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Phoenix666 writes:

Although barcodes are currently utilized mainly to keep track of merchandise, they may soon also be used to detect counterfeit goods. We're not talking about ordinary barcode labels, however. Instead, British scientists at Sofmat Ltd and the University of Bradford have devised a new 3D barcode that's actually molded into plastic or composite items.

The system utilizes tiny pins that are integrated into the mold from which the product is made. Each pin can be set to different heights via micro actuators, with each 0.4-micron increment in height corresponding to a specific letter or numeral (0 - 9). The current prototype consists of a four-pin array, allowing for over 1.7 million unique configurations.

The resulting indentations in the finished item are difficult to see and impossible to feel, yet can be read using a white light interferometer or a laser-scanning confocal microscope – a compact laser scanner is in the works, which could wirelessly transmit readings to a smartphone or tablet.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Sciencemag.org:

It's long been known that exercise can lead to denser, stronger bones. On the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website, researchers report that when they injected mice with the peptide irisin, which is produced by muscles during exercise, the bones of the treated mice became stronger (as compared to controls). Irisin has the same amino acid sequence in mice as in humans.

They don't yet know which receptors irisin interacts with, but they suggest it prompts the production of proteins that in turn increase the expression of key genes—those that drive immature cells to differentiate into osteoblasts, which synthesize new bone. If more research can demonstrate a similar effect in humans, the authors say, irisin could offer a new therapy for osteoporosis.

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n1 writes:

ZeroHedge reports:

In a world in which everything is up if only one excludes all the things that are down, a favorite pastime of "strategists" has become announcing how high S&P500 earnings would be if only one excluded energy companies... and the impact of the dollar... and China's economic slowdown... and the Emerging Markets currency crisis... and the [cold|hot|just right] weather... and rising labor costs... and everything else that stands between revenue (non-GAAP of course, just ask Tesla) and the bottom line.

What if one does the inverse: what if instead of eliminating the worst performing sectors (and all other factors that detract from performance in a priced to centrally-planned perfection world) one eliminates the biggest company in the world, Apple?

The result is troubling. [...] When it comes to second quarter earnings, Apple made all the difference in the world, literally, between gains and losses for what was otherwise one of the "best" performing sectors. In fact, AAPL provided a whopping 6% swing in IT sector EPS for Q2, pushing them from down 1.5% Y/Y without AAPL to +4.4% with AAPL.

The article goes on to show that in Q3 of 2015, the sectors earnings are expected to go down 0.4% with AAPL included. Without Apple earnings in the sector are to decline a quite significant 5.9%. It will apparently only gets worse from there, ZeroHedge continues.

So while Q3 tech EPS with AAPL could be a nailbiting toss up, with the final number potentially even ending in the green, in the fourth and final quarter of 2015 - the quarter when supposedly the Fed will have hiked - all bets are off and the Info Tech sector, even with AAPL, will post its biggest EPS decline in over two years.

Does this report tally with the feelings on the ground in the industry and water-cooler talk, or is this purely a financial markets issue?

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Phoenix666 writes:

An international team of researchers, including the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, announced today in Science the observation of a dynamic Mott transition in a superconductor.

The discovery experimentally connects the worlds of classical and quantum mechanics and illuminates the mysterious nature of the Mott transition. It also could shed light on non-equilibrium physics, which is poorly understood but governs most of what occurs in our world. The finding may also represent a step towards more efficient electronics based on the Mott transition.

Since its foundations were laid in the early part of the 20th century, scientists have been trying to reconcile quantum mechanics with the rules of classical or Newtonian physics (like how you describe the path of an apple thrown into the air--or dropped from a tree). Physicists have made strides in linking the two approaches, but experiments that connect the two are still few and far between; physics phenomena are usually classified as either quantum or classical, but not both.

Interesting article on the moment at which materials transition from behaving in a manner consistent with classical physics to one consistent with quantum mechanics.

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AnonTechie writes with a Gizmodo article:

When a jetliner's engine explodes moments before take off, people ask questions. Now, less than a week after that very thing happened to a British Airways 777, answers are starting to emerge—and they're scary.

Turns out the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned both Boeing and General Electric, the 777's engine-maker, about a flaw in the plane's engine design that could result in the very catastrophe that took place last week at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.

What's worse is that the safety warning was issued over four years ago. Then again, Boeing doesn't have a super great track record when it comes to using defective parts on planes full of people.

