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Phoenix666 writes:

Industrial design researchers at Brunel University London have solved two of the major challenges which prevent everyday items of clothing being turned into power sources for smartphones, tablets and other personal tech.

Technology to produce supercapacitor thread capable of being made into cloth has been around for some time. But until now scientists have been unable to make it provide sufficient voltage for most devices or devise a method to produce it economically outside the lab.

Now patented breakthroughs made by colleagues Professors David Harrison and John Fyson, Dr Yanmeng Xu, Dr Fulian Qiu and Ruirong Zhang of Brunel's Department of Design mean thread capable of storing and supplying enough power for common devices and of being manufactured at industrial scale are a reality.

It seems there could be more fun uses for this than charging iPhones.

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EFF's "Let's Encrypt" Enters Public Beta

rigrig writes:

As of today, invitations are no longer needed to get a free certificated signed by the EFF's Let's Encrypt CA.

The user guide explains several options for the process, ranging from automatically setting up SSL for Apache or Nginx (support for Nginx is still experimental), to a manual process for those who would rather not run the installer as root.

Let's Encrypt CA issues short lived certificates (90 days), which shouldn't be a problem with a sufficiently automated renewal process. It looks like wildcard certificates won't be issued anytime soon (if at all), but you can get certificates that are good for multiple subdomains.

"Let's Encrypt" Project Enters Public Beta

takyon writes:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla-backed Let's Encrypt certificate authority has now entered Public Beta:

So if you run a server, and need certificates to deploy HTTPS, you can run the beta client and get one right now. If you have any questions, you can get answers on community.letsencrypt.org.

We've still got a lot to do. This launch is a Public Beta to indicate that, as much as today's release makes setting up HTTPS easier, we still want to make a lot more improvements towards our ideal of fully automated server setup and renewal. Our roadmap includes may features including options for complete automation of certificate renewal, support for automatic configuration of more kinds of servers (such as Nginx, postfix, exim, or dovecot), and tools to help guide users through the configuration of important Web security features such as HSTS, upgrade-insecure-requests, and OCSP Stapling. And of course, if you have some Python coding knowledge, you can come and help us reach those objectives.

A fully encrypted Web is within reach. Let's Encrypt is going to help us get there.

The Register reports:

The certification-issuing service is run by the California-based Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), and is in public beta after running a trial among a select group of volunteers. The public beta went live at 1800 GMT (1000 PT) today.

Its certificates are trusted by all major browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer worked in our office with fresh certs from the fledgling certificate authority.

Incredibly, it is almost too easy to use. You download an open-source client to your web server, and then one command will request and install a certificate, and configure your system to use it. And that's it.

[...] Full documentation is here and a quick start guide is here.

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telemin writes:

The continuation of many previous quests to drill into the Earth's Mantle will begin shortly in the Indian Ocean. A team of scientists and engineers led jointly by Henry Dick of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Chris MacLeod from Cardiff University will use the scientific drilling ship JOIDES Resolution to bore 2km into the ocean floor in the first of a series of three planned missions to the South-West Indian Ridge. The ultimate aim of the mission is to find and understand the "Moho Boundary", this is a point in the earth's crust where the seismic waves from earthquakes abruptly change their speed of travel. The current explanation of the Moho boundary is a simple change in rock types from the crust to the mantle, however, this operates on untested assumptions about the structure of the Earth's crust and mantle. The team have a theory that the mantle structure is more complicated, and that ingress of ocean water can cause large structural changes. This is the key theory they plan to test with this drilling mission.

"The Moho is pretty uniform everywhere across the ocean basins, and because of that everyone has assumed that the ocean crust is very uniform and therefore, by inference, very simple," explains Prof MacLeod. "But if we're right here, it changes the game completely. If the Moho seismic boundary is actually an alteration boundary from water penetration into the mantle, it means we know a lot less about the ocean crust than we did."

Further information:
Expedition Site: http://iodp.tamu.edu/scienceops/expeditions/indian_ridge_moho.html
Nature Article: http://www.nature.com/news/quest-to-drill-into-earth-s-mantle-restarts-1.18921
BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34967750

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Phoenix666 writes:

They bad-mouth you to work colleagues behind your back; they angrily demand the impossible from everyone but themselves; they make unwanted comments about your attire.

At some point in our careers, most of us have come across someone known as a "toxic worker," a colleague or boss whose abrasive style or devious actions can make the workday utterly miserable. Such people hurt morale, stoke conflict in the office, and harm a company's reputation.

But toxic workers aren't just annoying or unpleasant to be around; they cost firms significantly more money than most of them even realize. According to a new Harvard Business School (HBS) paper, toxic workers are so damaging to the bottom line that avoiding them or rooting them out delivers twice the value to a company that hiring a superstar performer does.

