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jan_jes writes:

Researchers developed a[sic] multipurpose, fish-shaped microrobots — called microfish — that swim around efficiently in liquids, are chemically powered by hydrogen peroxide, and magnetically controlled.

They used an innovative 3D printing technology to develop these microrobots.

These proof-of-concept synthetic microfish will inspire a new generation of “smart” microrobots that have diverse capabilities such as detoxification, sensing, and directed drug delivery.

The technique used to fabricate the microfish provides numerous improvements over other methods traditionally employed to create microrobots with various locomotion mechanisms, such as microjet engines, microdrillers, and microrockets.

http://www.rtoz.org/2015/08/27/3d-printed-microfish-capable-of-removing-and-sensing-toxins/

AnonTechie writes:

People, trucks and even military tanks have tried and failed the task of pulling apart two phone books lying face up with their pages interleaved, like a shuffled deck of cards. While physicists have long known that this must be due to enormous frictional forces, exactly how these forces are generated has been an enigma – until now.

A team of physicists from France and Canada has discovered that it is the layout of the books coupled with the act of pulling that is producing the force.

http://phys.org/news/2015-08-mystery-impossible-interleaved.html

[Source]: http://theconversation.com/solved-the-mystery-of-why-its-impossible-to-pull-apart-interleaved-phone-books-46697

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Disney and LucasFilms will reportedly use computer generated imagery to digitally recreate Grand Moff Tarkin, the character Peter Cushing played in Star Wars back in 1977. Cushing died at age 81 in 1994:

A source told the Daily Mail that Disney and LucasFilms are using CGI to bring Grand Moff Tarkin back to life for the spin-off film which is centred on a back story about Darth Vader.

Cushing starred in many of the Hammer Horror films with Christopher Lee, including Dracula and Dr Frankenstein. He also appeared in two Doctor Who films, based on the BBC sci-fi series.

CGI technicians have been particularly challenged in recreating his legs and feet, because they never appeared on camera in the original film. As his character was a Galactic Imperial officer, his uniform included tight riding boots, which Cushing complained were uncomfortable. So director George Lucas gave him permission to wear slippers and instructed the camera operators to only film him from above the knees. Original footage is vital in the process of computer generating real people, to ensure that it appears as accurate as possible.

With the power of CGI, Tarkin/Cushing can be made to leap over railings, dodge blaster fire in mid-air, and high five Jar Jar Binks.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

If you're like me and dig a good RTS game but run Linux as your primary desktop, today is your lucky day:

Exactly one year to the day after writing Company of Heroes 2 might be coming to Linux, today marks the planned release of the Linux port of CoH 2.

Company of Heroes 2 for Linux isn't up on Steam at the moment, but it's expected to appear there within the next few hours. As mentioned last week with regards to the system requirements, this Linux/OSX game port by Feral Interactive Games lists Intel or NVIDIA graphics as the requirement. "Requires an Intel Iris Pro graphics card or an NVIDIA 600 series graphics card or better with driver version 352.21 or later." But a GeForce GTX 760 or better is what Feral recommends for the game on Linux. There's no mention at all of AMD Catalyst or RadeonSI support, so we'll just have to see what goes wrong with it later today...

No, this isn't a soyvertisement. I just dig when good games and Linux meet.

[Ed. additions] Also noted on twitter:

Feral Interactive on Twitter: "Mac Linux ready their armies: Company of Heroes 2 will arrive Aug 27 on Steam and soon after on MAS. Minisite: http://t.co/VUysnoVnR6"

Also, it appears that it will have per-platform multiplayer.

Nice GamingonLinux article/review of the release.

Original Submission

zafiro17 writes:

Japan is home to an extremely important vessel: it's the ship that lays the trans-oceanic cables that form the backbone of telecommunication, that is, the Internet. Satellites play an increasingly important role in shipping packets, but the bulk of the connections pass through underwater cables.

The laying process involves checking submarine geography to avoid steep rises and falls, and then calculating tide movements and the trajectory of the falling cables in relation to ship speed, the firm said. Only then are the cables laid and buried by the Subaru, which was built in 2000.

The cables, encased in sheaths of rolled metal, are laid and buried deep — at an average of 1,000-1,500 meters below the sea surface — so as not to interfere with fishing vessels. However, the Subaru can lay cables much deeper at 8,000 meters below the waves.

Speaking of backbones, the Internet's backbone - in the protocol sense of the word - remains unfortunately vulnerable. The issue is the Border Gateway Protocol, at the heart of routers everywhere. And its vulnerabilities are not being tackled with a level of effort commensurate with their importance.

Large routers operated by Internet service providers and major corporations use BGP to figure out how to get data between different places. Each of these major routers turns to others like itself—ones operated by other companies—for the information it needs to most efficiently dispatch data to its destination. Companies operating the routers manually choose which other routers theirs will trust.

Unfortunately, BGP doesn't have security mechanisms built in that allow routers to verify the information they are receiving or the identity of the routers providing it. Very bad things can happen when routers spread incorrect information about how to route data, intentionally or otherwise.

