.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It's been three years since NASA's Curiosity rover, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory, made its bold skycrane-assisted landing on the surface of Mars.

Since then the rover has progressed across a wealth of varied and fascinating terrain. The southward looking panorama here has been stitched together from images taken back in April 2015 with the rover cameras - on Martian days (or sols) 952 and 953 after landing (a solar day on Mars is 24 hours and 39 minutes).

A series of beautiful views for Mars fans. The original file can be found in this 70MB jpg. And the original Press Release from NASA is also available.

The land forms are reminiscent of the Painted Desert in shape, if not in coloring.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] The holographic technology Aerial 3D, based on using laser-induced plasma, enables modifying air molecules to give the appearance of brilliant points of light, and thus creating pixels in suspension. However, the technology is dangerous because it can burn the skin.

Japanese researchers at the University of Tsukuba have augmented the speed of their lasers to create holograms, still based on plasma, but which can now be touched in complete safety.

In order to heat air molecules to make a pixel of light appear, the researchers fire ultra-short laser bursts on the order of femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second).

The ultra-short bursts cannot damage the skin. The holograms drawn in the air react in real time to touch and generate haptic feedback. For example, one can break the hologram with a touch and feel the shockwaves generated by plasma, as though the light had physical substance.

Disney imagineer Ivan Poupyrev presented a technique at Makers Faire a couple years ago that used directed puffs of air (vortices) to create haptic feedback.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

Islamic State militants beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, 82, a renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal where valuable artifacts had been moved for safekeeping.

Before the city's capture by Isis, Syrian officials said they moved hundreds of ancient statues to safe locations out of concern they would be destroyed by the militants. Isis was likely to be looking for portable, easily saleable items that are not registered.

Unesco warned last month that looting had been taking place on an "industrial scale". Isis advertises its destruction of sites such as Nimrud in Iraq but says little about the way plundered antiquities help finance its activities. Stolen artefacts make up a significant stream of the group's estimated multi-million dollar revenues, along with oil sales and straightforward taxation and extortion.

Asaad had worked over the past few decades with US, French, German and Swiss archaeological missions on excavations and research in Palmyra's famed 2,000-year-old ruins. "He was a fixture, you can't write about Palmyra's history or anything to do with Palmyrian work without mentioning Khaled Asaad. It's like you can't talk about Egyptology without talking about Howard Carter."

Archaeological experts say Isis took over the already existing practice of illegal excavation and looting, which until 2014 was carried out by various armed groups, or individuals, or the Syrian regime. Isis initially levied 20% taxes on those it "licensed" to excavate but later began to hire its own own archaeologists, digging teams and machinery.

"Their systematic campaign seeks to take us back into pre-history. But they will not succeed."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] The deal is official: NBC Universal has invested $200 million in the website "Buzzfeed." The roughly 180 million Euro is a stock transaction and should clear the way to a strategic partnership, according to the companies.

"Buzzfeed" and NBC Universal want among other things to cooperate on reporting for the 2016 Olympic Games. The broadcaster NBC holds the rights to coverage for the Olympics in the USA. To the media group also belongs a Hollywood studio, that recently produced box office hits like "Jurassic World" and "Minions." NBC Universal is itself owned by the American cable giant Comcast.
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In the past weeks NBC Universal has also invested $200 million in the online media company Vox, to which the blog "Re/code" and the tech website "The Verge" belong. The deal awarded Vox shares valued at $1.1 billion.

Traditional media companies have merged with online media before, such as the Time-Warner/AOL deal and News Corporation's acquisition of MySpace. Can it work this time, or are the cultures of the two realms fundamentally incompatible?

Reuters.

Phoenix666 writes:

The NSA (National Security Agency) is funding development of an architecture for a "safer" Internet of Things (IoT), in the hope of incorporating better security at a product's design phase.

The controversial US intelligence agency is bestowing a $299,000, one-year grant to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) for a project that aims to build a lightweight virtualisation architecture which will make it easier to build security into IoT systems before they leave the factory.

There are some interesting reactions to the announcement on the Sophos Naked Security blog.

