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takyon writes:

Scientists have found specific parts of the brain that correspond to different aspects of language:

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people's inner thoughts? UC Berkeley scientists have taken a step in that direction by building a "semantic atlas" that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature, are based on a brain imaging study that recorded neural activity while study volunteers listened to stories from the "Moth Radio Hour." They show that at least one-third of the brain's cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing.

Notably, the study found that different people share similar language maps: "The similarity in semantic topography across different subjects is really surprising," said study lead author Alex Huth, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Click here for Huth's online brain viewer.

Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex (DOI: 10.1038/nature17637)

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An Anonymous Coward submitted this story about efforts to build an encrypted meshnet in Toronto:

Meshnet networks, or meshnets, are a form of intranet that doesn't require a central router point. Instead of emitting from a single point, they're distributed across an entire system of nodes. Accessing one is free—and doesn't require the services of a telecom.

Lau had spent the previous summer chatting with other meshnet enthusiasts in Europe, trying to figure out the best way to set up routers across the city. He suggested it was time to give it a try in Toronto. What grew out of Lau and Iantorno's meeting, four months ago now, was a plan to build a meshnet in this city—one where users wouldn't need to worry about eavesdroppers, because it would be encrypted.

When it's finished, Toronto's first free-to-use meshnet should provide an accessible and secure internet community, maintained by locals keen on becoming digitally self-sufficient. Those early adopters could reshape our relationship to internet providers, and cut monthly rates out of the picture.

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takyon writes:

Intel has exited the smartphone System-on-a-Chip business, at least temporarily, with the cancellation of Broxton and SoFIA products:

Given the significance of this news we immediately reached out to Intel to get direct confirmation of the cancelation, and we can now confirm that Intel is indeed canceling both Broxton (smartphone and tablet) and SoFIA as part of their new strategy. This is arguably the biggest change in Intel's mobile strategy since they first formed it last decade, representing a significant scaling back in their mobile SoC efforts. Intel's struggles are well-published here, so this isn't entirely unsurprising, but at the same time this comes relatively shortly before Broxton was set to launch. Otherwise as it relates to Atom itself, Intel's efforts with smaller die size and lower power cores have not ended, but there's clearly going to be a need to reevaluate where Atom fits into Intel's plans in the long run if it's not going to be in phones.

[...] Thus Intel's big wins in the smartphone space have been rather limited: they haven't had a win in any particularly premium devices, and long term partners have been deploying mid-range platforms in geo-focused regions. Perhaps the biggest recipient has been ASUS, with the ever popular ZenFone 2 creating headlines when it was announced at $200 with a quad-core Intel Atom, LTE, 4GB of DRAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p display. Though not quite a premium product, the ZenFone 2 was very aggressively priced and earned a lot of attention for both ASUS and Intel over just how many higher-end features were packed into a relatively cheap phone.

Meanwhile, just under two years ago, in order to address the lower-end of the market and to more directly compete with aggressive and low-margin ARM SoC vendors, Intel announced the SoFIA program. SoFIA would see Intel partner with the Chinese SoC vendors Rockchip and Spreadtrum, working with them to design cost-competitive SoCs using Atom CPU cores and Intel modems, and then fab those SoCs at third party fabs. SoFIA was a very aggressive and unusual move for Intel that acknowledged that the company could not compete in the low-end SoC space in a traditional, high-margin Intel manner, and that as a result the company needed to try something different. The first phones based on the resulting Atom x3 SoCs launched earlier this year, so while SoFIA has made it to the market it looks like that presence will be short-lived.

Here is a previous story about the SoFIA program.

Related:
Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs (only Broxton story on the site)
Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

As this year's National Football League (USA) draft kicked off Thursday night, Univ. of Mississippi offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil was projected to be a top pick; he was said to be coveted by several teams drafting early in the first round, including the San Diego Chargers at #3 and the Baltimore Ravens at #6. Soon after the draft began, however, a video clip was posted on Tunsil's Twitter account, showing Tunsil doing bong hits while wearing a gas mask (Tunsil later acknowledged being in the video, but says it happened two years ago). Shortly thereafter, Tunsil's Instagram account was hacked, with an upload of an email in which Tunsil asks a university official for money to help with his mother's bills (one might sympathize with Tunsil on this, but it would be an NCAA violation if the request were granted).

Tunsil was eventually picked at #13 by the Miami Dolphins; this chart shows what the incident might have cost him. The SI article linked above, written by a legal analyst, suggests that he likely has grounds to sue, if the perpetrator can be identified.

College kids do some stupid things, and the guys on the football team probably get into more than their share of campus scrapes and brushes with the law. NFL general managers, coaches, and scouts who draft players (mostly from American college football teams) spend considerable time vetting candidates, not just for their abilities the field, but for intelligence, personalities, behavioral traits, and potential character issues. Football talent is much more important to these gentlemen than good citizenship, but character "red flags" can push a candidate down on, or even off, a team's draft board (a priority queue of candidates that gets pruned as other teams make their selections in a multiple-round, round-robin fashion).

