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HughPickens.com writes:

Peter Thiel writes in the NYT that what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. "But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie "The China Syndrome," about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled," says Thiel. "If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago. Instead, we went in reverse."

According to Thiel, a new generation of American nuclear scientists has produced designs for better reactors. Crucially, these new designs may finally overcome the most fundamental obstacle to the success of nuclear power: high cost. Designs using molten salt, alternative fuels and small modular reactors have all attracted interest not just from academics but also from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists like me ready to put money behind nuclear power. However, none of these new designs can benefit the real world without a path to regulatory approval, and today's regulations are tailored for traditional reactors, making it almost impossible to commercialize new ones. "Both the right's fear of government and the left's fear of technology have jointly stunted our nuclear energy policy," concludes Thiel. "Supporting nuclear power with more than words is the litmus test for seriousness about climate change. Like Nixon's going to China, this is something only Mr. Obama can do. If this president clears the path for a new atomic age, American scientists are ready to build it."

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

The largest animal cloning factory in the world is now likely underway in China —

a path "no one has ever travelled" in cattle cloning and meeting the country's skyrocketing demand for beef. The projected 14,000-square-meter factory will be built and operated by Boyalife, which is allotting 200 million yuan ($313 million) for the project.

They are hoping at the moment to produce 100,000 cow embryos annually and to contribute five percent of China's premium cattle.

"We are building something that has not existed in the past," said Xu in an interview.

Boyalife scientists will also explore cloning champion racehorses as well as sniffer dogs that can assist in rescue operations or detect illegal drugs. Xu added that helping save critically endangered species is another one of their targets.

"This is going to change our world and our lives," the CEO said of the factory, which is among the latest moves of China to lead in cloning technology worldwide.

Uh huh. Ostensibly for cattle, racehorses, crime-fighting canines, and environmental responsibility. And humans too, as reported by the telegraph earlier this year.

China has been ordered to 'rein in' scientists who have edited the DNA of human embryos for the first time, a practice banned in Europe.

In a world's first, researchers at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou confirmed they had engineered embryos to modify the gene responsible for the fatal blood disorder thalassaemia.

The team, led by Junjiu Huang attempted to head off fears of eugenics by claiming the embryos were 'non-viable' and could never had become babies.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC reports that Blue Origin successfully tested their New Shepard spaceship:

Not only did they manage to conduct a successful launch, but they also successfully landed the rocket's propulsion unit, a step towards full reusability. Note that it was not an orbital flight, but reached a height of just over 100km.

takyon: SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk congratulated Jeff Bezos and his team on Twitter, before attempting to pour cold water on the achievement:

Musk seems a bit miffed to be scooped by Bezos for the first successful landing by a rocket that had flown into space. SpaceX has tried on a couple of occasions to land its Falcon 9 booster on a mobile, seaborne platform. And in this tweet, Musk is saying that by only flying into suborbital space the New Shepard vehicle isn't nearly in the class of his Falcon 9 rocket, which can heft payloads into orbit, and even geostationary orbit, some 35,000km above the Earth's surface.

Musk then proceeded to explain the physics of rocketry on Twitter, making the point that the Falcon 9 rocket booster with its nine Merlin engines was considerably more powerful than the New Shepard vehicle and its single BE-3 engine. (Just one Merlin engine has 934 kilonewtons of thrust, whereas a single BE-3 engine has up to 490 kilonewtons of thrust). Translation: Mine is bigger than yours.

Bezos was not deterred. During the media teleconference, he gave three reasons as to why his New Shepard flight was so significant. First of all, he said, the first stage of the Falcon 9 booster that SpaceX is trying to recover doesn't make it all the way to orbit. In this way, SpaceX is making a suborbital flight as well. Also, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket makes a deceleration burn in space to slow its reentry. This means New Shepard arguably traversed a more harsh reentry environment.

And finally, Bezos said, "The hardest part of landing is probably the final landing segment." Basically, he's telling Musk "mine stood up and yours fell over."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward reported:

Just took an elderly relative to an audiologist (USA) to try out hearing aids. To set up a demo the audiologist referred to the results of a recent hearing test and then used a fist-sized interface that talked to a Windows box by Bluetooth and to the high-end hearing aids by some unknown wireless method. Looking at the product literature, there is also a customer version of this interface that can be controlled through a smart phone--to change between modes, for example, "quiet room" and "noisy restaurant" (but not for detailed programming).

