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tt0389722 writes:

Purchasers of the Philips Hue "smart" ambient lighting system are finding out that the new firmware pushed out by the manufacturer has cut off access to previously-supported lightbulbs.

Philips uses ZigBee, which should mean any bulbs compatible with this standard will work with its Hue products. Not anymore. The firmware update removes this support, limiting this "open, global" standard to Philips' own bulbs and those it has designated as "Friends of Hue."

When owners complained that they had been given the old bait-and-switch on products they already paid for, Philips issued this statement:

The Philips Hue is a premium-priced LED lighting system, but the rapid pace of LED efficiency gains has started to leave them behind. Cheaper competitors have started to significantly undercut Hue's pricing. Maybe this lockout is more about pricing protection than it is about quality protection

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) has predicted that 220,000 to 250,000 electric cars (including plug-in hybrids) will be sold in China in 2015, likely surpassing sales in the United States which was the biggest market last year. According to CAAM, 171,145 such vehicles were sold in the first 10 months of 2015, 2.9 times the number sold during the comparable portion of 2014. Although they are predicted to comprise only 0.9% of the total vehicles sold, electric cars have rapidly grown in popularity, thanks at least in part to incentives by the national, Shanghai, and Beijing governments, which seek to lessen air pollution.

CAAM's secretary-general asked attendees at an automotive conference to pay greater attention to "vehicle safety and the quality of batteries."

In related news, the governor of Nevada announced that the Chinese-backed company Faraday Future, which currently has its office in California, chose North Las Vegas as the site for a factory where electric cars will be made. Nevada offered subsidies worth $335 million to attract the company.

sources:

• Xinhua
• Quartz
• National Public Radio
• Barron's [Login Required]
• Bloomberg via Times of India
• Jamaica Gleaner
• LasVegasNow.com

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On Tuesday morning, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, a governmental agency which operates hundreds of schools in Los Angeles and nearby areas, sent all its students home. The agency did not make its buses available, but instead asked parents to pick up their children from outside the schools. Superintendent Ramon Cortines ordered all the schools in the district closed because of a threatening message regarding "many schools" which was received by a member of the school board. Cortines called the closure a "precaution based on what has happened recently." Police and the district's "plant managers" are searching the campuses.

Sources:

• Los Angeles Times
• Reuters
• KTLA-TV
• New York Times

From Reuters:

The unprecedented move left some 643,000 students of the Los Angeles Unified School District and their families scrambling to make alternate arrangements and drew criticism as officials in New York said they received the same threat and deemed it not to be credible.

A law enforcement source told Reuters that Los Angeles authorities ordered the closure to allow a full search of about 900 public school facilities without consulting with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which takes the lead on any potential terrorism investigation.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Senators, including Republican Presidential candidate Marco Rubio, have signed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission opposing municipal broadband:

In a rare senatorial act, full-time Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio joined with a handful of fellow legislators on Friday in an attempt to block local municipalities from undercutting big telecom companies by providing cheap, fast internet service.

Rubio, who is raising campaign cash from the telecom industry for his presidential campaign, fired off a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to allow states to block municipal broadband services. The letter was the latest salvo in a long-running effort by the major telecom companies to outlaw municipal broadband programs that have taken off in cities such as Lafayette, Louisiana, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, because they pose a threat to a business model that calls for slow, expensive internet access without competition.

In Chattanooga, for instance, city officials set up a service known as "The Gig," a municipal broadband network that provides data transfers at one gigabit per second for less than $70 a month — a rate that is 50 times faster than the average speed American customers have available through private broadband networks.

AT&T, Cox Communications, Comcast, and other broadband providers, fearing competition, have used their influence in state government to make an end-run around local municipalities. Through surrogates like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the industry gets states to pass laws that ban municipal broadband networks, despite the obvious benefits to both the municipalities and their residents.

[...] Rubio's presidential campaign has relied heavily on AT&T lobbyist Scott Weaver, the public policy co-chair of Wiley Rein, a law firm that also is helping to litigate against the FCC's effort to help municipal broadband. As one of Rubio's three lobbyist-bundlers, Weaver raised $33,324 for Rubio's presidential campaign, according to disclosures. Rubio's campaign fundraising apparatus is also managed in part by Cesar Conda, a lobbyist who previously served as Rubio's chief of staff. Registration documents show that Conda now represents AT&T.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Abstract

Background

Mind-body practices that elicit the relaxation response (RR) have been used worldwide for millennia to prevent and treat disease. The RR is characterized by decreased oxygen consumption, increased exhaled nitric oxide, and reduced psychological distress. It is believed to be the counterpart of the stress response that exhibits a distinct pattern of physiology and transcriptional profile. We hypothesized that RR elicitation results in characteristic gene expression changes that can be used to measure physiological responses elicited by the RR in an unbiased fashion.