Twenty-one years ago, the stock of a top defensive lineman named Warren Sapp went into freefall right before the draft over rumors of heavy cocaine and marijuana use. Sapp fell from projected #2 overall to #12, where he was picked by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Sapp went on to have a Hall of Fame career with Tampa Bay, where he played 13 seasons and was selected to the Pro Bowl 7 times.

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Whoever writes:

Rovi Corporation (formerly known as Macrovision Corporation) has agreed to buy TiVo in an $1.1B stock and cash deal.
The combined company company will be called TiVo, and the CEO will be the current CEO of Rovi: Tom Carson.

The deal provides that Rovi will pay about $10.70 per share of TiVo stock, broken down into $2.75/share in cash and Rovi stock worth $7.95/share. The amounts may change before the deal finalizes, depending on the movement of TiVo and Rovi stock. However, Rovi will not pay more than $3.90 per share in cash.

Shareholders of both companies must agree to the sale and it may be scrutinized by antitrust regulators.

[Ed. Addition.] Also covered at Ars Technica which notes:

The deal seems to be centered on patents. According to The New York Times , Rovi's interactive TV program guides account for less than half of its $526 million revenue last year, while the rest is made up of its licensed intellectual property. TiVo made a name for itself with its DVR technology, but the patents that make its DVR hardware and software work are proving to be more valuable. Together, Rovi and TiVo have over 6,000 patents issued and pending in the digital entertainment space.

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JNCF writes:

Forbes reports (Javascript required) that Google has filed a patent application (PDFs) for a device which would be worn inside of the user's eyeball.

patent application

The patent application has a horrifying description of the installation procedure:

I wonder how many animals Google has blinded during testing.

takyon: Also at Discover Magazine , Gizmodo .

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martyb writes:

The Meaning of 'Hack': "Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

I think this story at Medium qualifies: I installed Windows 95 on my Apple Watch:

With a 520 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, the Apple Watch packs a lot of computing horsepower into a very small package. On paper, its processor alone is about twenty-five times faster than the average 386, and 512 MB was the size of a hard drive in the mid nineties, not memory. As a result, I was feeling confident that the Apple Watch had the ability to run one of the most revered desktop operating systems Redmond has ever produced.

I was born in the nineties, and the first personal computer my family bought (a $3000 screamer with a 300 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB of RAM, and the optional Boston Acoustics speaker system) ran Windows 95. Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve installed an old operating system on a watch. Here’s a video of my Apple Watch running Mac OS 7.5.5.

Sure enough, there's a picture of a Windows 95 desktop on the Apple watch's screen! The story goes on to give some details as to the steps and problems involved in getting it installed and running. The author notes "Due to the fact that it is emulated (not virtualized), it takes about an hour to boot." Which can be problematic as the watch would go into sleep mode during bootup. Ever resourceful and employing the best in automation technology, there is this note in the procedures: "* Optional: hot glue a motor to the watch's crown to keep it from falling asleep." And, yes, there is a picture of that, too!

[Update:] I just found his 5-minute time-lapse video of the Apple watch booting Windows 95 as well as his patient and persistent attempt to navigate the UI and launch a program on it.

What's next? Emulating an Apple ][?

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devlux writes:

We're all taught from a young age that spacetime is smooth, continuous and flowing.
In highschool and college we are taught that spacetime can expand or contract, essentially we swap momentum through time for momentum through space and vice versa. The pictures of bowling balls on a trampoline are classic visualizations we're all familiar with to explain the elasticity of spacetime.

Yet Quantum Mechanics (QM) tells us there are limits. There is a "smallest small" point in spacetime and at this scale the universe becomes "discrete". A collection of individual points which cannot be subdivided further. This is in direct opposition to relativity.

http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-howwhy-are-quantum-mechanics-and-relativity-incompatible/
https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/a11758.html

This is the root of the problem between QM & Relativity. Any theory which seeks to reconcile this disparity must reconcile two theories which posit two completely different models of what "spacetime" actually is.

Quantum Gravity is the name of an effort to find a theory that is compatible with both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, unifying them into a nearly complete theory of everything.

This has created a whole new class of theories — any of which could be valid — but the question remains how do you test and probe theories at this level?

How do you probe to a depth of 1.616199 * 10^-33 meters? Compared with the size of a hydrogen atom which is 5.291*10^-11 meters currently the smallest thing we can visualize, we have a long ways to go.

[Continues.]

Webweasel writes:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Son of Bobby Kennedy has written this article for politico.eu

http://www.politico.eu/article/why-the-arabs-dont-want-us-in-syria-mideast-conflict-oil-intervention/

He explains the history of the middle east from the 1950's onwards. I was mostly ignorant of this recent history and it has really opened my eyes to the current situation in the middle east. Our relentless pursuit of oil in the region since the 1950's has led to the current crisis in Syria.

