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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:44 | Votes:96

posted by CoolHand on Friday February 05 2016, @11:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the juno-we-post-the-best-stories dept.

NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully executed a maneuver to adjust its flight path [on] Feb. 3. The maneuver refined the spacecraft's trajectory, helping set the stage for Juno's arrival at the solar system's largest planetary inhabitant five months and a day from now.

"This is the first of two trajectory adjustments that fine tune Juno's orbit around the sun, perfecting our rendezvous with Jupiter on July 4th at 8:18 p.m. PDT [11:18 p.m. EDT]," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

The maneuver began at 10:38 a.m. PST (1:38 p.m. EST). ). The Juno spacecraft's thrusters consumed about 1.3 pounds (0.6 kilograms) of fuel during the burn, and changed the spacecraft's speed by 1 foot (0.31 meters), per second. At the time of the maneuver, Juno was about 51 million miles (82 million kilometers) from Jupiter and approximately 425 million miles (684 million kilometers) from Earth. The next trajectory correction maneuver is scheduled for May 31.

Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011. The spacecraft will orbit the Jovian world 33 times, skimming to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the planet's cloud tops every 14 days. During the flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its aurorae to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Friday February 05 2016, @09:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the fusion-aplomb dept.

Scientists in Germany successfully created a very short burst of nuclear fusion using the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator. Although still far from commercial production, this is a promising start for clean and safe energy.

Following nine years of construction and testing, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald injected a tiny amount of hydrogen into a doughnut-shaped device — then zapped it with the equivalent of 6,000 microwave ovens. The resulting super-hot gas, known as plasma, lasted just a fraction of a second before cooling down again, long enough for scientists to confidently declare the start of their experiment a success.

"Everything went well today," said Robert Wolf, a senior scientist involved with the project. "With a system as complex as this you have to make sure everything works perfectly and there's always a risk." Among the difficulties is how to cool the complex arrangement of magnets required to keep the plasma floating inside the device, Wolf said. Scientists looked closely at the hiccups experienced during the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland more than five years ago to avoid similar mistakes, he said.

[...] Known as the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, or W7-X, the 400-million-euro ($435 million) device was first fired up in December using helium, which is easier to heat. Helium also has the advantage of "cleaning" any minute dirt particles left behind during the construction of the device. Over the coming years the device, which isn't designed to produce energy itself, will slowly increase the temperature and duration of the plasma with the goal of keeping it stable for 30 minutes, Wolf said. "If we manage 2025, that's good. Earlier is even better," he said.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @08:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the sell-it-to-someone-else dept.

According to Consumerist, the NFL has refused to purchase the only known recording of Super Bowl I. The game was simulcast on CBS and NBC but neither saved a copy of the broadcast. So the only known recording was done by a private individual on Quadruplex videotape machine.

According to The New York Times ,

Troy Haupt is a 47-year-old nurse anesthetist here in North Carolina's Outer Banks. He has a secret to reveal about Super Bowl I: He owns the only known recording of its broadcast.

CBS and NBC, which televised the game, did not preserve any tapes. But the copy that Haupt owns — of a broadcast that launched the Super Bowl as an enormous shared spectacle that attracts more than 100 million viewers — might never be seen on any network. The N.F.L. does not want to buy the tapes and has warned Haupt not to sell them to outside parties or else the league will pursue legal action.

Unless the league and Haupt make a deal to resolve the financial differences that have privately divided them since 2005, the tapes will stay in storage in a former mine in upstate New York.

Haupt's father, Martin, taped the game. Haupt never knew him. Haupt and his mother, Beth Rebuck, say they have no idea what he did for a living back then. They also don't know why he went to work on Jan. 15, 1967, with a pair of two-inch Scotch tapes, slipped one, and then the other, into a Quadruplex taping machine and recorded the Green Bay Packers' 35-10 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. He told his family nothing about his day's activity.

It would take another eight years for Martin Haupt to tell his wife what he had done. By then, they had divorced and both had remarried.