Methods/Principal Findings

We assessed whole blood transcriptional profiles in 19 healthy, long-term practitioners of daily RR practice (group M), 19 healthy controls (group N1), and 20 N1 individuals who completed 8 weeks of RR training (group N2). 2209 genes were differentially expressed in group M relative to group N1 (p<0.05) and 1561 genes in group N2 compared to group N1 (p<0.05). Importantly, 433 (p<10−10) of 2209 and 1561 differentially expressed genes were shared among long-term (M) and short-term practitioners (N2). Gene ontology and gene set enrichment analyses revealed significant alterations in cellular metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, generation of reactive oxygen species and response to oxidative stress in long-term and short-term practitioners of daily RR practice that may counteract cellular damage related to chronic psychological stress. A significant number of genes and pathways were confirmed in an independent validation set containing 5 N1 controls, 5 N2 short-term and 6 M long-term practitioners.

Conclusions/Significance

This study provides the first compelling evidence that the RR elicits specific gene expression changes in short-term and long-term practitioners. Our results suggest consistent and constitutive changes in gene expression resulting from RR may relate to long term physiological effects. Our study may stimulate new investigations into applying transcriptional profiling for accurately measuring RR and stress related responses in multiple disease settings.

You heard 'em, put on your yoga pants.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Google has quietly started offering Google Cloud CDN service, a new content-delivery network (CDN) that should appeal to independent developers who want their applications to load quickly.

For its "alpha" release, Google is now accepting applications from people who want to try the new service, which is limited in geographical availability. More locations will be added when the service becomes generally available.

"Google Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses Google's globally distributed edge caches to cache HTTP(S) Load Balanced content close to your users," the product description states. "Caching content at the edges of Google's network provides faster delivery of content to your users while reducing the load on your servers."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The latest X Prize challenges teams to explore the sea floor using autonomous, untethered robots:

There is a new X Prize to accelerate technologies to explore the ocean. Shell is sponsoring the competition, which will challenge teams to map a 4km-deep, 500-sq-km area of sea floor using autonomous robots. The award, which is valued at $7m (£4.6m), will have to be claimed before the end of 2018. Previous ocean incentives put up by the X Prize organisation have helped develop oil clean-up solutions and sensors to monitor ocean acidification.

[...] X Prize technical director Dr Jyotika Virmani said much remained to be discovered about our planet. "It was a Caribbean sponge that gave us AZT, the compound used in AIDS treatments. There are many more medical benefits just waiting to be discovered, but we have no idea because the oceans remain largely unexplored," she told BBC News.

Although technologies already exist to survey the seabed at 4,000m down, the particular rules of the Shell Ocean Discovery competition will make even current experts in the field scratch their heads. The entrants will have to deploy their solutions from land or from the air; they cannot use a ship or even be in the survey area at the time. So, no cable can be used to remotely operate vehicles; they will need to be fully autonomous. There will be two rounds to the competition. The first, to be held in 2017, will be undertaken at a shallower depth of 2,000m, and require teams to make a bathymetric map of at least 20% of a 500-sq-km zone of seabed in roughly 6-8 hours.

The top 10 teams will then go forward to the second round, which will be held at the full competition depth of 4,000m. At least 50% of this area will have to be mapped in 12-15 hours. A scanning resolution of 5m per pixel is demanded. The teams will have to return high-resolution pictures from the deep as well, of a target specified by the organisers. Control and communications in the dark at 4,000m will be tough enough, never mind the consideration of pressure, which will be about 40 megapascals - nearly 6,000 pounds per square inch.

[...] There will be a separate bonus prize of $1m to go to the team that can demonstrate new chemical and biological underwater sensors. They will have to "sniff" a target to its source in the survey zone. That prize is sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

The tagline: 95% of the ocean is unexplored. The sponsor: Shell.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Biomedical startup company Biomė, founded by Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) researchers, is offering a synthetic bone equivalent used for bone restoration operations in odontology. The bone equivalent Cell'in, created by Lithuanian researchers, is made from cellulose/hydroxyapatite composite. [Similar] products in [the] global market are usually created on the basis of synthetic polymers.