It was hinted that (at least for some brands), the low-end or mid-range models are the same as the high-end models, but with some of the advanced features turned off in software.

Does anyone here know more about the hearing aid business? It seems to be full of trade secrets and security through obscurity. Based on comments from other hearing aid users over the years, there are a lot of unhappy customers. My state now has a mandatory 45 day trial period which seems like a good piece of regulation--it takes time to see if you can adapt to a particular hearing aid.

A quick web search turned up some forum chatter about these topics, but no one seems to have jail broken their hearing aids yet. These high end ones were quoted at USD $5600/pair, with a mid-priced version (less features) for $3400/pair -- maybe the high price scares would-be hackers/crackers away?
      http://www.audiologyforum.net/forum/index.php?topic=67.0
      http://www.hearingaidforums.com/showthread.php?18282-New-Aid-Wearer-Software-Engineer-Hack-my-hearing-aid&highlight=hack
      https://thecookiebitechronicles.wordpress.com/tag/hearing-aid-hacking/

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

If your previous try with WINE wasn't all you'd hoped for, the additions to 1.7.55 may include just what you need.

Softpedia reports

WINE is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. [...] It's considered to be a compatibility layer in the same way you will find compatibility settings in modern [versions of Windows that allow you to runs apps that are only natively compatible with earlier versions of that OS].

[...] The improvements made to Wine are not usually all that transparent for regular users, as the developers write their changelogs mostly for other devs or at least for people who are watching the project a lot closer.

[...] There are two different changelogs for each Wine release, one that deals with the application itself, and the other one that reveals what changes and improvements have been made to support various apps and games.

According to the changelog, the PulseAudio driver has been added, various fixes for Microsoft Office 2013 support have been introduced, more work has been done for the Web Services DLL, more fixes for the latest C runtime version have been implemented, the Makefile generation has been improved, and other bug fixes have been implemented.

The list of supported games and apps has expanded with the following titles: Adobe Premiere 6, Adobe AIR / Adobe Media Player, Resolume Avenue 3.3.2, Cubis Gold 2, ArcSoft PhotoStudio, PowerDVD 10, Freelancer, Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek Birth of the Federation, Guild Wars 2, Risen 2, Tomb Raider 2013, Sacred 2 Gold, valgrind, CCleaner, Emerge Desktop 6.1.3, Microsoft Office 2007, and numerous others.

Softpedia also notes WINE 1.7.x Branch Closed; WINE 1.8 to Launch Soon

The plan is to have a single stable version once a year, but it remains to be seen how this will work out for them.

[...] Until we have a chance to try the new model, we can't really say anything about whether it's right or wrong. What we do know is that Wine 1.8 has been announced, and it's coming in just a month or so.

1.7.55 is the last Version of the 1.7.x series.[1] It's likely to see Wine 1.8 until end of this year. Until then we'll have weekly release candidates. Please give them as much testing as you can, you're also welcome to improve translations in case your language isn't perfect yet".

[...] As a side note, the Wine developers have recently also reported that they managed to port the framework on Android, which is a great step forward, but they don't see a way of making money off that just yet.

[1] Rehash removes the ASCII whitespace in links.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

This one looks like a fun how-to paper [PDF] to try over the holiday.

I thought I was doing well with my 7 second boot time, but now realize how maudlin that is. Has anyone done this kind of optimization? Worth doing?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

As most people know, everyone poops.

However, when you are an astronaut there are a lot more technical challenges to overcome in carrying out this act. Older and current methods of stuffing the waste into bags, jettisoning it into space (despite being described as "one of the most beautiful sights"), or letting it become a shooting star to wish upon are not the best ways of handing it while looking toward future missions to the Moon or Mars.

A look towards future toilets discusses ways to handle the waste, which could be on the order of 300 pounds for a mission crew, as well as how to make use of it from fertilizer to building materials and radiation shielding.

