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Phoenix666 writes:

This week Dutch, American and Canadian researchers present a major step in understanding antifreeze proteins, the proteins that hinder the growth of ice crystals. Artificial forms of these proteins are interesting for a whole range of applications – from de-icing spray and road salt to improved preservation of frozen food and organs. The team, led by TU/e researcher Ilja Voets, will publish its findings this week in the leading journal PNAS on how we need a different type of antifreeze protein than previously thought for most applications.

[...] Roughly speaking, antifreeze proteins work in two ways. On the one hand, they reduce the temperature whereby ice crystals begin to grow rapidly (the scientific term being 'thermal hysteresis', or TH). On the other hand, they combat so-call recrystallization, the process by which, in simple terms, small ice crystals cluster into larger chunks (scientific term: 'ice recrystallization inhibition', or IRI). However, the relationship between these two activities of antifreeze proteins has long been unclear.

[...] TU/e researcher Ilja Voets and her team of Dutch, American and Canadian researchers now reveal that there is no clear relationship between these activities and that there are also significant differences per protein. This also means that it is not so easy, as had long been thought, to determine how 'active' a protein is – an important consideration in its suitability in applications. "Sometimes the TH activity is important but more often than not it is the IRI activity that appears to be the determining factor," says Voets.

Antifreeze proteins are considered for a variety of applications from de-icing aircraft wings to keeping roads ice-free to producing better-quality frozen food.

Blocking rapid ice crystal growth through nonbasal plane adsorption of antifreeze proteins (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1524109113)

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Snotnose writes:

Though he is aging and achy, Jack Lousma is only 20 years old. The retired NASA astronaut — who was born in Grand Rapids, graduated from the University of Michigan and lived in Washtenaw County for decades — is arguably Michigan's most famous leap day baby.

Lousma (LOUZE-ma) spent more than 1,600 hours in space, but what could've been the most exciting space flight of his career — a trip to the moon — was canceled after the space program accomplished all it set out to do on the first 17 Apollo missions. The former Marine colonel had been slated for Apollo 18, 19 or 20.

Meet Jack Lousma, Michigan's most famous leap day baby.

Lousma did not even hear what he is so famous for hearing; the article notes:

7. He pointed out that the sentence he's best known for being on the receiving end of is misquoted. What Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert Jr. actually said was "Houston, we've had a problem here." According to the NASA transcript, Lousma — who was the capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, the person in the flight control room through whom all communications with the astronauts passed — asked Swigert to repeat what he said, because he'd been talking to the flight supervisor about something else. Swigert did.

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takyon writes:

Western Digital has added helium to hard drives in several of its product lines. Now Western Digital, its subsidiary HGST, and competitor Seagate all have helium-filled hard drive products:

Western Digital added helium-filled hard disk drives to the Red, Red Pro and Purple product lines. The disks drive new consumer storage devices with increased capacity, cooler operation and higher density.

HGST, now a subsidiary of Western Digital, first released HelioSeal Technology in 2014. Not long after, the company claimed 1 million products shipped and field reliability increased a full 15 percent. Helium allows hard disk manufacturers to use more platters (up to 7 in a drive) to increase density. The gas is thinner than regular air so the platters face less resistance in motion. This reduces vibration and friction heat inside the drive, and it uses less power at the motor.

Western Digital will release helium-filled products using technology from HGST. These drives will make it into WD-branded consumer models like the My Book and several NAS systems.

Various WD Red, WD Red Pro, WD Purple, My Book, and My Cloud drives will use HelioSeal technology. This marks the first time that helium-filled hard drives will be sold directly to consumers. All of the initial products will have a capacity of 8 terabytes (later 2-drive products will store 16 TB). My Book, My Book for Mac, and My Cloud 8 TB external hard drives will be the first drives to ship, starting at a $300 price for U.S. customers.

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Phoenix666 writes:

IKEA made headlines when it openly mused about Western economies "reaching peak stuff", but they are by no means the only folks who think that our seemingly insatiable appetite for more and more stuff might finally be leveling out.

