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takyon writes:

Samsung has announced a 256 GB MicroSD card using 3D TLC NAND:

Samsung unveiled its beefy EVO Plus 256 GB MicroSD card, which unseats SanDisk as the current MicroSD density leader. SanDisk introduced its 200 GB Ultra MicroSD card in March 2015, but it is widely believed to employ 15nm planar TLC NAND, whereas the new Samsung EVO Plus features its 48-layer 3D TLC V-NAND.

The UHS-1 Class 10 EVO Plus offers up to 95/90 MBps of sequential read/write throughput, which should satisfy the needs of most common applications, such as 4K video recording, high-resolution photography and other mobile applications. In contrast, the SanDisk Ultra 200 GB offers up to 90 MBps of sequential read speed, but no write speed is listed in its specifications.

It's a new dense SD card you can use to fill up your station wagon, but it costs $250 at launch, whereas the price of the SanDisk 200 GB MicroSD card has declined to about $80.

Related: Secure Digital 5.0 Standard: Memory Cards Intended for 8K and Virtual Reality Recording

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Phoenix666 writes:

Mike Rowe (of "Dirty Jobs" fame) has a podcast[1] that follows in the footsteps of Paul Harvey's, "The Rest of the Story," wherein he covers little-known history about famous people or events. Episode 1 of March 1, 2016, "25 Million Dollar Kiss," covers Hedy Lamarr, a 30's and 40's era film star and brunette bombshell who was also a visionary inventor. She invented an improved traffic light and "a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink." Her greatest invention, though, was the radio-spectrum hopping principle at the heart of Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth designed to help the Navy's radio-guided torpedoes defeat Nazi jamming in WWII.

The Navy, however, ignored her invention, which she patented, until the 1960's because it came from a woman and film star. In fact, when she tried to join the National Inventor's Council to bring her ideas to help with the war effort, she was told to go sell war bonds by selling kisses instead. She raised $25 million that way, and never received recognition for that either.

She died in impoverished seclusion, estranged from her children, in 2000.

It's a fascinating and sad story of unrecognized genius. Even fame and fortune aren't enough to guarantee you history's plaudits if your contemporaries aren't willing to listen to what you're trying to say because of who you are.

[1] Javascript required; scroll down to near the bottom of the page to find "Episode 1: 25 Million Dollar Kiss".

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Time Warner Cable (TWC) was hit with an outage [May 9] throughout New York City. Map

[...] According to monitoring site DownDetector, reports of problems at TWC in New York began spiking in the early afternoon local time and continued into the evening. TWC has not said when service could be restored.

[...] The outage comes at a particularly embarrassing time for TWC. The cable giant has been in the news lately after the FCC issued its approval for a merger between TWC, Charter Communications, and Bright House Networks valued at $78.7bn. The FCC said that it will release more information on that decision, including the specific terms that it will hold Charter to, in the coming days.

New York had been among the states that Charter had courted for approval of the acquisition. Local officials eventually opted to green-light the deal, but only after Charter and TWC agreed to improve broadband speeds for New Yorkers each of the next four years.

Perhaps [FCC] should have held out for an uptime promise as well.

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butthurt writes:

The Washington Post reports on a video from the television series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver regarding flaws in science and in reporting about science.

Topics touched upon by Mr. Oliver include p-hacking, exploratory studies vs. confirmational studies, press releases, the "telephone" effect, animal testing, oversimplification, industry funding, sample sizes, and TED talks.

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https://www.rt.com/usa/342566-facebook-trending-senate-inquiry/

-- submitted from IRC

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is facing a US Senate inquiry over claims that the social network has been filtering conservative news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fallen under scrutiny from a US Senate committee over the alleged political bias of the site's Trending news feature. A GOP senator questioned Facebook's practice of filtering news, accusing it of "misleading" the public.

The chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Senator John Thune, has asked Zuckerberg to answer questions regarding allegations that Facebook's team prevented conservative news stories from appearing in its Trending news section.

"If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook's assertion that it maintains 'a platform for people and representatives from across the political spectrum' misleads the public," Thune wrote, stressing Facebook's "enormous influence on users' perceptions of current events, including political perspectives."

Other sources:

The Washington Post

Gizmodo - sounds like the article that kicked things off..

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dyingtolive writes:

Someone released an image on reddit on how to make "Bernie Sander's[sic] glow sticks". Except they're not glow sticks, they're chlorine bombs. The image recommends mixing chlorine with isopropyl alcohol and shaking them in a closed bottle. This is a VERY bad idea and should not be attempted.