While a top 1 percent worker might return $5,303 in cost savings to a company through increased output, avoiding a toxic hire will net an estimated $12,489, the study said. That figure does not include savings from sidestepping litigation, regulatory penalties, or decreased productivity as a result of low morale.

On the other hand, toxic co-workers are useful as foils come bonus time: "Hey, at least I'm not as bad as that guy..."

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azrael writes:

BBC reports:

MPs have overwhelmingly backed UK air strikes against so-called Islamic State in Syria, by 397 votes to 223, after an impassioned 10-hour Commons debate.

Four Tornado jets took off from RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus, after the vote. Their destination has not been confirmed.

A total of 66 Labour MPs sided with the government as David Cameron secured a larger than expected Commons majority.

The PM said they had "taken the right decision to keep the country safe" but opponents said the move was a mistake.

...

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn argued that the case for war "does not stack up" - but his party was split, with senior Labour figures, including members of the shadow cabinet voting with the government after they were given a free vote.

The 66 MPs who backed military action was equivalent to 29% of the parliamentary party.

[Editor's Note: For non-Brits, MP="member of parliament"]

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Phoenix666 writes:

in gastrointestinal microbiome research, an area rife with new discoveries and opportunities thanks to recent breakthroughs in our understanding of how influential these microbes are to our health, it has until now been very difficult to monitor microbial cells during their travels through mammalian gastrointestinal tracts. Microbial growth rates fluctuate in response to diet, wellness, exercise and the environment, and are affected by inter-organism competition inside the gut. Yet after entering the gut and before exiting, microbes pass through the "dark zone," where they cannot be accessed or analyzed using standard methods and without disrupting observation of natural conditions.

That challenge inspired Cameron Myhrvold, a Hertz graduate fellow at the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School and the lead author on the new study, to work with Silver to develop the novel synthetic "mark and recapture" technique known as DCDC.

Using a genetically engineered red-colored fluorescent protein controlled by a gene expression promoter as a visual flag, Myhrvold set out to quite literally mark and recapture E. coli, which are extremely common bacteria found in all mammalian guts. The DCDC strategy -- in which mice were fed the genetically engineered microbes and then their waste collected for analysis -- enabled the team to precisely count the bacterial cell divisions that occurred inside the mice's gastrointestinal tracts. The fluorescing protein "marked" the first generation of E. coli introduced to the gut and therefore allowed the team to calculate the population dynamics by analyzing the proportion of fluorescing cells versus the entire population of cells collected after their "recapture."

For 30-40 years understanding the human genome was considered the Rosetta Stone for human health. Has the study of microbiomes taken its place?

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The Guardian reports on a multi-national survey by the Ipsos Mori market research company, comparing people's perception of a number of national statistics with the actual statistics. There's also an interactive quiz which allows you to feel superior to your countrymen. Some of the findings:

• In most countries, people overestimate the number of immigrants, often by large margins. In USA, the average guess was 33%, the real figure is 14.3%.
• Similarly, most countries grossly overestimate the number of atheists and agnostics.
• The country with the most accurate self-perception was South Korea, followed by Ireland and Poland.
• Mexico, India, and Brazil were the most inaccurate.
• Britain ranked mid-table in 16th place, while the US was fifth.

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Justin Case writes:

My 9 year old girl has expressed an interest in learning to program. Of course I want something that will give her short term rewards, but still teach solid skills. I know this question gets asked from time to time on various forums but I wanted to get some opinions from the good people of SN.

Christmas is coming... she's (for now) a Windows user... is there something you'd recommend as a gift?

Thanks for your ideas.

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takyon writes:

HGST, a division of Western Digital, has announced its second 10 terabyte helium-filled hard drive. The Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰ , announced back in June, was a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive. Now HGST has launched the Ultrastar He¹⁰, a 10 TB helium-filled HDD using traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). With a total of 7 platters, each platter stores around 1.43 TB. AnandTech reports:

Hard drives are struggling to reach the 10TB capacity point with traditional PMR technology. While Seagate did announce a few 8TB PMR drives earlier this quarter, it really looks like vendors need to move to some other technology (shingled magnetic recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)) in order to keep the $/TB metric competitive against the upcoming high-capacity SSDs. As of now, helium seems to be the only proven solution causing minimal performance impact and HGST appears to have a strong hold in this particular market segment.

Ars Technica has some speculation about the price:

There's no price listed for the Ultrastar He¹⁰, but it'll probably cost about £600/$800. The first helium-filled drives were extortionately expensive, but the He⁸ is now down to around £400/$550, which isn't bad for an enterprise drive (these things have a 5-year warranty and other such niceties, too). Seagate's shingled 8TB drive is much cheaper (£170/$200), but you get a shorter warranty and less enterprisey stuff.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Criminals are selling 'lifetime' Netflix, HBO, and cable sports streaming accounts for less than US$10 on sites hidden within Tor.