New figures from the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that the amount of raw materials consumed by the UK economy fell from 15 tonne per person in 2001 to just over 10 tonnes in 2013.

That's a pretty astounding drop.

True, there was this tiny thing called The Great Recession between then and now. But still, such a huge decrease in everything from steel to plastics to fuel and biomass suggests that something bigger (or maybe smaller?) is going on. Over at The Guardian, Patrick Collinson takes a deeper dive into the numbers, noting among other things that the digitization of industries such as music, movies and more has led to a large decrease in raw materials within those industries. And also that industry has gotten better about using less material for each product created.

Have you reached peak stuff?

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ticho writes:

A fascinating new research called DROWN has uncovered a previously-unknown vulnerability in SSL v2, the first ever version of SSL that was released in 1995 and declared dead less than a year later. Even though this old version of SSL is not used much these days, it continues to be supported by many servers. The especially bad aspect of this attack is that it can be used to exploit TLS, even in cases when client devices don't support SSL v2, and sometimes even in cases when the servers don't support SSL v2 (but use the same RSA key as some other server that does). The researchers estimate that up to 22% of servers could be impacted by this problem.

You can read more in a Qualys blog article about the attack.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Contributor David Axe writes in the Daily Beast that a tiny, injectable machine could turn your noodle into a remote control — Pentagon Research Could Make 'Brain Modem' a Reality:

This seemingly unlikely piece of technology has just gotten a lot less unlikely. On Feb. 8, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-the U.S. military's fringe-science wing-announced the first successful tests, on animal subjects, of a tiny sensor that travels through blood vessels, lodges in the brain and records neural activity. [1]

The so-called "stentrode," a combination stent and electrode, is the size of a paperclip and flexible. The tiny, injectable machine—the invention of neurologist Tom Oxley and his team at the University of Melbourne in Australia—could help researchers solve one of the most vexing problems with the brain modem: how to insert a transmitter into the brain without also drilling a hole in the user's head, a risky procedure under any circumstances.

By reducing the need for invasive surgery, the stentrode may pave the way for more practical implementations of those kinds of life-changing applications of brain-machine interfaces, Doug Weber, a DARPA program manager, said in a statement.

[1] The Pentagon Wants to Put This in Your Brain: The U.S. military wants to build a brain modem that allows you to control objects by willpower. How realistic is it?

The U.S. military is beginning work on a new "implantable neural interface" that it hopes will allow wearers to transmit data back and forth from their brains to external digital devices.

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takyon writes:

Clear Channel Outdoor is launching a program called RADAR that will use billboards to track nearby phones and mobile devices in order to better target "out-of-home audiences". The data is supposedly anonymous and aggregated:

Clear Channel Outdoor — one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in the U.S. — is starting a new program called Radar that will use billboards to map real-world habits and behaviors from nearby consumers. The technology is sure to help advertisers better target their ads. But privacy advocates argue that it's, well, a little creepy. This is how Clear Channel Outdoor describes how the program works, in a video on its website:

"Using anonymous aggregated data from consumer cellular and mobile devices, RADAR measures consumer's real-world travel patterns and behaviors as they move through their day, analyzing data on direction of travel, billboard viewability, and visits to specific destinations. This movement is then mapped against Clear Channel's displays, allowing advertisers to plan and buy Out-Of-Home to reach specific behavioral audience segments."

AT&T is one of the partners:

Clear Channel and its partners — AT&T Data Patterns, a unit of AT&T that collects location data from its subscribers; PlaceIQ, which uses location data collected from other apps to help determine consumer behavior; and Placed, which pays consumers for the right to track their movements and is able to link exposure to ads to in-store visits — all insist that they protect the privacy of consumers. All data is anonymous and aggregated, they say, meaning individual consumers cannot be identified.

