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FakeBeldin writes:

From the what-separation-of-powers department:

The Department of Homeland Security has an update on the entry ban:

The NY Post adds:

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new ultrafast technique, using high-energy electrons coupled to a laser pump, revealed insights into atomic vibrational dynamics in a laser-heated gold thin film. This technique directly measured the phonon spectrum (quantized packets of energy related to atomic lattice vibrations) and explored the energy transfer from the laser excited electrons to atomic vibrations of the atomic lattice. This work demonstrates that specialized ultra-fast electron diffraction instruments can add to the suite of time-resolved laser pump/probe techniques capable of exploring excitations in materials.

Ultrafast excitation and energy transfer at the atomic scale is important in phase transitions, chemical reactions, and macroscopic energy flow. Relevant vibrational time frames occur in femtoseconds (move the decimal point for 1.0 second 15 times to the left). This research established the usefulness of this technique to resolve changing vibrational states, the understanding of which could advance a range of applications from superconductivity to laser-induced phase transitions.

The interactions of electrons and the atoms they reside in are important for a range of phenomena, from fundamental electron and spin transport, to laser-induced phase transitions. Most experimental techniques are limited in their ability to investigate atomic vibrations (phonons) because, like a thermometer, they average over all of the vibrational states in the material. Now research led by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has directly measured the full frequency range and time dependent behavior of phonons in a laser-heated gold thin film. In the experimental setup, high-energy electrons were emitted from an electrode by an ultrafast laser pulse. Both pulses, electrons and light, continued to the sample. The laser pulse arrived first and excited the resident electrons in the gold material, which was then probed by scattering the subsequent electron pulse into a detector. The pump/probe technique, involving the newly developed ultrafast electron diffraction source, measured the positions of the atoms as a function of the controlled and variable time between pump and probe.

Ultrafast electron diffraction from non-equilibrium phonons in femtosecond laser heated Au films (DOI: 10.1063/1.4940981) (DX)

Original Submission

dry writes:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-gun-shots-1.3957686

Two men were arrested following last night's shooting at a Quebec City mosque that left six people dead and 19 wounded, in what Quebec's premier described as a "murderous act directed at a specific community."

Thirty-nine people escaped the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec (Islamic cultural centre of Quebec) in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood without injuries, according to Quebec provincial police Sgt. Christine Coulombe.

Initially, it was reported that eight people were wounded, but authorities updated that number to 19 Monday morning.

​Five were still in critical condition in hospital Monday morning, including three people who are in intensive care. Another 13 people have been released, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Coulombe said the people who died in the shooting, which occurred during Sunday evening prayers, ranged in age from 35 to 70.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After reading the story about Disqus stopping the free version, I remembered this article in which artist behind Pepper and Carrot comic, David Revoy, narrates how he dropped Gravatar, and other external dependencies, like fonts or icons. He even created an avatar generator based around cats. Social networks are still there, but only can track you if you click, the images are locally hosted. You may have heard about this artist, as he was involved in some Blender projects, Krita videos and general promotion of FLOSS for artistic purposes.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Last week talk of Solaris heated up again with Solaris 12 being removed from the Oracle road-map, after rumors of Oracle canning Solaris occurred in early December, meanwhile there are also more layoffs happening at Oracle. Oracle finally issued a blog post this week with a bit more clarification on the matter.

Via this Oracle.com post, Oracle Solaris will be moving to a continuous delivery model. Rather than working towards Solaris 12 or "disruptive updates", they will be working on smaller, continuous updates to Solaris 11. The post reads in part, "New features and functionality will be delivered in Oracle Solaris through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases, consistent with trends seen throughout the industry. This addresses customer requirements for an agile and smooth transition path between versions, while providing ongoing innovation with assured investment protection."

Source:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Solaris-Continuous-Delivery

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

LeakedSource, a breach notification service that exposed some of 2016's largest data breaches, might be facing a permanent shutdown.

According to a forum post on a well-known marketplace, the owner of LeakedSource was raided earlier this week, although the exact details of any potential law enforcement action remains a mystery.