Why would the NSA invest in a project that would make it harder for them to spy on you?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Raspberry Pi owners can dig out their SD-card formatting tools of choice again, because a new version of FreeBSD has emerged for the machines,

RaspBSD will work on the Pi models B and B+ and promises to run on more "soon". The "more" looks like including the BeagleBone Black and the Banana Pi.

FreeBSD has been available on the Pi for some time, as recorded in this post by the Pi foundation. This cut of the OS is the work of FreeBSD contributor and forum administrator Brad Davis, who says "The Goal of this project is to build images easily useable by anyone. Sometimes that means images preloaded with different packages to help new users get started."

Anyone working on fun Pi projects this summer?

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

TechCrunch has a story on Apple Watch & Apple Pay.

FYI the provider of the study, Wirstly, has this in their about page:

Our vision is to contribute to the Apple Watch success by delivering innovative tools and services to developers and marketers of the platform.

TechCrunch:

Well it turns out that people who are willing to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on gadgets like to use gadgets to spend more dollars.

An exclamation point-laden report released today from Wristly, an organization that Apple has cited in the past, detailed the pretty impressive impact that Apple Watch has had on adoption of the Apple Pay service. The data, which comes from a survey of 1,000 respondents, also suggests that consumers with Apple Watches actually show a preference for shopping at retailers that allow them to use Apple Pay.

The survey finds that 19% of Watch owners tried out Apple Pay for the first time on their Watch, and that 80% of Watch users overall have used the service. Frequent use of the service is also pretty high with 78% of Watch/Pay users reporting that they use the service on at least a weekly basis.

For the 20% of owners that have yet to make the jump, the top reason cited was Apple Pay's lack of support for their personal bank. Further dissecting the non-users, Wristly's findings also detail that "only about 5% of Apple Watch users are unlikely to use Apple Pay."

This isn't all that surprising as people willing to make the plunge for the Apple Watch are likely pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem and looking to get the most out of what it offers. Still, 80% is a pretty impressive adoption rate, though I'd be interested to see data on Apple Pay adoption amongst iPhone users overall as well.

What truly is surprising is what the study has to say about Apple Watch users' eagerness to use Apple Pay over other payment methods. The study shows that 62% of Watch users prefer to do business with merchants that use Apple Pay over others and that 86% of users actively look for Apple Pay support when they're making a retail purchase.

According to this BBC article from July 21, 2015, approximately 2.5-3 million units have been sold.

Original Submission

fleg writes:

The Guardian is reporting that the first (almost) fully formed human brain has been grown in a lab. Note, no paper or data has yet been published, but...

An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University. The team behind the feat hope the brain could transform our understanding of neurological disease.

Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases. It could also be used to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, since the regions they affect are in place during an early stage of brain development.

Is it thinking?

The ethical concerns were non-existent, said Rene Anand of Ohio State University. "We don't have any sensory stimuli entering the brain. This brain is not thinking in any way."

Personally I'd like to see it hooked up to an fMRI just to check.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

TechCrunch article:

Secure encrypted email provider ProtonMail, which runs a "zero access" PGP mail service based in Switzerland has now open sourced its webmail interface — meaning all the code that runs locally on the user's computer is available for inspection.

The startup was founded last year to capitalize on post-Snowden paranoia by offering client-side encryption and host servers that live far from the NSA's prying eyes (if not the Swiss equivalent). And while it open sourced its cryptography code from the get-go, it's now letting outsiders parse its webmail client too — at the same time as launching v2 of the client. ProtonMail is hosting the source code for v2 on Github.

Co-founder Andy Yen says ProtonMail now invited more than 500,000 users off its waiting list, up from 350,000 beta sign ups back in March. He tells TechCrunch it's planning to remove the waiting list entirely this fall.

Yen says ProtonMail's user-base is currently 55 per cent hailing from Europe (with Germany as the largest EU country in terms of users), and around a third (30 per cent) from North America. The U.S. is the single largest country (as you might expect, given population size).

Given tricky questions of trust in a post-Snowden era, Yen argues that open source is an important component for pro-privacy services — coupled with having a solid financial base. ProtonMail started out by raising $550,000 in crowdfunds, but has since topped that up with a $2 million seed round, from Charles River Ventures and Swiss not-for-profit incubator FONGIT. So it has the security of institutional backing.