He was sick with cancer and handed her the tapes.

"He said maybe they could help pay for the kids' education," she said. And she put them in the attic, where they accumulated dust and intrigue.

Related:
NFL Has a Recording of Every Play of Super Bowl I and Re-Aired That--but....


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @06:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-they-can't-beat-it-there-is-promise-in-the-tech dept.

Technologyreview.com carries the following story:

The National Security Agency did a surprising thing last August – it suddenly declared that the algorithms it had spent a decade telling the world were the best way to lock up secret data weren't safe anymore. The reason? The danger of quantum computers.

The NSA has now released more detail on those fears. "There is growing research in the area of quantum computing, and enough progress is being made that NSA must act now," says a new Q&A style document on the problem. It's aimed at companies and government departments working with sensitive data.

The catch is that no one knows how to make quantum-computer-proof encryption. The NSA can only tell companies building new systems to use certain algorithms "believed to be safe from attack by a large quantum computer." It says it's working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology on coming up with some new standard algorithms that could survive in a post-quantum era.

Or, the more cynical amongst us might say that the NSA would prefer us to use the 'new' encryption which they know that they can crack...?


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @05:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the resurrecting-the-dead dept.

The original plan as CBS Sports announced was

- Super Bowl I will re-air for the first time half a century later

Forty-nine years to the day after Super Bowl I between the Packers and Chiefs went down, NFL Films is replaying a recreated version of the game at 8 p.m. ET on Friday, January 15th.

[...] The game originally aired on both NBC and CBS but all the tapes of the game "were either lost or recorded over". There was no "full video version of the game" until NFL Films fully restored the tapes, putting audio of a radio broadcast over top.

In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources. Once all the plays were located, NFL Films was able to put the plays in order and [stitch] them together while fully restoring, re-mastering, and color correcting the footage. Finally, audio from the NBC Sports radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman was layered on top of the footage to complete the broadcast.

The execution, however, wasn't quite the spectacular that the National Football (hand egg) League's promotions hyped as NBC Sports reported:

[Continued.]

- NFL Network drops the ball with Super Bowl I re-broadcast

When the NFL Films announced that it had cobbled together every play of Super Bowl I and that NFL Network would show the game in its entirety, it sounded like a landmark achievement in sports broadcasting: The full recording of Super Bowl I was previously thought lost to history, and Friday night's re-airing would be a historic moment.

Instead, it was a major disappointment.

Although NFL Network did, in fact, show every play of Super Bowl I, its presentation fell far short of a full re-broadcast of the game. NFL Media had said the game would feature the original radio call of Jim Simpson, who passed away this week at the age of 88, but what NFL Network mostly showed was its own analysts, in their familiar Los Angeles studio, talking over the game. The commentary wasn't particularly interesting, didn't offer much historical insight or actual analysis of the game, and served only to detract from what should have been a big event for NFL Network.

Perhaps NFL Media thought it needed that kind of filler content because the NFL Films footage didn't include all the moments between plays. Maybe it would have seemed jarring to viewers if the broadcast had been full of stops and starts. But even if thats the case, the filler content could have been so much better. The good stuff--like an interview with Len Dawson, the Chiefs' quarterback in Super Bowl I--was far too brief. And the bad stuff--like the Los Angeles studio commentators informing us that The Beatles and The Monkees were the top musical acts in January of 1967, when Super Bowl I was played--went on way too long. I could listen to Len Dawson talk about Super Bowl I for three hours, but I don't want to listen to NFL Network analysts who had no connection to Super Bowl I talk for three hours.

There's a story that the Dumont Network, having been soundly beaten in the ratings by the offsprings of existing radio networks, had their workers load into trucks all the existing recordings of the television shows Dumont had done and those guys were told to dump them into the East River. NASA's official recording of the Apollo 11 landing has been lost. Just think of how much of our culture has been lost because of short-sighted managers, clumsy archivists, and horrible "intellectual property" laws.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @03:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-gotta-be-pricey dept.