That problem has been known for decades. It was the basis of the hacking group L0pht's 1998 claim before Congress that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. But incidents that have illuminated BGP's flaws have prodded some security companies to take it more seriously.

Read more about it at Technology Review, who is reporting on one of the important presentations revealed at the 2015 Blackhat Conference earlier this month.

Original Submission

mrchew1982 writes:

Adafruit has released step by step instructions to build your own 10" Raspberry Pi 2 based computer.

From the article:

This project takes a DIY approach with no compromises in cost. The cost of this build easily goes over low budget DIY projects, but it's [meant] to be [a] premium build. It will be used for monitoring and wirelessly controlling a farm of printers. A dedicated linux box with a decent sized screen could cost about the same amount, but when the process of building a project is more meaningful than getting the cheapest deal, this sorta thing becomes a trophy item as well as a functioning utility. Also, we can mount it to anything and design custom brackets to adjust it in any configuration, and that's pretty darn cool.

A PDF of the instructions is also available.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

in the long run the fortunes of nations are determined by population trends. Japan is not only the world's fastest-aging major economy (already every fourth person is older than 65, and by 2050 that share will be nearly 40 percent), its population is also declining. Today's 127 million will shrink to 97 million by 2050, and forecasts show shortages of the young labor force needed in construction and health care. Who will maintain Japan's extensive and admirably efficient transportation infrastructures? Who will take care of millions of old people? By 2050 people above the age of 80 will outnumber the children.

Who will take care of millions of old people? Robots!

Original Submission

FlyingSock writes:

The German high court has upheld an earlier ruling, that Apple's "Slide to Unlock" Patent (EU Patent 1964022) is a trivial extension of the state of the art embodied by the Swedish Neonode N1 released in 2003 (with Windows CE), and is therefore invalid.

From Reuters:

The Neonode N1 had substantially similar technical features, the patent court had found. It ruled Apple's easier-to-use interface was not in itself patentable. Neonode sold tens of thousands of phones before declaring bankruptcy in 2008. It reorganized itself as an intellectual property firm licensing its patented optical technology for use in phones, tablets, readers and other touchscreen devices.

Motorola Mobility, at the time a unit of Google Inc but now owned by China's Lenovo Group Ltd, filed the original suit in a Munich court against the Apple user interface patent. Apple won that case but the ruling was later overturned by the federal patent court.

Also at Heise (German).

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Algae is proving to be pretty darn useful – in recent years, it's been used to produce oxygen, purify wastewater, provide light and serve as a source of biofuel. Now, bioplastics firm Algix and clean tech company Effekt are making flexible foam out of the stuff, too.

The process starts with the harvesting of algae from waste streams in the US and Asia, using a mobile floating platform. In such settings, the overly-nutrient-rich waters often create algal blooms, which in turn cause the death of aquatic life such as fish. Therefore, no additional fertilizers are required to grow the algae, and removing it can actually help the local environment.

That harvested algae biomass is subsequently dewatered and dried, polymerized into pellets, then combined with other compounds to ultimately form a soft, pliable foam. Depending on the formulation and intended application, the algae makes up anywhere from 15 to 60 percent of the finished product, which is said to be similar in quality to traditional petroleum-derived foam.

The term "pond scum" may be in the process of being rehabilitated.

Original Submission

khallow writes:

The Stockholm Environment Institute issued a report which attempts to quantify the effects of a loophole in the creation of carbon offset credits on EU carbon markets which was removed in 2013.

Joint Implementation is an activity allowed by the Kyoto Treaty to help countries with firm emission targets meet their goals by implementing emission reduction projects in other countries (including non-EU countries) with likewise emission targets. In practice, this was implemented by the EU carbon markets as carbon credits.

A considerable number of such projects were created in Russia and the Ukraine (though the study cites emission reduction projects in other countries, particularly the former Eastern Bloc) and allowed to sell carbon credits on the EU carbon markets. The study evaluated in particular claims of "additionality" for a sample of these projects, namely, the claim that the projects would not occur otherwise (pp. 5-6 from the report PDF).

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes:

Chinese tech companies reportedly hiring 'cheerleaders' to motivate programmers

At least one tech company in China appears to be taking a page out of Silicon Valley's infamous "workplace culture" handbook by offering its employees some rather unique benefits — one of which includes personal cheerleaders.

The country's government-run news service China.org.cn reported last week that internet companies "across China" are hiring "pretty, talented girls that help create a fun work environment."

Dubbed "programming cheerleaders," these young women serve to chit-chat and play Ping-Pong with employees as part of their role.

The duties of an office cheerleader are said to include buying programmers breakfast, chit-chatting and playing Ping-Pong with them. (Facebook/Trending in China)

They also sometimes smile and clap for male employees who play guitar in the office, as indicated by photos posted to the news service's verified "Trending in China" Facebook page.

