SoylentNews

Demose writes:

Lasersaur has made their manual available with a bill of materials, build guide and CAD models. "The unit will cut any dense organic material such as plywood and cloth as well as some plastics such as acrylic glass up to 0.5 in (13 mm) thick (depending on the power of the laser tube selected) with up to 100 µm of accuracy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasersaur

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

CNN and USA Today report that investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, who worked with Geoscience Australia, Boeing and the Australian National University, have concluded that two pieces of wreckage found in December and February on the coast of Mozambique "almost certainly" came from the disappeared Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

previous story:
Piece of 777 Wing Found on Reunion Island; Likely from MH370

Original Submission

takyon writes:

It's that time of the year again. Time to talk about drugs and the war on them because some stoners declared a holiday or something.

A recent article in Harper's Magazine includes the following gem that sums up the modern Drug War's origins. The journalist interviewed John Ehrlichman, one of the Watergate co-conspirators:

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

[Oh yes, it continues...]

butthurt writes:

The Register (mirror) and ZDNet (mirror) report that version 10.3 of the FreeBSD operating system has been released.

In the new version, the ability to run Linux binaries now includes 64-bit compatibility (on the amd64 architecture). Ethernet hardware in Intel Skylake chipsets is now supported, and support for ZFS as a root file-system when using UEFI has been improved.

Other changes, such as a multithreaded xz, are listed in the release announcement.

further information:

• hardware notes
• release notes

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An NYPD social media campaign promoting backdoored encryption appears to have failed miserably after a Twitter hashtag was "hijacked". The press release for the campaign mentions murderers, rapists, terrorists, child abuse, domestic violence, and human trafficking, and the press conference included sympathetic victims:

A social media campaign by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Manhattan District Attorney to garner public support for forcing tech companies to install encryption backdoors has backfired spectacularly. "The debate over encryption is often referred to in terms of privacy and security, with little regard for the impact on crime victims," said District Attorney Cyrus Vance at the launch on Monday.

[...] As we saw in the UC Davis case, there are plenty of social media "gurus" willing to take money to try and manipulate social media. So the law enforcement team launched #unlockjustice, a campaign to let the public scream their disapproval of end-to-end encryption. You can see where this is going. The response to the campaign has not been what the NYPD is looking for.

Strong crypto prevents serious crimes like identity theft, stalking, sabotage and espionage. #UnlockJustice with strong security and crypto. — matt blaze (@mattblaze) April 18, 2016

Giving government authority over every intimate aspect of your private life is a wide gate to enslavement #UnlockJustice — Jonathan Zdziarski (@JZdziarski) April 19, 2016

People deserve stronger protection than criminals. Default strong encryption protects civilians against muggers and thieves. #UnlockJustice — the grugq (@thegrugq) April 18, 2016

The failed campaign also drew attention to the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which had already been using the #UnlockJustice hashtag to highlight excessive mandatory sentences.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

An eWeek blogger notes that in Google's Safe Browsing rating system, the company has rated its own google.com domain as "partially dangerous." According to an archived copy of the listing, the reasons for the rating are (hyperlinks removed):

• Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers.
• Attackers on this site might try to trick you to download software or steal your information (for example passwords, messages, or credit card information).
• Some pages on this website redirect visitors to dangerous websites that install malware on visitors' computers, including: 7b726aeb-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com, polnu4ewtan4iwki.ws, and 40d0dfd9-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com.
• Dangerous websites have been sending visitors to this website, including: maeaflordapele.com, valeimaginar.blogspot.com, and bou7out.blogspot.com.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Light consists of tiny indivisible portions, the photons. Under certain conditions, they, too, can condense, if they are cooled enough. Many thousands of these light packets then suddenly fuse into a kind of super-photon with unusual characteristics – a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate.

The physicists at the University of Bonn have now been able to show that the photon gas at this phase transition behaves according to the theoretical predictions of Bose and Einstein: Similar to water, it abruptly changes its heat storage capacity, meaning the ability to store thermal energy. "This behavior was already known from condensed atoms", explains Prof. Dr. Martin Weitz of the Institute of Applied Physics. "However, this is the first time that this phenomenon has been demonstrated for a condensate of light".

Atoms, too, form a Bose-Einstein condensate, when they are cooled greatly and enough of them are simultaneously concentrated in a small space. They then suddenly become indistinguishable: They act like a single giant atom. Twenty years ago, physicists already demonstrated that the heat capacity of atoms suddenly changes at this phase transition. How strong this change is, however, can be measured only imprecisely for atoms. "In our condensate, this can be done substantially better", emphasizes Dr. Jan Klärs, who has since moved from Bonn to ETH Zurich.

I wonder what color, if any, it would have? -Ed.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Phones can only last so long and my admittedly ancient BlackBerry Curve took one-too-many tumbles and now needs to be replaced. Thanks to recent changes in the cell-phone market, I'm looking to purchase a phone, outright, and get a month-to-month plan for it.

I am very privacy conscious and have, so far, avoided Apple (walled garden - blegh) or Android (tell Google everything). I suspect there are fellow Soylentils who hold a similar perspective. (My current cell provider is US Cellular. I'm open to change, but would like to avoid AT&T and Verizon --- have heard too many horror stories.)

Background: I've been programming computers since the 1970s. I've tried using Apple products, but it seems they are user-friendly to the extent that you want to do what they have already decided is okay. They seem to expose a bare minimum of controls to allow customization. That would frustrate me to no end.

So, that leaves me with Android as the other major alternative. I am leery about giving any more info to Google than necessary -- given a choice, I regularly choose an alternative over a Google product (i.e. DuckDuckGo for search, openstreetmap, etc.)

