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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers from the University of Leeds and Sheffield University have created a way to move data through magnetic nanowires by using surface acoustic waves as the motivating force. Being developed for use in so-called racetrack solid-state memory, the researchers claim that using sound waves for data transfer should markedly increase computer processing speeds while vastly reducing power consumption.

[...] Looking for a way to overcome these power inefficiencies, Dr Tom Hayward from the University of Sheffield and Professor John Cunningham from the University of Leeds together hit upon the idea of manipulating magnetic domain walls by passing two counter-propagating surface acoustic waves (SAW) across the piezoelectric substrate to which the nanowires are fixed.

In other words, the researchers sent two sound waves across the surface of a racetrack memory in opposite directions. Where the sound waves met, a standing acoustic wave was formed which was then used to isolate and manipulate the arrays for the more efficient movement of energy across the magnetic domain walls.

Pretty neat. But will it drive your dog crazy?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Washington Post published an article today which describes the ongoing tension between the security community and Linux kernel developers. This has been roundly denounced as FUD, with Rob Graham going so far as to claim that nobody ever attacks the kernel.

Unfortunately he's entirely and demonstrably wrong, it's not FUD and the state of security in the kernel is currently far short of where it should be.

[Here is] an example. Recent versions of Android use SELinux to confine applications. Even if you have full control over an application running on Android, the SELinux rules make it very difficult to do anything especially user-hostile. Hacking Team, the GPL-violating Italian company who sells surveillance software to human rights abusers, found that this impeded their ability to drop their spyware onto targets' devices. So they took advantage of the fact that many Android devices shipped a kernel with a flawed copy_from_user() implementation that allowed them to copy arbitrary userspace data over arbitrary kernel code, thus allowing them to disable SELinux.

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Phoenix666 writes:

If you wanted to pinpoint the most absurdly geeky event in the world calendar, it would be difficult to beat the binary numbers challenge at the World Memory Championships. In it, a bevy of trained memory masters fight it out over 30 minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s in order as they possibly can.

Back when this was my idea of a good time, I was able to "do" more than 2,000 1s and 0s in the half-hour. My then arch-rival, Dr Gunther Karsten of Germany, was not afraid to tell me this level of performance was "really quite lame". He could do 3,200. The current world record is over 4,000: more than two 1s and 0s every second.

Dig past the mystery of such feats, and you discover a set of techniques and an approach to learning that is full of strikingly simple wisdom and fun. Even if, quite sensibly, you've no interest in learning to recite computer code, the memory techniques that enable such performance are a treasure trove of insight into how to motivate and direct the learning brain.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Anyone can buy a telescope to observe space and sometimes even make discoveries, so it's a no-brainer that you should have a similar access to the appropriate technology if your scientific interests involve something else, say, the brain. Some groups are already making that happen for amateur neuroscientists. One is the Brooklyn startup OpenBCI, now back on Kickstarter with a new 3D printed EEG headset and development board that you can use to study patterns of brain activity or create more inventive projects like a mind-controlled shark balloon.

These guys have been at Maker's Faire the last couple of years. Pretty good example of a knock-on technology from 3D printing and microcontroller movements.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The New York Times reports that in a major blow to a multibillion-dollar industry that introduced sports betting to legions of young sports fans, the New York State attorney general has ordered the two biggest daily fantasy sports companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, to stop accepting bets from New York residents, saying their games constituted illegal gambling under state law. "It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country," says NY attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, "Today we have sent a clear message: not in New York, and not on my watch."

Fantasy sports companies contend that their games are not gambling because they involve more skill than luck and were legally sanctioned by a 2006 federal law that exempted fantasy sports from a prohibition against processing online financial wagering. "Fantasy sports is a game of skill and legal under New York state law," says FanDuel. "This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love and share with friends, family, co-workers and players across the country." The attorney general's office also said that ads on the two sites "seriously mislead New York citizens about their prospects of winning." State investigators found that to date, "the top 1 percent of DraftKings winners receive the vast majority of the winnings." Schneiderman's investigation was spurred after reports arose that a DraftKings employee used internal data to win $350,000 on rival site FanDuel, which the operators denied. While both companies had allowed employees to place bets on the others site, they have since banned such practices.

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"exec" writes in with a story from the Twitch.tv blog:

Life is full of happy accidents. When we first discussed the idea of running an all-episodes marathon of “The Joy of Painting” with the Bob Ross folks, we weren't entirely sure what would happen. We knew it would bring attention to Twitch Creative and give the internet some enjoyment and inspiration for a few days.