A National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) committee has given conditional backing to the use of mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT). Three-person in vitro fertilisation was approved and legalized in the United Kingdom last year, but has been banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 2001, despite having been used to conceive a patient back in 2000. Mitochondrial replacement is intended to allow a couple to conceive a child, but with healthy mitochondria inserted into the embryo from a female donor:

Would it be ethical for scientists to try to create babies that have genetic material from three different people? An influential panel of experts has concluded the answer could be yes. The 12-member panel, assembled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, released a 164-page report Wednesday outlining a plan for how scientists could ethically pursue the controversial research. "The committee concludes that it is ethically permissible" to conduct such experiments, the report says, but then goes on to detail a long list of conditions that would have to be met first.

For example, scientists would have to perform extensive preliminary research in the laboratory and with animals to try make sure it is safe. And then researchers should initially try to make only male babies, because they would be incapable of passing their unusual amalgamation of DNA on to future generations. "Minimizing risk to future children should be of highest priority," the committee writes.

The report was requested by the Food and Drug Administration in response to applications by two groups of scientists in New York and Oregon to conduct the experiments. Their goal is to help women have healthy babies even though they come from families plagued by [mitochondrial] genetic disorders.

The PDF of the report, "Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques: Ethical, Social, and Policy Considerations" (DOI: 10.17226/21871) is 8.1 MB and can be downloaded "as guest" with no email confirmation.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the zoom-zoom dept.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has placed first in the design phase of SpaceX's Hyperloop competition. 115 teams submitted designs, and 22 teams will be able to test their designs on a 1.5 km test track during the summer:

Designs for passenger pods that could travel through airless tubes have been revealed by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passenger pods could be fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h). The MIT team came first in a SpaceX competition to design pods that could be tested in a prototype tube. The team will now have the opportunity to build and test its design in the US.

Elon Musk - the entrepreneur behind companies such as Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors - announced his vision for a Hyperloop transport system in August 2013. Although SpaceX is not developing its own commercial Hyperloop, the company says it wants to "accelerate development" of the idea and is building a mile-long test track in California. The winning entries in the company's design competition will now have the opportunity to test them in full-scale tubes over the summer.

Popular Science, Space.com.

Previously:
SpaceX will hold a Hyperloop Pod Competition in 2016
Three Tracks Planned to Test 'Hyperloop' Transportation Idea


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @12:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the Robbie-Rosie-BigDog-T1000 dept.

Last week at the Army Aviation Symposium, in Arlington, Va., a U.S. Army officer announced that the Army is looking to slim down its personnel numbers and adopt more robots over the coming years. The biggest surprise, though, is the scale of the downsizing the Army might aim for.

At the current rate, the Army is expected to shrink from 540,000 people down to 420,000 by 2019. But at last week's event, Gen. Robert Cone, head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, offered some surprising details about the slim-down plans. As Defense News put it, he "quietly dropped a bomb," saying the Army is studying the possibility of reducing the size of a brigade from 4,000 soldiers to 3,000 in the coming years. To keep things just as effective while reducing manpower, the Army will bring in more unmanned power, in the form of robots.

Related: Google's Noisy "BigDog" Robot Fails to Impress U.S. Marine Corps


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the started-dating-carmen-san-diego? dept.

Moxie Marlinspike was a coveted speaker at security conferences. He uncovered elementary flaws in SSL certificate repudiation, posited flaws in SSH, and co-authored a specification for certificate pinning. However, after the acquisition of his startup by Twitter in Nov 2011, appearances and blog posts become significantly more sparse. With the exception of one post in Feb 2015, the blog has been unchanged since Dec 2013. Moxie's organization has released a succession of libraries and applications but Moxie seems to maintain a very low profile.


takyon: cafebabe wrote:

Marlinspike's Twitter account has been active in December 2015. The pinned tweet is from June 2013. He also visited Russia in December.

Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-about-a-nice-game-of-missle-command? dept.