The bone equivalent was created by collaborating groups of researchers at KTU, headed by Professor Jolanta Liesienė (Faculty of Chemical Technology) and Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU), headed by Professor Gintaras Juodžbalis (Face and Jaw Surgery Clinic).

"[The] bone equivalent is being created from natural polymer, i.e. cellulose. [In the] human body there is no cellulase, which helps to decompose cellulose, [so] it degrades very slowly, but after some time is being resorbed. Cellulose is non-cytotoxic, biologically compatible and provides [a] friendly environment for cell absorption and multiplication. The porosity of the implant enables the circulation of nutrients and metabolites," said Professor Liesienė.

Adamantium, Professor, adamantium. The bone modification was supposed to take up adamantium.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The space simulation game Star Citizen has reached $100 million in crowdfunding:

Star Citizen continues its reputation as one of the most highly-anticipated, yet controversial games around, mainly because the ambitious space-based game has a large amount of crowdfunding but no final release date. Even with many uncertainties for the game's future, people are still giving the developers money. This past weekend, another milestone was reached as the total funding for Star Citizen passed $100 million.

The timing worked out perfectly, as the game's alpha was updated to version 2.0 this weekend. The latest version finally included some features that early backers thought would come earlier, such as first-person shooting, multi-crew ships (which also means new ships specifically for multiple players), and a new planet to explore (along with some moons and space stations).

[...] The funding for the game started in September 2012. One month later, backers raised $2 million. Since then, the developers put stretch goals if various levels of funding were successful, such as a facial capture system at $22 million, or a new salvage ship at $32 million. However, the goals stopped after the $65 million mark. The last reward allowed developers to work on a modular feature for "any suitable ships" in the game, so that pilots can swap interior and exterior parts to build a spacecraft suitable for combat, mining, bounty hunting, or whatever hobby they wish to partake in the large in-game universe.

The seemingly endless amount of money also allowed the developers to enhance the game's single-player campaign, titled Squadron 42 , with a cast of celebrities such as Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Raspberry Pi is now a threat to thin clients.

Citrix has been fooling around with the Pi as a desktop virtualisation (VDI) target for a while, even releasing a prototype Citrix Receiver for the little computers. That effort was in early 2014.

Citrix has since decided it was inefficient to put a lot of effort into creating a special version of Receiver for one device, so instead set to "working with the Pi Organization to ensure our existing Linux Receiver would work with their new Pi2 architecture and supported OS images."

The result of that effort, the company blogged last Friday, is that in "XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 and the new HDX Thinwire compatibility codec, we ... had a codec that would perform efficiently on the Pi2 without the need for hardware accelerated plugins."

This thin client is wafer-thin.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is asking for Internet service provider customers to contribute results of speed tests to aid an investigation:

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been investigating Verizon Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc. over false advertising for their Internet speeds since October. He's now asking these companies' customers to take an Internet speed test and submit the results to his office. This way he'll get a better idea whether Verizon, Cablevision and TWC are lying to their customers about the speeds they're getting.

Schneiderman's office also sent the three companies requests for more information and copies of any tests they have done on their own Internet speeds, as well as copies of disclosures they have made to their customers. To see whether there's any large discrepancy between what they say they are offering and what they're actually delivering, the AG also asked for feedback from the public.

His office created a new online broadband test at InternetHealthTest.org, which will capture a customer's real bandwidth speeds. After the test is done by the customers of Verizon, Cablevision or TWC, he wants them to submit a screenshot of the results and fill out an online form.

Quick, flip the switch and double everyone's speeds!

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Noah Deich, the executive director for the Center for Carbon Removal, ruminated on the directions planetary-scale carbon removal schemes might take. The list of proposals is extensive and growing, he notes, but they generally fall within two "capture pathways:" biological and chemical.

Biological carbon schemes largely rely on natural plant photosynthesis to snare carbon from the air. Though Deich observes this is an essentially "carbon-neutral" phenomenon—plants use carbon from the air to build vascular tissue, but the carbon is released back into the atmosphere when the plants die and decompose—the process nevertheless can be tweaked to lock up large amounts of carbon for long periods of time. For example, you can literally farm for carbon.
...
Restoring ecosystems—particularly wetlands—is a promising avenue for carbon removal.

"Many ecosystems provide natural carbon sinks, but they (may have been) degraded over time by agricultural and urban expansion," Deich explains. "Restoring carbon-storing ecosystems like peatlands and mangroves can aid in mitigating climate change, while also providing numerous other ecosystem services (such as clean water, open space, wildlife habitat and fisheries enhancement)."