[...] Well, all good things come to an end eventually. #RUINED! We've been as sad as you have, knowing the end of our marathon was approaching. Bob's voice sends many of us to sleep at night, and calms and inspires us throughout the day. Bob has reminded us of what's important in life, reminded us of our childhoods, time with family, and the days we've spent creating something. WE DIDN'T WANT THE END TO BE REAL.

So, we pulled out all the stops and came up with a new plan. #KEEPBOB. From now on, Monday night is Bob Ross night. Every Monday, we will be running one season of The Joy of Painting on /bobross starting at 3pm PST and ending at 9:30pm PST. There are 31 seasons, so repeats will happen only once every seven months. Whether you've had a great Monday and want to celebrate with a familiar crowd, or your day has plain sucked and you want to be calmed by his soothing tones, Bob will always be there for you every Monday night without fail.

The great people at Janson Media and Bob Ross Inc have been incredibly supportive. They're as excited as we are to see Bob getting the recognition and attention he deserves. So, as a thanks, they are allowing Twitch broadcasters to re-stream these mini-marathons. You can paint right along with Bob, add commentary, and broadcast the result to your own channel. Time to add your own favorite color.

-- submitted from IRC

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hubie writes:

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has been gathering information on Mars' upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and solar and solar-wind interactions since its orbit insertion in September 2014. On November 5th the first MAVEN results were published in a special issue of Geophysical Research Letters . The issue contains over 40 articles investigating measurements of the overall geometry and variability of the Martian magnetosphere, upper atmosphere, and ionosphere and their responses to interplanetary coronal mass ejections and solar energetic particle influxes, with the highlights covered in the introductory article. NASA also held a news briefing discussing the results.

One of the many results presented was the identification of the process that transitioned the Martian climate from warm and wet to cold and arid. MAVEN has measured the rate at which the solar wind is stripping the Martian atmosphere of gas:

"Mars appears to have had a thick atmosphere warm enough to support liquid water which is a key ingredient and medium for life as we currently know it," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Understanding what happened to the Mars atmosphere will inform our knowledge of the dynamics and evolution of any planetary atmosphere. Learning what can cause changes to a planet's environment from one that could host microbes at the surface to one that doesn't is important to know, and is a key question that is being addressed in NASA's journey to Mars."

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takyon writes:

Scientists from MIT Media Lab have created a shape-changing wearable device that they call LineFORM:

We propose a novel Shape Changing Interface which has the form of a "Line". Lines have several interesting characteristics from the perspective of interaction design: abstractness of data representation; a variety of inherent interactions / affordances; and constraints as boundaries or borderlines. By utilising such aspects of lines together with the added capability of shape-shifting, we present various applications in different scenarios such as shape changing cords, mobiles, body constraints, and data manipulation to investigate the design space of line-based shape changing interfaces.

Via NextBigFuture:

LineFORM starts with a line; a linear series of actuators that can move independently or together to arrange itself in new shapes. In one demo, it's wrapped around a wrist like a high-tech Slap Wrap. In this configuration, it's able to convey a notification through haptic feedback, uncoiling its end and gently tapping a user's wrist. Its creators ask us to imagine this forming the core structure of a mobile device, presumably replete with a display, microphone and speaker. On receiving the notification, the user then unfurls it, and it contracts into a rectangular prism. After he taps away on an imaginary display, it shape-shifts into an old-timey telephone.

There's also the potential for LineFORM to act as an intelligent cable. Such a cable would be capable of recognizing a number of modules, transforming where necessary. On recognizing an attached light bulb, the robot jolts into action, almost-instantaneously becoming a posable lamp, complete with three-dimensional dimmer switch.

LineFORM: Actuated Curve Interfaces for Display, Interaction, and Constraint [full paper]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It's 60 years since the British inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft using a cat food tin and a vacuum cleaner. Great things were promised for this mode of transport, but it never really caught on. Why?

The hovercraft slides down a concrete ramp and into the Solent. Its engines, propellers and fans hum as it crosses from Southsea, in Hampshire, to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, travelling 4.4 nautical miles in under 10 minutes.

The journey is more than twice as quick as the catamaran from Portsmouth to Ryde and more than four times as quick as the Portsmouth-to-Fishbourne ferry.

For that matter, why haven't hydrofoils caught on?

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the past four years, Dunn and two of his colleagues—Noah Fierer, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Holly Menninger, the director of public science at N.C. State—have been deciphering these histories, investigating the microorganisms in our dust and how their lives are intertwined with our own.