The Underhanded C competition has just announced the 2015 winner and runners up.

The objective of the competition is to:

write C code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should perform some specific underhanded task that will not be detected by examining the source code.

For this particular competition:

two countries agree to build a fissile material detector with an "information barrier"—-essentially a computer program that will take the result of a scan, determine if it matches some reference pattern, and output only a "yes" or "no."

Your goal is to write the function that compares a test measurement to a reference pattern:

int match( double * test, double * reference, int bins, double threshold )

...where test and reference are 1-dimensional arrays of width bins, that encode a gamma ray spectrum of a test warhead and a reference warhead, respectively. Your detector should output a 1 ("yes") if these two arrays are sufficiently similar, and 0 ("no") otherwise; you should use the parameter threshold to adjust the sensitivity of the match.
...
Somehow, match() should return a "yes" even when fissile material is missing, if triggered by certain circumstances that can be engineered by the host country.

The winning entry uses some clever type confusion between double and single precision floats.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the that-didn't-take-long dept.

The manufacturers of a pioneering video game controller that doubles as a virtual reality male sex toy have pulled it off the market after being swamped by demand.

VirtuaDolls is a system which allows hi-tech heavy breathers to strap on a VR helmet, sleep with simulated women and be pleasured by a device which responds to on-screen eroticism.

This could, for instance, allow gamers to watch a cyber-siren twerking whilst the silicon sex toy pulsates in time with her every gyration.

So many men rushed to pre-order this device on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo that its designers were forced to "put the project on hold".

In a series of tweets, the firm behind Virtuadolls admitted demand for their virtual vagina had been enormous.

At last, the inevitable.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @06:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the look-in-the-chinatown-phone-book dept.

There is a brief interview over at NPR with James Pampush, who recently published a paper in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology titled The enduring puzzle of the human chin. This paper is based upon his dissertation work about why homo sapiens have chins at all.

The conclusion of the article is that it appears that the chin perhaps points to some deeper insight into what it means to be human:

Well, if you're looking across all of the hominids, which is the family tree after the split with chimpanzees, there's not really that many traits that we can point to that we can say are exclusively human. Big brains - Neanderthals had larger brains than us. All those animals all walked on two legs. The one thing that really sticks out is the chin.

Paper abstract:

Although modern humans are considered to be morphologically distinct from other living primates because of our large brains, dexterous hands, and bipedal gait, all of these features are found among extinct hominins. The chin, however, appears to be a uniquely modern human trait. Probably because of the chin's exclusivity, many evolutionary scenarios have been proposed to explain its origins. To date, researchers have developed adaptive hypotheses relating chins to speech, mastication, and sexual selection; still others see it as a structural artifact tangentially related to complex processes involving evolutionary retraction of the midfacial skeleton. Consensus has remained elusive, partly because hypotheses purporting to explain how this feature developed uniquely in modern humans are all fraught with theoretical and/or empirical shortcomings. Here we review a century's worth of chin hypotheses and discuss future research avenues that may provide greater insight into this human peculiarity.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @04:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the snakes-on-a-space-plane dept.

Sometimes, headlines just write themselves. And in this particular case, there's so much cool stuff going on with this NASA-funded robotic project that we couldn't even stuff it all in to a single line. It's a concept for a soft robotic eel designed to explore the oceans of Europa (a moon of Jupiter), which is able to scavenge electrical energy from magnetic fields, use it to generate oxygen and hydrogen, and then light it off to create an explosion to propel itself. Oh, and it'll have a soft flexible skin that doubles as "a stretchable, electroluminescent display," because it's awesome. And why not.

This concept for a "soft-robotic rover with electrodynamic power scavenging" comes from Cornell University, and NASA has awarded it a grant under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to hoist itself up from TRL 1 to TRL 2. TRLs are "tech readiness levels;" TRL 1 is "basic principles observed and reported" while TRL 2 is "technology concept and/or application formulated." An actual mission to Europa would involve a system that's waaay up at TRL 9, so we've got a ways to go, but the sheer distance from any sort of practical technological readiness sure does let this robotic eel get away with all kinds of craziness.