Another encouraging option is reforestation. The extant prime example is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), a 2005 initiative by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. While its results have been mixed, the thinking is that since deforestation may account for 10 to 30 percent of atmospheric carbon emissions, planting lots and lots (and lots) of trees may reverse or at least stabilize accumulating greenhouse gases.
...
Chemical carbon storage offers somewhat more limited options, involving two basic approaches.

"Direct air capture and storage includes technologies that can capture industrial-scale quantities of CO2 from ambient air using solvents, filters or other methods," Deich notes. But there's an inherent drawback: "Direct air capture systems are energy consuming—not energy generating—so they generate net-negative emissions only when the sequestered CO2 is greater than the CO2 emitted to power the system."

Mineral capture and storage, on the other hand, is a passive process that exploits the natural CO2 sequestering qualities of some minerals, such as silicates. By extracting, crushing and spreading such minerals over large areas, Deich maintains that significant quantities of CO2 could be captured and stored.

Carbon remediation schemes that are cost centers will probably fail, but schemes that are profit centers might succeed. Can money be made by mining carbon from the atmosphere?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Our power went down yesterday afternoon (December 12). The utility posted a message on their 1-800 number with expected repair time (a few hours later), but no explanation except that ~2000 customers were affected in our suburban area (Northeast USA).

Here's the weird bit -- LED bulbs stayed on, at reduced brightness. I got out a meter and measured 16 VAC in the house. This was enough to make useful light from "dimmable" LED bulbs (happened to be GE brand). After it got dark, we could also see that incandescent bulbs were giving off a faint reddish glow.

16VAC was also enough to keep a Netgear home router/Wi-Fi box going, it must have a switcher in the wall wart that accepts a really wide input voltage range?

Called a friend on the other side of the country who is an EE (with hardware background). He didn't have a good explanation, but suggested that in the process of bringing the grid back up there might be some big voltage swings--recommended unplugging everything we could. Went out to dinner and all was restored when we got home (no damage).

He also told a story from a rural area (near CA-Nevada border) where there was a power failure that upset the normally-balanced split phase -- instead of ~120V on both sides of neutral, the power went to 80V on one side and 160V on the other side of neutral. Equipment on the high voltage side failed due to extended over-voltage, seems that surge suppressors won't deal with this much energy.

Anyone? How does the grid fail-soft?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there's no question that they're a serious threat to privacy.

That's why EFF is launching the cell-site simulator section of Street Level Surveillance today.

EFF's Street Level Surveillance Project unites our past and future work on domestic surveillance technologies into one easily accessible portal. On this page, you'll find all the materials we have on each individual technology gathered into one place. Materials include FAQs about specific technologies, infographics and videos explaining how technologies work, and advocacy materials for activists concerned about the adoption of street level surveillance technologies in their own community. In the coming months, we'll be adding materials on drones, stingrays, and fusion centers.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ecuador and Sweden have struck an agreement on how the two nations will co-operate on criminal matters that will likely advance the investigation into sexual assault charges levelled against Wikileaker-in-chief Julian Assange.

Ecuador's Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Movilidad Humana revealed the agreement last week. The Ministerio's statement on the agreement says, after a pass through an online translat-o-tron, that "The agreement in question is undoubtedly an instrument that strengthens bilateral relations and facilitate, for example, compliance with judicial proceedings, as the interrogation of Mr. Assange asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London."

Is the agreement good news, or bad, for Assange?

Original Submission

xpda writes:

The FAA has released its final rules for drone registration requirements. Every small unmanned aircraft used for hobby and recreational purposes must be registered (you can begin registering on December 21st). This includes traditional radio controlled models in addition to autonomous and semi-autonomous drones. "Small" means 0.55 to 55 lbs.

takyon: Registration costs $5 per operator, but the fee will be waived for the first 30 days to encourage early registration:

Anyone 13 and older can register themselves as an operator; younger children can operate drones under adult supervision with proper registration.

This is only one of the elements of FAA's drone-related rulemaking. The agency is also tackling a set of comprehensive rules for recreational drone fliers and another one for commercial drone operators, such as Google or Amazon.

For now, the FAA's guidance for fliers of store-bought and homemade drones remains the same: Keep your drones under 55 pounds; fly them within your line of sight and below 400 feet; stay at least 5 miles away from an airport; avoid flying near stadiums or crowded places; and take some drone classes or join a club for extra safety.

Original Submission