And unlike Google and Facebook, where employees must walk (or ride Segways) to company restaurants for free food, these cheerleaders will reportedly take breakfast orders from employees right at their desks.

bitshifter writes:

From MIT and KurzweilAI.net:

MIT and Samsung researchers have developed a new approach to achieving long life and a 20 to 30 percent improvement in power density (the amount of power stored in a given space) in rechargeable batteries — using a solid electrolyte, rather than the liquid used in today's most common rechargeables. The new materials could also greatly improve safety and last through "hundreds of thousands of cycles."

[...] The electrolyte in rechargeable batteries is typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery's two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging. That material has been responsible for the overheating and fires that, for example, resulted in a temporary grounding of all of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets. With a solid electrolyte, there's no safety problem, he says. "You could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there's nothing there to burn."

The key to making all this feasible, Ceder says, was finding solid materials that could conduct ions fast enough to be useful in a battery. The initial findings focused on a class of materials known as superionic lithium-ion conductors, which are compounds of lithium, germanium, phosphorus, and sulfur. But the principles derived from this research could lead to even more effective materials, the team says, and they could function below about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another "almost there" revolutionary battery technology?

Design principles for solid-state lithium superionic conductors [abstract]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Hawaii is often the first to roll out new renewable energy projects and for good reason. The island state depends on imported fuel to provide most of its power, but that is changing quickly. The state has a plan to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2045 and it has already installed wind power plants, sophisticated smart grid systems, plenty of rooftop solar and, now, the first fully closed-cycle Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant in the U.S.

OTEC is a process that produces electricity by using the temperature difference between the warm ocean surface waters of tropical areas and the much colder deep water below. The plant that Hawaii has just installed pumps water from the warm shoreline as well as from the cold deeper ocean through a heat exchanger. The resulting steam drives a turbine and produce electricity at an onshore power station, pictured below.
...
The OTEC plant has a capacity of 105 kW, which is enough to power 120 Hawaiian homes per year. That may seem paltry, but even at that small capacity, it's the largest plant of its kind in the world. It will serve as a demo site called the Ocean Energy Research Center to prove the potential of this type of technology and to inspire other places in the region like Okinawa and Guam to install something similar.

The article projects electricity provided by a scaled-up version of the plant would retail at $0.20/kwh. Given that Hawaii has the highest electricity rates in the nation, in the neighborhood of $0.48/kwh, that's a big savings.

Original Submission

fritsd writes:

BBC News has an article about a newly described condition called "aphantasia", where people can't visualize an imaginary scene:

Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex [paywalled].

Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they find hard to convey to others."

How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability of human experience."

If you think you have aphantasia or hyperphantasia and would like to be involved in Prof Zeman's research he is happy to be contacted at a.zeman@exeter.ac.uk

If this is true, isn't it fascinating that we have apparently always had two groups of people: those (majority) who could "count sheep" in order to fall asleep, and assumed that everybody could, and those (minority) who thought that "counting sheep" was just some weird expression, surely not something actual people could actually do.

Personally, my mum once advised me to count sheep; I could visualize them jumping over the fence, but it didn't help much in getting me to sleep. Clearly the genes for this "aphantasia" are not linked to those for insomnia.

Original Submission

basstard writes:

People genetically prone to low vitamin-D levels are at increased risk of multiple sclerosis, a large study suggests.

The findings, based on the DNA profiles of tens of thousands of people of European descent, add weight to the theory that the sunshine vitamin plays a role in MS. Scientists are already testing whether giving people extra vitamin D might prevent or ease MS. Experts say the jury is still out. It is likely that environmental and genetic factors are involved in this disease of the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, they say. And if you think you may not be getting sufficient vitamin D from sunlight or your diet, you should discuss this with your doctor. Taking too much vitamin D can also be dangerous.

Research around the world already shows MS is more common in less sunny countries, further from the equator. But it is not clear if this relationship is causal - other factors might be at play. To better understand the association, investigators at McGill University in Canada compared the prevalence of MS in a large group of Europeans with and without a genetic predisposition to low vitamin D.

Research article can be found from Plos Medicine.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Not content with using hybrid artificial photosynthesis to turn CO2 emissions into plastics and biofuel, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) now claim to have produced an enhanced system that uses water and solar energy to generate hydrogen, which is in turn used to produce methane, the main element of natural gas, from carbon dioxide. Generating such gases from a renewable resource may one day help bolster, or even replace, fossil fuel resources extracted from dwindling sub-surface deposits.

Simply put, the process of photosynthesis turns light energy into chemical energy. In plants and certain types of algae, energy from incoming sunlight is used as the power source to synthesize simple carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. In the original Berkeley Lab hybrid system, a membrane arrangement of nanowires created from silicon and titanium oxide harvested solar energy and transported electrons to microbes where they used that energy to transform carbon dioxide into a range of chemical compounds.

Produces methane...Sorry, cows, you have been rendered superfluous.

Hybrid bioinorganic approach to solar-to-chemical conversion [abstract]

Original Submission