At the start of the new year, LeakedSource indexed more than 3 billion records. Their collection is the result of information sharing between a number of sources, including those who hacked the data themselves. Access to the full archive requires a membership fee.

[...] On the OGFlip forum Thursday, a user posted vague details about the LeakedSource raid, but Salted Hash has been unable to verify the claims.

The U.S. Department of Justice will not comment, refusing to confirm or deny any investigations related to LeakedSource. The operators of the notification service itself have been offline for several days, and the LeakedSource website stopped working late Tuesday evening.

It's possible that this is just someone trolling the media, but the fact remains that

However, the LeakedSource contacts are still unavailable via usual channels, and the website went offline earlier this week.

Source:
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3162039/security/breach-notification-website-leakedsource-allegedly-raided.html

Additional info:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/site-that-sold-access-to-3-1-billion-passwords-vanishes-after-reported-raid/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

OnChip and SiFive, two groups aiming to develop and release RISC-V platforms, have announced they will collaborate. From OnChip's crowdfunding campaign:

Sounds like good news for those hoping for RISC-V and open hardware designs to become tangible objects.
Note that the SiFive HiFive1 campaign was successful and has already shipped to some backers while the OnChip OPEN-V campaign looks like it will not reach its goal.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

Making art can be a kind of escape, and it's hard to think of a place that begs louder for escape than death row. For inmates facing the death penalty, art offers a way to define their own identity and assert their existence to an audience far beyond the confines of their cell and long after their execution.

The relationship between prison and creative pursuit is long and strong. Writing has historically been the go-to creative outlet for prisoners, as it can be achieved with minimal resources and the product can be hidden or secreted in and out of cells. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago from the forced labour camps of the former Soviet Union. Martin Luther King Jr wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Alabama. And, in a sign of how art and form evolve with time, US rapper Gucci Mane even recorded some verses of his 2010 album Burrprint 2 over the phone from prison.

In prisons in the US, Europe and Australia, visual art classes and resources are now available to more inmates than ever before. These programmes have been shown to have a positive influence on the immediate and long-term behaviour of prisoners – though often the resources allocated to them are scarce. When these aren't available, innovation often prevails, with paints made from crushed sweets or instant coffee.

[...] "Generally, but more extremely on death row, part of the incarceration process involves stripping away your identity as a human being," [Margot] Ravenscroft says. "The expression of art is a way of redressing that dehumanisation and identifying yourself as an individual and as a member of society."

Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170126-the-death-row-inmates-who-make-art

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung recently announced its fourth generation of 3D/vertical NAND, with 64 layers and a capacity of 512Gb (64GB) per die. Now SK Hynix is announcing its plans for 512 Gb V-NAND dies with 72 layers:

Later this year SK Hynix intends to start volume production of 72-layer 3D TLC NAND (3D-V4) memory and this is where things start to get interesting. Initially, SK Hynix intends to produce 256 Gb 3D TLC ICs and these are going to be available already in Q2 2017, according to the company's product catalog. Later on, sometimes in Q4, the company plans to introduce 512 Gb 3D TLC ICs (64 GB), which will help it to significantly increase capacities of SSDs and other devices featuring NAND flash.

What is important about SK Hynix's fourth-gen 3D NAND is that it will feature block size of 13.5 MB, which will increase the performance of such ICs compared to 3D-V3 and 3D-V2 that have a block size of 9 MB. At this point, we do not know whether SK Hynix intends to increase interface speed of its 512 Gb 3D-V4 ICs to compensate lower parallelism in lower-capacity SSDs, like Samsung did with its high-capacity 64-layer 3D V-NAND chips. What we do know is that SK Hynix's catalog already includes NAND multi-chip packages of 8192 Gb capacity (1 TB) that will enable high-capacity SSDs in smaller form-factors (e.g., [2 TB] single-sided M.2). Meanwhile, 64 GB NAND flash chips may force SK Hynix and its partners to abandon low-capacity SSDs (i.e., 120/128 GB) unless there is sufficient demand.

The article also talks about the company's plans for 18nm DRAM and fabrication facility expansion.