[Source]: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/14/exclusive-boeing-and-ge-warned-about-airplane-engine-that-exploded.html

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes with an article from IT World:

Microsoft and NATO have agreed to renew a longstanding partnership that will see the tech giant provide the intergovernmental treaty group's Communications and Information Agency with details of Microsoft products and services, as well as new information about cybersecurity threats. 

It's part of the company's Government Security Program, which was created in 2002 to provide governments around the world with controlled access to Microsoft's source code. Since its inception, the GSP has grown to encompass a bunch of other types of information, especially over the past few years. With the new agreement, NATO will get controlled online access to source code for key Microsoft products including Windows and Office; information about Microsoft's cloud services, and intelligence about cybersecurity threats. 

That last piece is of particular importance, especially in light of high-profile attacks on government databases such as the hacking of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which the U.S. government blamed on Chinese crackers.

The Communications and Information Agency believes NATO's members are facing new and increasingly dangerous cybersecurity threats around the world that could affect their citizens and their economies. It sees the rapid and early sharing of information about those threats as key to avoiding them.

[...] Microsoft has other agreements with more than 40 agencies from international organizations and countries including Australia, Austria, Canada, Poland and Russia. NATO will be able to share some security information with its constituent states in order to protect them from threats.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The domain sharebeast.com has been seized by the US government. Although the site's operators had prohibited "...Content that violates the rights of others, such as Content that infringes any copyright..." and promised that

If your copyrighted or trademarked works are on the ShareBeast website without your permission, please contact abuse@ShareBeast.com describing the work that has been infringed, where it is located on the website, and provide your contact information and a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner, or authorized by the owner, of the copyrighted or trademarked work. Illegal files will be removed immediately after notice with sufficient information.

the RIAA applauded the closure. Its chairman said:

This is a huge win for the music community and legitimate music services...Sharebeast operated with flagrant disregard for the rights of artists and labels while undermining the legal marketplace.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes with an article from El Reg:

Canadian security researcher Yannick Formaggio has detailed a significant flaw in VxWorks, the real-time operating system (RTOS) made by Intel subsidiary Wind River.

Speaking at the 44CON event made famous last week, Formaggio detailed how an integer overflow mess allows remote code execution in the operating system. Formaggio discovered the flaw after fuzzing the OS at the request of a client keen to understand its workings better. That effort led the researcher to declare that Wind River generally generally does a fine job of security and takes it seriously, but hadn't considered what might happen when a credential was set to a negative value.

Once Formaggio tried that trick, he found he could defeat or bypass all memory protections and set up a backdoor account. Which of course is just what you don't want to be possible in the kind of devices that require an RTOS, as most are expected to be extraordinarily reliable and secure so they can get on with jobs like running industrial equipment, planes and the Curiosity Rover that Wind River proudly claims as a customer.

Formaggio also found that the operating system's “FTP server is susceptible to ring buffer overflow when accessed at a high speed” and crashes when sent a “specially crafted username and password”.

Versions 5.5 through 6.9.4.1 have the problem, which means many millions of devices need patching.

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eof writes:

MIT News has a story on technology for 3-D printing developed at the school.

Other groups have attempted to 3-D print glass objects, but a major obstacle has been the extremely high temperature needed to melt the material. Some have used tiny particles of glass, melded together at a lower temperature in a technique called sintering. But such objects are structurally weak and optically cloudy, eliminating two of glass's most desirable attributes: strength and transparency.

The high-temperature system developed by the MIT team retains those properties, producing printed glass objects that are both strong and fully transparent to light. Like other 3-D printers now on the market, the device can print designs created in a computer-assisted design program, producing a finished product with little human intervention.

Both an academic paper and a demonstration video are available.

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Phoenix666 writes:

What began as a nod to conservation by a state government ended as a surprising discovery of Washington's 10,000-year human history.

Salmon conservation is not normally the business of a state's transportation agency, but in Washington, the State Department of Transportation tries to restore areas near large projects. Nine such projects are underway now, and one of them has caught the attention of the archaeological community.

Archeologists found stone tools buried deep under the river bank slated for a salmon conservation project. The discovery offers new evidence of earlier history of Washington's ancient humans than researchers knew existed. It also reveals the presence of greater cultural diversity than archaeologists had previously thought the area had, according to an article in the journal PaleoAmerica. This all came from "a region notoriously lacking" significant sites such as this.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Ten automakers have committed to the government and a private safety group that they will include automatic emergency braking in all new cars, a step transportation officials say could significantly reduce traffic deaths and injuries.
...
Automatic emergency braking includes a range of systems designed to address the large number of crashes, especially rear-end crashes, in which drivers do not apply the brakes or fail to apply sufficient braking power to avoid or mitigate a crash. The systems use on-vehicle sensors such as radar, cameras or lasers to detect an imminent crash, warn the driver and, if the driver does not take sufficient action, engage the brakes.