I don't know if this is really technically "news", as the universal constant is the internet continually managing to bring out the worst in humanity, but given the lack of credible sites talking about it, I felt I should do my part in submitting it here to increase visibility.

Link (with autoplaying video): http://www.aol.com/article/2016/05/09/potentially-deadly-bernie-sanders-glow-stick-meme-makes-waves-on/21374113/

Additional coverage:

• Snopes (with videos),
• sfgate,
• MSN.com,
• inquisitr.com,
• yahoo.com,

[Update: as several commenters noted, the candidate's name is "Bernie Sanders", so the possessive form, depending on what style guideline you follow, should be either "Bernie Sanders'" or "Bernie Sanders's" — misspellings from the image have now been flagged with a [sic]. A copy of the image can be found on Snopes.-Ed.]

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

More than one million Americans live with Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition in which the pancreas stops producing insulin, a hormone needed to turn sugar into energy. Now Kate Linebaugh writes at The Wall Street Journal that Jason Calabrese, a software engineer, followed instructions that had been shared online to hack an old insulin pump so it could automatically dose the hormone in response to his son's blood-sugar levels. The Calabreses aren't alone. More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. Initially, Calabrese worried about the safety of the do-it-yourself project. He built it over two months, and spent weeks testing. At first, he only tried it out on his son on weekends and at night. Once it performed well enough, he said it felt irresponsible not to use it on his 9-year-old son. "Diabetes is dangerous anyway. Insulin is dangerous. I think what we are doing is actually improving that and lowering the risk," says Calabrese.

The home-built project that the Calabreses followed is known as OpenAPS. The only restriction of the project is users have to put the system together on their own. As long as the people tinkering with their insulin pumps aren't selling or distributing them, the FDA doesn't have a legal means to stop it. The system involves an outdated insulin pump that communicates with a small radio stick connected to a continuous glucose monitor, a computer motherboard and a battery pack. It is an outgrowth of another open-source project where caregivers developed software to remotely monitor blood-sugar levels. The size of the homemade system varies, and the one that Calabrese carries has come down from the size of a small shoebox to that of a headphone case. He wears his insulin pump and glucose monitor on his belt. "It is clearly for people who have some expertise in computer programming," says Bruce Buckingham, a pediatric endocrinologist at Stanford University who has conducted clinical trials for Medtronic and others developing such systems.. "What it shows is that people are anxious to get something going."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new batch of verified exoplanets, including nine that are potentially habitable:

NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date. "This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope's July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of "planet." An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

[...] In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.

Also at NPR and The Register .

False Positive Probabilities For All Kepler Objects of Interest: 1284 Newly Validated Planets and 428 Likely False Positives (DOI: 10.3847/0004-637x/822/2/86)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A federal judge has blocked Staples' attempted $6.3 billion acquisition of Office Depot, citing anti-competitive concerns:

"Today's court ruling is great news for business customers in the office supply market. This deal would eliminate head-to-head competition between Staples and Office Depot and likely lead to higher prices and lower quality service for large businesses that buy office supplies," Debbie Feinstein, the director of the Federal Trade Commission bureau of competition, said in a statement.

The proposed merger was fraught from the beginning. The deal would have combined the country's largest office supply retailer, Staples, with the second largest, Office Depot.

Regulators had stopped Office Depot and Staples from merging nearly two decades ago. But the companies argued that the competitive landscape had changed dramatically since then. More business functions are now done online and there is declining demand for paper-based office supplies. Staples and Office Depot have also faced increasing competition from retail giants such as Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Also at CNBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, and MarketWatch.

Previously: Staples and Office Depot Merger Attempt Faces Regulatory Scrutiny

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japan's soon-to-be most powerful supercomputer is scheduled to start operations in December:

It's a good day to be Intel, Data Direct Networks (DDN), and Fujitsu. The Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC) in Japan today released the details of its next generation supercomputer – Oakforest-PACS – which will deliver 25 PFLOPS, use Intel's Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) manycore processors and Omni-Path Architecture, be built by Fujitsu, and be operational in December 2016.

[...] Fujitsu has taken pains to conserve energy and space use. Oakforest-PACS will be a high-density system with a compact physical footprint, with eight nodes fitting into a 2U rackmount chassis. Advanced "hot water" cooling technology is used to supply cooling water to all the system's components, each of which have different optimum temperatures. In this way efficient cooling at low power is achieved.