My thoughts, at the moment, are to get a phone and load cyanogenmod on it. I've read good things about the privacy capabilities it provides; especially fine-grained allow/deny access permissions. Added bonus is ability to apply updates more frequently than a telco-branded phone would provide. I have no experience with rooting/flashing a phone, so I need this process to be as idiot-proof as possible. Also, I'm leery of getting a phone only to see support for it dropped shortly thereafter.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

Jolting a super-stretchy, self-healing material with an electrical field causes it to twitch or pulse in a muscle-like fashion. The polymer can also stretch to 100 times its original length, and even repair itself if punctured.

Cheng-Hui Li, working in the Stanford University lab of chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao, wanted to test the stretchiness of a rubberlike type of plastic known as an elastomer that he had just synthesized. Such materials can normally be stretched two or three times their original length and spring back to original size. One common stress test involves stretching an elastomer beyond this point until it snaps.

But Li, a visiting scholar from China, hit a snag: The clamping machine typically used to measure elasticity could only stretch about 45 inches. To find the breaking point of their one-inch sample, Li and another lab member had to hold opposing ends in their hands, standing further and further apart, eventually stretching a 1-inch polymer film to more than 100 inches.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

European scientists are meeting this week to consider their best option for exploring Europa, the moon of Jupiter.

They have a number of ideas that could fit as add-ons to US missions that are likely to be launched in the 2020s.

The concepts range from remote-sensing instruments to penetrators that would try to burrow beneath Europa's ice-encrusted surface.

Whatever option is chosen, it will first have to win the support of the European Space Agency.

The Paris-based organisation is about to issue a call for proposals to fill a medium-cost launch opportunity - and the invitation will cover the full gamut of space exploration, not just planetary science.

Nonetheless, there is an offer on the table to Esa from its American counterpart, Nasa, to participate in the Europa ventures.

These missions will likely include a probe, to be launched in 2022, that will make repeated passes of the moon.

It is very probable also that Nasa will send another craft to make a soft landing. This could launch in 2022 with the first mission, or separately a couple of years later.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Afraid your partner is cheating on you in your own bed? In the market for a new mattress? Good news:

Having failed at marketing their internet-connected mattress for babies, Spanish company Durmet has flipped the pillow talk on their WiFi-enabled "Smarttress." The device now comes in an adult-sized version with what Durmet sees as its newest killer feature: a "Lover Detection System" that will buzz your phone every time it detects suspicious activity.

With 24 ultrasonic sensors embedded in the springs, the mattress can detect... action across multiple contact zones and "sends an alert to your mobile phone whenever someone is using your bed in a questionable way." But the questionably smart mattress offers more than just simple alarms. According to the dramatically soundtracked promotional video, the app also delivers creepily specific bedtime analytics like a "Speedometer" and "Intensity and impact per minute" metrics. That means you, the paranoid buyer of smart mattresses, won't just be spying on your cheating partner, you'll also be able to monitor their performance.

Also at CNET, TechCrunch.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

We have a beautiful theory that puts each of nature's forces into a single, neat package. The whole of it can be summed up in a single line of very compact—and for most, including me, incomprehensible—mathematics. At least, that is what we would like to be able to say, but this beauty is marred. Imagine the Mona Lisa with an eyepatch drawn in using crayon.

That is modern physics. The eyepatch is gravity.

There are many ideas about how to remove the crayon eyepatch from the masterpiece of modern physics and create a single, unified theory, but there's little evidence to support any of them. Among the ideas are theories involving extra dimensions (like string theory). And for nearly 10 years, physicists have been fruitlessly searching for evidence for these hidden dimensions.

Now, one of the most sensitive experiments yet has reported another null result. But it's a very cool experiment nonetheless.

They should have asked Buckaroo Banzai for help.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Using a state-of-the-art ultrafast electron microscope, University of Minnesota researchers have recorded the first-ever videos showing how heat moves through materials at the nanoscale traveling at the speed of sound.

The research, published today in Nature Communications, provides unprecedented insight into roles played by individual atomic and nanoscale features that could aid in the design of better, more efficient materials with a wide array of uses, from personal electronics to alternative-energy technologies.

Energy in the form of heat impacts all technologies and is a major factor in how electronic devices and public infrastructure are designed and engineered. It is also the largest form of waste energy in critical applications, including power transmission and especially transportation, where, for example, roughly 70 percent of the energy in gasoline is wasted as heat in automobile engines.

The video in question is available on YouTube.

Original Study

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The BBC reports that Intel will cut 12,000 jobs, or about 11% of its workforce:

US tech giant Intel is shedding 12,000 jobs as it seeks to cut reliance on the declining personal computer market. The maker of computer chips will take a $1.2bn charge to cover restructuring costs. The job cuts, about 11% of Intel's workforce, will be made over the next 12 months, Intel said in a statement.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The dinosaurs were already in decline 50 million years before the asteroid strike that finally wiped them out, a study suggests.

The new assessment adds further fuel to a debate on how dinosaurs were doing when a 10km-wide space rock slammed into Earth 66 million years ago.

A team suggests the creatures were in long-term decline because they could not cope with the ways Earth was changing.

The study appears in PNAS journal.

Researchers analysed the fossil remains of dinosaurs from the point they emerged 231 million years ago up to the point they went extinct.

To begin with, new species evolved at an explosive rate. But things started to slow about 160 million years ago, leading to a decline in the number of species which commences at about 120 million years ago.
...
The asteroid impact is commonly thought to have paved the way for mammals to take over. But the new study suggests that mammalian supremacy might have occurred eventually, without a space impact.

Original Submission