[...] Privacy advocates, however, have long raised questions about mobile device tracking, particularly as companies have melded this location information with consumers' online behavior to form detailed audience profiles. Opponents contend that people often do not realize their location and behavior are being tracked, even if they have agreed at some point to allow companies to monitor them. And while nearly all of these companies claim that the data they collect is anonymous and aggregated — and that consumers can opt out of tracking at any time — privacy advocates are skeptical. "People have no idea that they're being tracked and targeted," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "It is incredibly creepy, and it's the most recent intrusion into our privacy."

[...] Clear Channel Outdoor will offer Radar in its top 11 markets, including Los Angeles and New York, starting on Monday, with plans to make it available across the country later this year.

Senator Al Franken has written a letter (pdf) to Clear Channel asking for more information about the service's privacy policy.

Clear Channel Outdoor reported a loss of $41.4 million for the quarter ending on Dec. 31.

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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

(Andy's note: pretty sure it's only "radical" if you discount ideas from science fiction - Technovelgy points out it's been as an idea from at least 2002, and I'm pretty sure earlier examples could be found if one went looking.)

[Wikipedia helpfully has articles on Chimera (mythology) (the source of the name) and Chimera (genetics) (the topic of this research). -Ed.]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

It seems 🚸 should 👀 watch out what kind of 💩 they're sending with their 📱💻 if they don't want to get a visit from the 👮🚓. Time writes:

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HughPickens.com writes:

Taking a page from the Uber playbook, Christopher Palmeri writes in Bloomberg that Disney's six parks in Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California, are raising the cost to visit its theme parks as much as 20 percent during the busiest times of year and lowering them on typically slow days. Previously, the parks charged the same price for a one-day pass any time of year. "The demand for our theme parks continues to grow, particularly during peak periods," the company said. "In addition to expanding our parks, we are adopting seasonal pricing on our one-day ticket to help better spread visitation throughout the year."

The move is designed to help manage traffic at the parks, which had record visits in the final three months of 2015. Busy days at Disney's amusement parks cause long lines for customers, and even gate closures. Dynamic pricing is meant to financially incentivize customers to choose less-busy days, spread out attendance, and to make as much money as possible on days when the park is historically expected to be full. It is also likely to boost Disney's total revenue since most visitors will pay more for their tickets.

One reason Disney may expect bigger crowds this year is the upcoming Star Wars theme park expansion which includes a virtual reality ride that allows guests to control the Millennium Falcon in an aerial battle with the First Order. "Star Wars is, for lack of a better word ... awesome," said Harrison Ford. "I'm so blessed that I had the opportunity to be a part of it. To walk in these iconic locations. And soon, you'll be able to do that as well. Not in a galaxy far, far away, but in a place close to home."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

American independent game creator Jonathan Blow, who created both Braid and the recently-released The Witness, has been working on a home-grown programming language from scratch for over a year now — with the focus being, of course, game development. For those interested, he will be doing a livestream tomorrow, Tuesday (March 1st) at 7PM PST (2AM UTC on March 2). You can catch the stream on twitch.tv and even download the demo source code written in the new language as a single .zip file. For those not in the loop and curious to see what's different about his language (compared to say, Rust or Go), he has all his previous demos archived on his YouTube channel.

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kurenai.tsubasa writes:

This story is somewhat stale if not for the escalating national controversy concerning gender identity. In June 2015, The Advocate covered a curious incident of violence against a woman that occurred in January earlier that year. Cisgendered woman Cortney Bogorad was forcefully ejected from a Detroit Fishbone's restaurant, suffering several injuries.

Bogorad told news station WXYZ (autoplay video warning):

The Detroit Free Press also carried a description of the injuries she sustained:

Fishbone's is a Cajun-style restaurant chain located in the Detroit area.

Here is my question, since many people recently have found themselves in various increasingly absurd demographics with much gusto. Is violence against women who do not have traditional looks acceptable in the pursuit of determining another's "true gender" and which spaces are acceptable for them to enter?