JCAHPC release.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/10/shared-memory-pushes-wheat-genomics-boost-crop-yields/

Wheat has been an important part of the human diet for the past 9,000 years or so, and depending on the geography can comprise up to 40 percent to 50 percent of the diet within certain regions today. But there is a problem. Pathogens and changing climate are adversely affecting wheat yields just as Earth's population is growing, and the Genome Analysis Center (TGAC) is front and center in sequencing and assembling the wheat genome, a multi-year effort that is going to be substantially accelerated by some hardware and updated software.

[...] TGAC, which gets its funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) in England, provided the computing power that let researchers deliver a first draft of the wheat genome last November, a milestone in the project. That effort delivered a genome assembly with 98,974 genes, which TGAC reckons is about 91 percent of the total genome for the plant; it weighs in at 13.4 GB, which is pretty fat for a text file. But work still needs to be done to fill in gaps in the wheat genome, which is not expected to be fully completed until around 2018 or so. (BBSRC invested over £509 million in various life sciences projects in 2014 and 2015 and has spent over £100 million alone on wheat research in the past decade.)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Western Digital's acquisition of SanDisk has received regulatory approval from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce:

Western Digital announced the $19 billion SanDisk acquisition in October 2015 and that its shareholders approved the acquisition in March 2016, which left MOFCOM (the Chinese Ministry of Commerce) approval as the only remaining barrier to the merger. WD announced today that it has received regulatory approval from MOFCOM to proceed, and the transaction closes on May 12--a scant two days away. SanDisk is one of the early leaders of NAND development and holds over 5,000 patents, but broader management issues led to a dramatic weakening of the company's prospects last year. The resultant crash of SanDisk's stock price opened the door for WD to step in and purchase the company.

WD's absorption of SanDisk will be happening as the company continues to keep its acquired former hard disk competitor HGST at arm's length for another two years (a MOFCOM requirement).

Previously:
Western Digital Acquires SanDisk, MyPassport 256-bit AES Encryption "Useless"
Western Digital, SanDisk, and the NAND Market

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A week ago it was reported that a vulnerability in the ImageMagick image processing library left Websites open to attack. It didn't take long for attackers to develop exploit kits and code to utilize the flaw:

Recently, researchers discovered a flaw in the system, CVE-2016-3714, which if exploited through the upload of malicious images, leads to remote code execution and hijacked domains, malware distribution and information leaks.

[...] There are a number of different exploit kits and scripts which are now implementing CVE-2016-3714, but the worst of which so far implements the Python scripting language.

[...] Researchers from Securi have also witnessed cyberattackers using the vulnerability to launch attacks against specific targets with malicious code disguised as benevolent .JPG images.

[...] Webmasters using ImageMagick should update their software to the latest release as quickly as possible.

Original Submission

Celestial writes:

Amazon unveiled a service that allows users to post videos and earn royalties from them, putting a big bulls eye on Alphabet's YouTube.

The service, called Amazon Video Direct, will make the uploaded videos available to rent or own, to view free with ads, or be packaged together and offered as an add-on subscription.

Amazon will pay content creators 50% of the revenue earned from rental receipts or sale of the videos, according to the company's license agreement. For ad-supported videos, the creators will get half of the net ad receipts.

Amazon's fast-growing Prime loyalty program already offers original TV programming and access to digital entertainment products such as Prime Music and Prime Video, as well as one-hour delivery of purchases, for an annual fee of $99.

YouTube offers a free, ad-supported service as well as a $10-per-month subscription option called YouTube Red. Amazon, though, has a long way to go to catch up with YouTube, the go-to venue for video on the internet since 2005.

Users of Amazon's service will be able to make their videos available in the US, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom. and Japan. The company has also signed up several partners for the service, including Conde Nast, the Guardian, Mashable and toymaker Mattel.

Amazon can throw a lot of money behind their new Video Direct service, but I don't know how well it will do. YouTube is pretty well thoroughly entrenched in the online video space.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Mount St. Helens has been reminding researchers it is still an active volcano.

More than 130 small tremors have been documented in the Mount St. Helens region in Washington, according to the US Geological Survey. The quakes began in mid-March and have ramped up to nearly 40 localized earthquakes a week.

Thousands of small quakes preceded the massive eruption on May 18, 1980 that blew off nearly 1,000 feet of the mountain and spewed hot ash across the state, resulting in deaths, forest fires, and flooding.

But this time, the data collected offers more reassurance than worry, say the volcanologists.

"There is absolutely no sign that it will erupt anytime soon," the USGS said in a statement, "but the data we collect tells us that the volcano is still very much alive."

I watch for signs of a crazed Woody Harrelson ranting before I worry about volcanic eruptions.

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