Previously, we have discussed that in space everyone can hear you poop.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A team from UCLA has 3D-printed microparticles that may be suitable for medical applications:

Bioengineers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method of 3-D printing that allows production of complex micro-scale objects smaller than the width of a human hair. The technique, using patterned ultraviolet light and a custom-shaped flow of polymer material, creates 3-D objects that can be first designed with software and could be used in a variety of biomedical and industrial applications. The research was published online in the journal Advanced Materials.

The authors suggest that producing 3-D shapes at the micro scale could be useful for designing custom biomaterials such as interlocking particles that self-assemble to help tissue regenerate, or for industrial applications such as creating new coatings and paints with unique light-reactive properties.

[...] To make smaller custom objects with folds, holes and other precise features, the UCLA team developed a new technique called optical transient liquid modeling. It uses a series of microfluidic and optical technologies, including a technique previously developed by Di Carlo's research group that simplifies designing the shape of fluid flows.

First, two different types of fluids are combined in a series of tiny pillars that control the shape of the merged fluids. One fluid is a liquid polymer that is the precursor material for the object. The other essentially acts as a liquid mold for the polymer stream. The arrangement of the pillars determines how the two flows mix and intertwine. The researchers used software that they previously developed to rapidly predict what shape will be produced by altering the pillars' location and sequence. It can be downloaded for free here.

When the flow of materials is stopped rapidly, an outlined pattern of ultraviolet light — somewhat like a cookie cutter — slices into the precursor stream. So the object is shaped first by the stream, then again by UV light. The UCLA researchers have reached printing speeds of nearly one object every five seconds.

[...] The objects the team has produced are about 100–500 micrometers in size, with features as small as 10–15 micrometers. With this method, they have produced objects composed of organic materials as well as particles whose movements and position could be precisely controlled by magnetism.

Via NextBigFuture.

Rapid Software-Based Design and Optical Transient Liquid Molding of Microparticles [abstract]

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

It always amuses me when folks give their insightful input in threads, adding comments about their last-century experience getting Linux going. It appears that this guy has a similar reaction.

Itripovermyownfeet shared his thoughts in the Linux Mint subreddit.

This is awful, when I install Linux on the desktop I'm expecting to be able to waste a solid 8 hours chasing down random issues that were solved on all other modern desktop systems by 2008. I went into this hoping and wishing to have to crawl through linuxquestions.org threads from 2006 to figure out why plugging in a second monitor doesn't work with X.org.

I want the peace and quiet that you can only get from spending 45 minutes trying to get alsa/oss/flavor of the week sound manager to work properly. I miss the subtle delicious pain of trying to figure out what I have to do to get Gnome 3 or Unity to provide desktop functionality that came standard with Windows NT 4.

With what you've done here I am no longer able to do any of these things. You've taken the awful travesty of an experience that trying to do anything production on a Linux desktop is supposed to provide and made it usable, sensible, and working out of the box. This is why I can't call Mint a Linux desktop. It's just a desktop... you monsters.

(I plugged a second monitor into my HDMI slot and it just worked. I have literally never experienced that since working with Linux since the days of Redhat 3. You've taken away a cherished time honoured tradition of having a terrible experience using a Linux desktop from me forever.)

Comments by other redditors include:

Gandalfx: Could "reverse trolling" be an appropriate term for this?

Crcr: I know what you mean, Mint has been this way for me since version 12 & it's starting to get old, the usability out of the box drives me nuts.

Foofly: I tried to explain to a friend that the installation experience is better than Windows these days. In addition to having way less driver issues in general. He didn't believe me since his last experience was almost 10 years ago.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Apollo program was powered by the mighty Rocketdyne F-1 engine, the most powerful liquid-fuel rocket ever developed. Five engines were used on each Saturn V launch. They would burn for about two and half minutes before separating and falling back into the Atlantic Ocean. In 2013 a Jeff Bezos funded expedition located a debris field of F-1 engine remains sitting over 14,000 feet under the ocean surface. The recovered parts have been put through a conservation process to identify them and remove some of the effects of sitting on the ocean floor for more than 40 years. At the request of Bezos, NASA has donated a recovered Apollo 12 engine to the Seattle Museum of Flight.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New research from analysts at ESRI UK has found that a third of us feel stressed due to the increasing amount of digital information we are expected to consume, make sense of, and act on, in our day to day lives.