The scientists began with a small pilot study, recruiting forty families in the Raleigh-Durham area to swab nine locations in their homes. When the researchers analyzed these cotton swabs and sequenced the fragments of bacterial DNA that they contained, they found that even the most sparkling houses were teeming with microbial squatters—more than two thousand distinct types, on average. Different rooms formed distinct ecological niches: kitchens were popular among the bacteria that grow on produce, whereas bedroom and bathroom surfaces were colonized by those that typically dwell on the skin. (In a troubling discovery, Dunn and his colleagues learned that, from a microbiological perspective, toilet seats and pillowcases look strikingly similar.)

The fungi in the dust of your house tell where you live, the bacteria tell who lives there.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Administrators of Web servers that were infected with a recently released ransomware program for Linux are in luck: There's now a free tool that can decrypt their files.

The tool was created by malware researchers from antivirus firm Bitdefender, who found a major flaw in how the Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware uses encryption.

The [ransomware] program makes files unreadable by using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which uses the same key for both the encryption and decryption operations. The AES key is then encrypted too by using RSA, an asymmetric encryption algorithm.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Now Stanford electrical engineers have taken the latest step toward developing such a device [tricorder] through experiments detailed in Applied Physics Letters and presented at the International Ultrasonics Symposium in Taipei, Taiwan.
...
First, all materials expand and contract when stimulated with electromagnetic energy, such as light or microwaves. Second, this expansion and contraction produces ultrasound waves that travel to the surface and can be detected remotely.
...
Arbabian's team then used brief microwave pulses to heat a flesh-like material that had been implanted with a sample "target." Holding the device from about a foot away, the material was heated by a mere thousandth of a degree, well within safety limits.

Yet even that slight heating caused the material to expand and contract – which, in turn, created ultrasound waves that the Stanford team was able to detect to disclose the location of the target, all without touching the "flesh," just like the Star Trek tricorder.

The device heats you up with microwaves and listens for ultrasound signatures of tumors expanding and contracting.

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Hundreds of fast food workers are striking nationwide Tuesday, joining other workers in pressing for a more livable wage. But while some say $15 is a minimum needed to survive, some business owners say dishing out more pay would leave them struggling to keep their doors open.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fast-food-workers-strike-again-nationwide-for-15-an-hour

In New York City, rallies are being held in Harlem, the Financial District and Brooklyn in support of efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, reports CBS New York.

In Los Angeles, the local protests are organized by Service Employees International Union, and include fast-food, home-care and child-care workers, along with other "underpaid" employees, reports CBS Los Angeles.

"Is this the America we believe in? When someone works all day long and they still can't get by," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during an early-morning rally in Downtown Brooklyn. "Does anyone believe that it's easy to get by in New York City on less than $15 an hour?"

Critics say a $15 minimum wage would obliterate opportunity and usher in higher taxes, but de Blasio said the opposite is true -- with more money to spend, low wage workers contribute more to the economy.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The interplay of size and time may make carbon nanotubes the answer to the computer industry's prayers as it grapples with pressure to make silicon chips ever-smaller. Or the same factors may turn CNTs into a technological dead end.

Size refers to the dimensions of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) vs. the shrinking geometry of the components on today's silicon chips. A CNT is basically a tube whose wall is 1 carbon atom thick. The tube itself is 1 nanometer (nm, or one billionths of a meter, or one-thousandths of a micron) in diameter, although it can be tens of microns long. Although made of carbon, single-wall CNTs are excellent conductors thanks to quantum conductance, which allows electrons to propagate along the length of the tubes.

Time refers to the progression of Moore's Law, an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of components on a chip can be expected to double every two years, without an increase in price. According to that, about more eight years from now silicon technology, which has reached 14nm geometry, will reach the atomic level. At that time, presumably the industry will no longer be able to uphold Moore's Law by making silicon components continually smaller.

Will CNTs, with their 1nm geometry, be ready by then?

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Have a Vizio smart TV? You'll probably want to read this article over at net-security.org then:

Owners of Smart TVs manufactured by California-based consumer electronics company Vizio should be aware that their viewing habits are being tracked and that information sold to third parties ("partners").

And, what's more, with a recent change of the company's privacy policy, the company has started providing this data to companies that "may combine this information with other information about devices associated with that IP address."

"Beginning October 31, 2015, VIZIO will use Viewing Data together with your IP address and other Non-Personal Information in order to inform third party selection and delivery of targeted and re-targeted advertisements. These advertisements may be delivered to smartphones, tablets, PCs or other internet-connected devices that share an IP address or other identifier with your Smart TV," the privacy policy says.

Vizio's competitors Samsung and LG Electronics can also track users' viewing habits via their smart TV offerings, ProPublica's Julia Angwin pointed out, but the feature has to be explicitly turned on by the users.

Yep, glad I do all my TV watching on a computer monitor.

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