The systems could prevent or mitigate an estimated 80 percent of the auto and commercial truck rear-end collisions that cause about 1,700 deaths and a half million injuries annually, according to a recent report by the National Transportation Safety Board. There are about 1.7 million rear-end crashes each year in the U.S.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Using a novel mathematical approach, a team of MIT researchers developed a domain-specific programming language for generating custom materials based on a set of design specifications. The software, dubbed Matriarch for "Materials Architecture", allows users to combine and rearrange material building blocks in almost any conceivable shape.

The work suggests that engineers will be able to reach the next stage of materials design through fundamental control of a protein's final assembled structure.

"Matriarch could very well be the core of a new molecular design process, where engineering decisions can be made at arbitrary scales," says Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) postdoc Tristan Giesa '15, co-author of the study. "The idea is to start at ground level. If engineers require a polymer material to have specific properties—strength, resilience, size to name a few—then we need to question what must be done at a fundamental level to achieve these properties."

With Matriarch engineers can explore what happens to a material's properties when its architecture changes. Accessible as an open source Python library, the program will ultimately be used as a tool for engineers to quickly discover new materials and design them according to their needs.

More detail and a brief code snippet available in the article.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket sees this story from CNet:

Just because some animals have things like extraordinary vision doesn't make them some kind of natural superheroes. In fact, the Kryptonite of some animals like owls, mantis shrimp and eagles might be that their other organs are weaker to compensate for their "supersight" powers.

A study conducted by researchers at Lund University in Sweden examined the Mexican cave fish, an omnivore that has no eyes and lives in dark, underwater caves where food sources are more scarce. The study claims that the loss of the cave fish's eyes may have been a strategic way to compensate for the lack of food and energy it needs to survive.

Researchers published the results of their study on Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The study examined the biological makeup of the Mexican tetra or blind cave fish, a freshwater fish that uses sense organs called lateral lines that detect vibrations and movement in the water to show it where it's going. Researchers also compared the cave fish to similar, surface area fish with more developed eyes that live in areas with more abundant food sources.

Researchers studied certain parts of the brain that control vision in both types of fish and calculated the oxygen consumption needed to operate a set of functional eyes. The results showed that the loss of the cave fish's eyes saved approximately 5 percent to 15 percent of its total energy budget depending on the age of the fish, according to the study's abstract. "Animals with large and well-developed eyes, necessary for their survival, pay a high price for them," Warrant says. "As all animals have a strictly limited energy budget, a major investment in the visual system only occurs at a cost to other organ systems."

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Phoenix666 writes:

A Surrey school student has co-authored a paper investigating components that could be important for the future of flexible electronics.

The 18-year-old studied source gated transistors, a lightweight alternative to traditional transistors. Their usability has been questioned due to some self-heating effects.

Source gated transistors (SGTs) are more energy efficient and more electrically robust than traditional transistors - the fundamental building blocks of electronic devices. They allow the control of colour and brightness in the pixels on a screen, among a raft of other variables.

Thomas Burridge, a sixth-form student, co-authored the paper during a placement with the University of Surrey last summer, through the educational charity Satro. He wrote computer code to simulate SGTs self-heating and processed the results, then checked them against data from real experiments.

Simple design changes to the geometry of the SGT, he found, all but eliminated self-heating and its damaging effects. The new research, presented at the British Science Festival and published in Scientific Reports, shows that these effects are actually minimal.

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takyon writes:

Google has updated its Cardboard VR template. The cardboard frame holds your smartphone and lenses in order to make a simple and cheap virtual reality headset:

Even with the simplicity of the design, the company did make a few changes to Cardboard 2. The base model now requires only three steps to set up with your smartphone instead of seven. The viewports are smaller and circular, indicating that there's more cardboard used to hold the phone in place. Even with the increase of material used throughout the viewer, it's able to hold large phones such as the iPhone 6 Plus and the Nexus 6.

Here's a direct download link. It's about 9 megabytes and contains the technical specifications, "Works with Google Cardboard" - the best practices for third-party Cardboard sellers, technical drawings, and 3D models.

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