Premium sports accounts sell for about $10 while streaming TV can be bought for as low as 50 cents, far less than the $10 monthly subscription.

Comic fans can buy a stolen Marvel Unlimited lifetime account - meaning the victim is unlikely to shutter it - for 50 cents compared to the $10 monthly fee.

El Reg found the stolen accounts on the AlphaBay Marketplace accessible via the Tor network, on the back of the Intel report "The Hidden Data Economy" [pdf] which listed a few similar but more pricey offerings on another unnamed site.

Sellers are also flogging Premium Spotify, ComCast Xfinity, Uber, Apple, and Lynda training video accounts.

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Tree Hugga writes:

The electricity is sourced from solar panels, wind turbines, and heat from biogas. In addition they have a backup wood chip furnace. They also have a fairly beefy battery of 10 MW capacity to help level the fluctuations in production. The village runs its own grid and pays less for energy.

News articles: The Independent, The Huffington Post, GreenBiz.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Although methane is one of the most potent of the greenhouses gases, scientists still aren't entirely clear on all of its ground-based sources. That's why researchers from Sweden's Linköping and Stockholm universities have created a camera that's capable of imaging methane in real time. They say that it could find use in monitoring sources such as sludge deposits, combustion processes, farms and lakes.

The present prototype tips the scales at 35 kg (77 lb), and shoots both stills and video of methane. It's a hyperspectral camera, which means that it can "see" light spectra not visible to the human eye. In its case, it's tuned to image the specific type of infrared radiation that methane is known for absorbing.

While it's not the first methane-detecting camera ever made, the scientists state that it's much more sensitive than anything that has come before. This should make it ideal for detecting the gas even in relatively small amounts.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The human body contains two types of fat. White fat stores excess energy, releasing it if it is needed or resulting in flabby love handles if it is not. The other type, brown fat, mostly performs the role of burning fat to generate heat and keep the body warm, a process known as thermogenesis. As our understanding of this has improved over recent years, research has uncovered proteins that may promote thermogenesis when targeted with diabetes drugs and chemical compounds, potentially creating more "good fat". But little is known about the proteins that inhibit it.

Now an international team of scientists has found a protein called sLR11 that suppresses thermogenesis. It was found that mice lacking the gene for the production of sLR11 were less capable of gaining weight, had higher amounts of energy and burned through calories faster, especially after feasting on high fat foods. A closer look revealed that sLR11 sticks to certain receptors on fat cells, like a key sliding into a keyhole, preventing thermogenesis being triggered.

Measuring sLR11 levels in humans showed that the protein's levels in the blood were linked with total fat mass. Observations of obese patients following bariatric surgery showed that the amount of resulting weight loss was proportional to reduced sLR11 levels, suggesting to the researchers that fat cells are responsible for generating sLR11.

Let's hope they tread carefully when re-igniting thermogenesis in fat cells, lest they trigger spontaneous combustion.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Real-time computing algorithms will replace humans in an innovative series of driverless races to be staged alongside the regular Formula E season, promotors said on Wednesday.

The Formula E championship features 10 teams of two drivers on city-centre circuits. Brazilian Nelson Piquet Junior won the inaugural 2014/2015 world championship.

It is seen as a cleaner and greener alternative to Formula One and the news of the Formula E initiative coincides with the Paris-hosted COP21 global climate talks.

Now Formula E and Kinetik, a technology company specialising in electric vehicles and trains, will also stage races between 10 teams of two driverless cars on the same circuits as a warm-up show to the main event.

This new championship called 'ROBORACE' will start for the 2016-2017 season. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) guided one-hour races will run over the full championship.

Won't taking humans out of the driver's seat take all the drama and excitement out of the sport?

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"exec" writes:

Flash continues to sink away into the shadows:

Adobe is finally ready to say goodbye to Flash. In an announcement last night, Adobe said that it will now "encourage content creators to build with new web standards," such as HTML5, rather than Flash. It's also beginning to deprecate the Flash name by renaming its animation app to Animate CC, away from Flash Professional CC.

[...] By acknowledging that Flash is dying, Adobe is able to better position its animation tools for the future. Flash Professional CC is already capable of creating HTML5 content — in fact, it already represents a third of all content created in the app, according to Adobe. By taking up the name Animate CC, Adobe is able to sell Flash Professional CC as a general animation tool, rather than a tool geared toward Flash. The name change will take effect early next year.

-- submitted from IRC

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multixrulz writes:

China is being blamed for a major cyber attack on the computers at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, which has compromised sensitive systems across the Federal Government. The bureau provides critical information to a host of other Federal government agencies.

Multiple official sources have confirmed the recent attack and the ABC has been told it will cost millions of dollars to plug the security breach, as other agencies have also been affected. In the words of one source: "It could take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix."

Sounds like there's some severe systemic failures going on in Canberra.

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