Anyone here familiar with the company, or use this? I'm also wondering what form of ROI the 'institutional backers' expect to receive from the $2M seed.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Video bloggers (or vloggers) on sites such as YouTube must be up-front about videos that are paid advertisements, according to UK's Cap:

The UK's Committee of Advertising Practice (Cap) has published new guidelines for video bloggers who enter marketing relationships with brands. The rules encourage vloggers to label advertising content and explain when they have been asked to feature products sent to them by companies. Videos could carry digital text such as "sponsored" or "ads". Last year, the advertising authority ruled that several vlogs praising Oreo biscuits were not clearly marked.

[...] In a statement, Shahriar Coupal, director of Cap, said: "Wherever ads appear we should be confident we can trust what an advertiser says; it's simply not fair if we're being advertised to and are not made aware of that fact." However, the guidelines noted that when free items are sent to vloggers without any editorial or content control over videos exerted by the brand in question, there is no need for them to follow the Cap code.

The Oreo videos in question were "banned" by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), but not removed from YouTube. The statement "Thanks to Oreo for making this video possible" was not considered sufficient acknowledgment that the videos were advertisements.

Phoenix666 writes:

Violent conflicts in Neolithic Europe were held more brutally than has been known so far. This emerges from a recent anthropological analysis of the roughly 7000-year-old mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten by researcher of the Universities of Basel and Mainz. The findings, published in the journal PNAS, show that victims were murdered and deliberately mutilated.

It was during the time when Europeans first began to farm. To what degree conflicts and wars featured in the early Neolithic (5600 to 4900 B.C.), and especially in the so-called Linear Pottery culture (in German, Linearbandkeramik, LBK), is a disputed theme in research. It is particularly unclear whether social tensions were responsible for the termination of this era. So far two mass graves from this period were known to stem from armed conflicts (Talheim, Germany, and Asparn/Schletz, Austria).
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Besides various types of (bone) injuries caused by arrows, they also found many cases of massive damage to the head, face and teeth, some inflicted on the victims shorty before or after their death. In addition, the attackers systematically broke their victims' legs, pointing to torture and deliberate mutilation. Only few female remains were found, which further indicates that women were not actively involved in the fighting and that they were possibly abducted by the attackers.

The abstract from the original study can be found at pnas.org.

From Schöneck-Kilianstädten to Rwanda, it seems like humanity hasn't come very far.

Original Submission

More Exoskeleton Development from Japan

basstard writes:

Bloomberg writes that Mitsui & Co., best known among investors as Japan's top oil and iron-ore trader, and its partners have built a wearable suit—a backpack fitted with belts and leg supports—that enhances a user's ability to lift and move heavy objects. The idea is that when worn by farmers, or at nursing homes or construction sites, strength is enhanced.

The device, known as the Assist Suit AWN-03, was developed at ActiveLink, Panasonic Corp.'s robot-development unit. Weighing in at 6 kilograms (13.2 pounds), the suit allows the wearer to lift as much as 15 kilograms without stressing the lower back, according to Mitsui, which demonstrated the outfit to media at its Tokyo headquarters on Aug. 14.

Such a machine is tailor-made for Japan, where labor shortages and a shrinking and aging population are already causing construction delays, says the trading house. But the Assist Suit is just a first step. In two years, Mitsui and its partners aim to release the next iteration, complete with mechanical arms and legs. Further out, future versions could start to take on Aliens-like proportions. "What we have in mind is the Aliens power loader," says Tomoya Tsutsumi, an official at Mitsui's construction and industrial machinery division.

General contractor Kajima Corp. and Yamato Holdings Co., which offers door-to-door parcel delivery services, are among dozens of companies planning to try the technology, according to Tsutsumi. The target is to sell 1,000 units in the initial year after the Assist Suit's release.

"Young workers tend to want to work in a more comfortable environment so businesses are having trouble finding enough workers when labor conditions are harsh," Tsutsumi said.

Article includes a Youtube video demonstrating some pretty nifty stuff.

[More After the Break]