What do you fellow Soylentis think about this? Should we feel massive guilt for the actions of our governments or is the price justified in the modern world? Oil runs the world and our civilisation is utterly dependant on it. Have we been doing the right things in the middle east for the last 70 years?

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Webweasel writes:

For most of us, Slime molds are the easy low level creature in Nethack nethack.alt.org

Experiments by researchers from France's Toulouse University have shown that Slime molds seem to demonstrate learned reactions to their environment.

They used bridges leading to food sources, coated in caffeine and quinine, to show that Slime Molds appear to remember taste and evaluate toxic environments.

From the article:

"Does the behavior of slime molds constitute intelligence? Slime molds are a testament to what you can achieve when you have many simple, independent actors all working together — which is why they have been associated with some of the very same pattern-finding problems assigned to artificial neural networks, the other big example of a complex network of simple actors."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227439-looking-for-true-intelligence-study-shows-that-slime-molds-can-learn

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Nollij writes:

From ComputerWorld:

Microsoft on Thursday began blocking rival browsers and search providers from using Windows 10's Cortana search box, the operating system's prime search real estate.

While Gavin didn't name names, Mozilla's Firefox modified Windows 10 so that when that browser was made the operating system's default, Firefox's selected search provider generated results from in-Cortana queries, with the ensuing pages appearing in Firefox, not Edge. Other browsers, such as Google's Chrome, did not go that far, but third-party extensions available in the Chrome Web Store did.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Microsoft's relentless Windows 10 nagware has interrupted a live TV weather forecast, urging meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade.

The operating system suddenly popped up a box on screen insisting the station's computer be upgraded to the latest version--while Slater was on air describing thunderstorms rolling through Iowa, USA.

The cyber-badgering blatted over her doppler weather radar, which was being broadcast on KCCI 8 News [April 27].

"Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10. Gosh, what should I do?" Slater asked sarcastically.

So, do you know of a case of MSFT update pushiness that rivals this?

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CaTfiSh writes:

The $4.4 billion Large Haldron Collider has been shut down by a wandering weasel which managed its way into the collider's 66kV transformer and was promptly fried.

The collider is expected to be up and running in a few days.

The unfortunate creature did not survive the encounter with a high-voltage transformer at the site near Geneva in Switzerland.

The LHC was running when a "severe electrical perturbation" occurred in the early hours of Friday morning.

A spokesman for Cern said that the weasel did not get into the tunnels, just the electrical facilities.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-weasel-large-hadron-collider.html

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

BBC reports that the US Air Force has conducted air strikes targeting ISIS's stores of money destroying up to $800 million in cash which has contributed to a 90% jump in defections and a drop in new arrivals.

US intelligence indicated the group's cash troubles had led it to start selling vehicles to make money, says Maj Gen Gersten, the deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the US-led operation against IS. In January, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that IS announced it was to cut fighters' salaries in half "because of the exceptional circumstances that the Islamic State is passing through". In one case, Gersten says, an estimated $150 million was destroyed from the air at a house in Mosul, Iraq after forces fighting IS received intelligence indicating in which room of the house money was stored. But according to Patrick Wintour writing in The Guardian, these assertions are hard to verify, and could be seen as self-delusion, propaganda or disinformation – all designed to reassure public opinion that Isis is being slowly degraded. However the claims chime with documentary evidence published by researchers in the counter-terrorism journal CTC Sentinel, showing that Isis is struggling to fund its fighters, which make up about 60% of the group's costs.

Likening the anti-Isis coalition's efforts to financially weaken the Isis base to the economic warfare waged against Nazi Germany during the second world war, individuals including Air Vice-Marshal Edward Stringer have come to regard efforts to understand, and undermine, the group's funding as equally important to military gains. "Isis is trying to get more hard cash through extortion of the local population," says Stringer . "We are starting to see corruption and embezzlement among senior leaders, suggesting we are having success."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft is purchasing synthesized strands of DNA to test DNA data storage:

Microsoft is buying ten million strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience to investigate the use of genetic material to store data.

The data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. DNA is also remarkably robust; DNA fragments thousands of years old have been successfully sequenced. These properties make it an intriguing option for long-term data archiving. Binary data has already been successfully stored as DNA base pairs, with estimates in 2013 suggesting that it would be economically viable for storage of 500 years or more.

At a future price of 2 cents per base pair, or 1 cent per bit (ignoring the need for error correction), a terabyte would cost $80 billion (and weigh a nanogram). Once synthesized, copying it would be as cheap as using a PCR machine.

Also at TechCrunch.

Related: An Isolated Vault Could Store Our Data on DNA for 2 Million Years
Scientists Store Digital Images in DNA, and Retrieve Them Perfectly

Original Submission