This robot will not give Europans a very good idea of how humans look.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @02:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-are-all-just-big-rocks dept.

The moon was formed by a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a "planetary embryo" called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, UCLA geochemists and colleagues report.

Scientists had already known about this high-speed crash, which occurred almost 4.5 billion years ago, but many thought the Earth collided with Theia (pronounced THAY-eh) at an angle of 45 degrees or more -- a powerful side-swipe (simulated in this 2012 YouTube video). New evidence reported Jan. 29 in the journal Science substantially strengthens the case for a head-on assault.

The researchers analyzed seven rocks brought to the Earth from the moon by the Apollo 12, 15 and 17 missions, as well as six volcanic rocks from the Earth's mantle -- five from Hawaii and one from Arizona.

The key to reconstructing the giant impact was a chemical signature revealed in the rocks' oxygen atoms. (Oxygen makes up 90 percent of rocks' volume and 50 percent of their weight.) More than 99.9 percent of Earth's oxygen is O-16, so called because each atom contains eight protons and eight neutrons. But there also are small quantities of heavier oxygen isotopes: O-17, which have one extra neutron, and O-18, which have two extra neutrons. Earth, Mars and other planetary bodies in our solar system each has a unique ratio of O-17 to O-16 -- each one a distinctive "fingerprint."

In 2014, a team of German scientists reported in Science that the moon also has its own unique ratio of oxygen isotopes, different from Earth's. The new research finds that is not the case.

See also the original press release. An abstract is available; full article is paywalled.


[Update: removed link to non-science Wikipedia article.]

Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 05 2016, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the slippery-slope dept.

The U.S. Congress has passed a bill that would require the passports of registered sex offenders to include a "special mark":

Legislation requiring the State Department to identify registered sex offenders with a special mark on their passports received final passage in the House of Representatives on Monday night and went to President Obama's desk. The White House has not indicated whether President Obama plans to sign the bill.

Called "International Megan's Law" by its sponsors, the bill provides that offenders' passports contain a "unique identifier" — as yet unspecified. Critics call it a scarlet letter. "Who is going to have a unique identifier added to their passport next? Is it going to be Muslims? Is it going to be gays?" asks Janice Bellucci, a civil rights attorney who has fought against sex offender registries. Supporters say the bill will help prevent sex trafficking, since sex offenders "hop on planes and go to places for a week or two and abuse little children," the bill's sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., told NJ.com. Multiple requests for comment made to Smith's office were not returned.

In drafting the bill, Smith and others drew upon a 2010 GAO report that found that about 4,500 of the more than 16 million U.S. passports issued each year go to registered sex offenders. The report included a selected list of registered sex offenders who received passports in 2008, with detailed descriptions of their crimes. In a rebuttal printed as an appendix in the report, the State Department noted that there was no evidence anyone on that list had traveled in order to commit a sex crime, and that it already has the authority to deny passports to people convicted of sex tourism involving minors and those whose probation or parole terms forbid them from traveling.

Co-published at Vice.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Friday February 05 2016, @12:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the almighty-dollar-shall-suffer dept.

Copenhagen's mayor has announced plans to divest the city's 6.9bn kroner (£700m) investment fund of all holdings in coal, oil and gas.

If his proposal is approved at a finance committee meeting next Tuesday, as expected, the Danish capital will become the country's first investment fund to sell its stocks and bonds in fossil fuels.

"Copenhagen is at the forefront of world cities in the green transition, and we are working hard to become the world's first CO2 neutral capital in 2025. Therefore it seems totally wrong for the municipality to still be investing in oil, coal and gas. We must change that," the city's mayor, Frank Jensen, told the Danish newspaper, Information, which first reported the story.

Some believe that disinvestment plans pressured South Africa to dismantle apartheid. Could it work with fossil fuels?


Original Submission