Many of us can probably relate to the stress of having to prepare for exams by "cramming" as much information into our heads as we can. But increasingly we are being expected to "cram" every day, with information fired at us by emails, phone conversations, videos, news broadcasts and social media. As a trivial example – there's no longer an excuse to forget Aunt June's birthday when she knows full well everyone will get a reminder via Facebook FB -0.95%!

Now science has stepped forward with an explanation. The human brain thrives on novelty and is driven to constantly seek it. When novelty is available in effectively unlimited quantity, the brain becomes overworked as it tries to process this information while driving itself on to search for more. This leads to increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can lead to confusion, memory loss and a state of restlessness.

The study of 1,000 Brits found that over a third (35%) feel that having to keep up with today's "information overload" leaves them feeling stressed out, unable to relax and anxious. Two thirds (65%) say that the need to keep track of a great deal of information is a "major concern" in their lives.

Others might cite major sources of stress as scope creep and compressed timelines, but YMMV.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Barefoot activities can greatly improve balance and posture and prevent common injuries like shin splints, plantar fasciitis, stress fractures, bursitis, and tendonitis in the Achilles tendon, according to Patrick McKeon, a professor in Ithaca College's School of Health Sciences and Human Performance.

The small, often overlooked muscles in the feet that play a vital but underappreciated role in movement and stability. Their role is similar to that of the core muscles in the abdomen.

"If you say 'core stability,' everyone sucks in their bellybutton," he said. Part of the reason why is about appearance, but it's also because a strong core is associated with good fitness. The comparison between feet and abs is intentional on McKeon's part; he wants people to take the health of their "foot core" just as seriously.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In his previous work, Stanford physicist Leo Yu has entangled photons with electrons through fiber optic cables over a distance of several feet. Now, he and a team of scientists, including Professor Emeritus Yoshihisa Yamamoto, have correlated photons with electron spin over a record distance of 1.2 miles (1.93 kilometers).

"Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer," Yu said. "This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world."

To do this, Yu and his team had to make sure that the correlation could be preserved over long distances – a key challenge given that photons have a tendency to change orientation while traveling in optical fibers.

Let's see the NSA surveille ansibles.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

How many people out there have been subjected to censorship and/or self-censorship by European Patent Office aggression against the media?

Roy Schestowitz at TechRights reports

What the EPO did to us [1, 2, 3] last month and earlier this month (for a number of weeks) is important because it can help inform other sites of what EPO has been up to and how to stand up to it. We already have evidence to show that Team Battistelli is using the "chilling effect" against politicians, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, and even government delegates. How far will these sociopaths go?

[...] [We noticed that] EPO lawyers had lazily used a template and didn't even change the name when they sent a threatening letter. [...] This kind of evidence suggests that other such letters were sent to other publishers, demanding that they take down their articles about the EPO. [...] We already know that SUEPO [Staff Union of the European Patent Office] removed some links from its public site. EPO management put them under threat, hence FOSS Patents links and Heise links got removed. [...] Any information about what exactly happened back then would be greatly appreciated. There is a campaign of "chilling effect" against dissent and if nobody speaks out, as a French blogger did a few months ago, we wouldn't know just how widespread this campaign is.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the hackers suspected of being behind the TalkTalk breach, which led to the personal details of at least 150,000 people being stolen, used a vulnerability discovered two years before he was even born.

That method of attack was SQL injection (SQLi), where hackers typically enter malicious commands into forms on a website to make it churn out juicy bits of data. It's been used to steal the personal details of World Health Organization employees, grab data from the Wall Street Journal, and hit the sites of US federal agencies.

"It's the most easy way to hack," the pseudonymous hacker w0rm, who was responsible for the Wall Street Journal hack, told Motherboard. The attack took only a "few hours."

But, for all its simplicity, as well as its effectiveness at siphoning the digital innards of corporations and governments alike, SQLi is relatively easy to defend against.

Original Submission