[Ed Note: there was considerable discussion among the editors as to whether or not this story would appeal to the community. Conclusion: We just don't know. Solution: Ask the community! So, is this particular story, or stories of this nature (cis/trans-gender issues), of interest to you? Would you like to see more stories like this posted to the site? Please reply in the comments.]

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takyon writes:

Apple has achieved a legal victory in a Brooklyn case that attempted to use the All Writs Act, similar to the case of a San Bernardino shooter's locked iPhone:

A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court in New York has handed Apple a legal victory in a Brooklyn drug case where federal investigators asked for help getting into a locked iPhone.

Though the ruling isn't precedent-setting or binding on other courts, it hits on a similar overarching theme of government access to encrypted data, as The Washington Post reports:

"The two cases involve different versions of iPhone's operating system and vastly different requests for technical help, but they both turn on whether a law from 1789 known as the All Writs Act can be applied to cases in which the government cannot get at encrypted data stored on suspects' devices."

NPR's Joel Rose previously outlined the premise of this Brooklyn case, which predated the legal clash over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters:

"Jun Feng pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine last year. As part of its investigation, the government obtained a search warrant for Feng's iPhone. But the phone was locked by a passcode, so prosecutors asked a judge for an order compelling Apple to bypass it."

That order was based on the same law as the San Bernardino court order compelling Apple's help in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook before the Dec. 2 attack, in which he and his wife killed 14 people.

The Justice Department will appeal the case. FBI Director James Comey and Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell will appear at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday to testify on encryption.

The Verge, The Register.

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takyon writes:

A Google self-driving car may be at fault for a crash for the first time, although the damage was minimal:

Google has prided itself on the fact that its self-driving car fleet has never been responsible for any of its crashes — they've always been caused by another (decidedly more human) force — but that may have just changed. According to a California DMV filing first reported by writer Mark Harris, one of Google's self-driving Lexus SUVs drove into the side of a bus at low speed.

[...]

The Google AV test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue. Approximately three seconds later, as the Google AV was reentering the center of the lane it made contact with the side of the bus. The Google AV was operating in autonomous mode and traveling at less than 2 mph, and the bus was travelling at about 15 mph at the time of contact.

[...] In all likelihood, it was just a matter of time before one of these research cars hit something — there's still years of testing and development left to do, after all. Still, despite that and the fact that these cars are enormously safer than human drivers by any statistical measure, it could shake confidence that autonomous cars are close to ready for real-world use. Google's monthly self-driving report is due in just a couple days' time, so we'll likely get more details on the incident then. We've reached out to Google for comment.

California DMV report, and Reuters.

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HughPickens.com writes:

John Markoff writes in the NYT on a new report written by a former Pentagon official who helped establish United States policy on autonomous weapons who argues that autonomous weapons could be uncontrollable in real-world environments where they are subject to design failure as well as hacking, spoofing and manipulation by adversaries. The report contrasts these completely automated systems, which have the ability to target and kill without human intervention, to weapons that keep humans "in the loop" in the process of selecting and engaging targets. "Anyone who has ever been frustrated with an automated telephone call support helpline, an alarm clock mistakenly set to 'p.m.' instead of 'a.m.,' or any of the countless frustrations that come with interacting with computers, has experienced the problem of 'brittleness' that plagues automated systems," Mr. Scharre writes.

The United States military does not have advanced autonomous weapons in its arsenal. However, this year the Defense Department requested almost $1 billion to manufacture Lockheed Martin's Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which is described as a "semiautonomous" weapon. The missile is controversial because, although a human operator will initially select a target, it is designed to fly for several hundred miles while out of contact with the controller and then automatically identify and attack an enemy ship. As an alternative to completely autonomous weapons, the report advocates what it describes as "Centaur Warfighting." The term "centaur" has recently come to describe systems that tightly integrate humans and computers. Human-machine combat teaming takes a page from the field of "centaur chess," in which humans and machines play cooperatively on the same team. "Having a person in the loop is not enough," says Scharre. "They can't be just a cog in the loop. The human has to be actively engaged."

Original Submission