Related: Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-Layer 256 Gb 3D NAND
Toshiba Teasing QLC 3D NAND and TSV for More Layers

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Over a hundred surveillance camera storage devices operated by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia were hacked just days ahead of the Inauguration. Ransomware was found on some of the devices and officials said the extortion effort "was localized":

Hackers infected 70 percent of storage devices that record data from D.C. police surveillance cameras eight days before President Trump's inauguration, forcing major citywide reinstallation efforts, according to the police and the city's technology office. City officials said ransomware left police cameras unable to record between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15. The cyberattack affected 123 of 187 network video recorders in a closed-circuit TV system for public spaces across the city, the officials said late Friday.

Brian Ebert, a Secret Service official, said the safety of the public or protectees was never jeopardized. Archana Vemulapalli, the city's Chief Technology Officer, said the city paid no ransom and resolved the problem by taking the devices offline, removing all software and restarting the system at each site.

Also at The Hill.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Berkeley News reports on a Jan. 18th paper about time crystals:

If crystals have an atomic structure that repeats in space, like the carbon lattice of a diamond, why can't crystals also have a structure that repeats in time? That is, a time crystal? In a paper published online last week in the journal Physical Review Letters, the UC Berkeley assistant professor of physics describes exactly how to make and measure the properties of such a crystal, and even predicts what the various phases surrounding the time crystal should be — akin to the liquid and gas phases of ice.

This is not mere speculation. Two groups followed [Norman] Yao's blueprint and have already created the first-ever time crystals. The groups at the University of Maryland and Harvard University reported their successes, using two totally different setups, in papers posted online last year, and have submitted the results for publication. Yao is a co-author on both papers.

Time crystals repeat in time because they are kicked periodically, sort of like tapping Jell-O repeatedly to get it to jiggle, Yao said. The big breakthrough, he argues, is less that these particular crystals repeat in time than that they are the first of a large class of new materials that are intrinsically out of equilibrium, unable to settle down to the motionless equilibrium of, for example, a diamond or ruby. "This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter," Yao said. "For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter."

Discrete Time Crystals: Rigidity, Criticality, and Realizations (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.030401) (DX)

Viewpoint: How to Create a Time Crystal

Observation of a Discrete Time Crystal

Norman Yao's website.

Previously:
Blueprint for a Time Crystal
Time Crystals Might Exist After All

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The respected Firefox add-on developer Quicksaver announced yesterday that he won't update any of his extensions anymore because of Mozilla's decision to move to WebExtensions exclusively. Quicksaver, responsible for add-ons such as Tab Groups, OmniSidebar, FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis and Puzzle Bars, had four of his five add-ons for Firefox featured by Mozilla in the past.

If you open any of the author's add-on pages on the Mozilla Add-ons repository, you will notice an important announcement on the page. It reads:
IMPORTANT: The add-on will not receive any more updates and will stop working by next November with Firefox 57.

[...] Quicksaver posted an explanation on his website that reveals why he made the decision to stop add-on development. There are several reasons, but the core reason given is that at least four of his five add-ons rely heavily on functionality that will either not be provided by WebExtensions, or would require him to rewrite the extension almost completely.

[...] Quicksaver is not the only author who announced that he will stop working on add-ons for Firefox. Add-ons like New Tab Tools, Classic Theme Restorer, Tree Style Tabs, Open With, DownThem All, KeeFox and many others are likely also not going to make the cut.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/28/firefox-add-on-quicksaver-quits/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have linked global warming to increased runoff, and in turn, increased levels of mercury in the ocean and fish:

Rising temperatures could boost mercury levels in fish by up to seven times the current rates, say Swedish researchers. They've discovered a new way in which warming increases levels of the toxin in sea creatures. In experiments, they found that extra rainfall drives up the amount of organic material flowing into the seas. This alters the food chain, adding another layer of complex organisms which boosts the concentrations of mercury up the line. The study has been published [open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601239] [DX] in the journal, Science Advances.

I, for one, welcome our newly mercury-enriched diets.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

If you thought India's decision to ban 86% of its cash was ambitious, wait until you hear what it may do next.

The head of a government-run policy institute said on Thursday that the country could completely eliminate the need for credit cards, debit cards and ATMs in the next three years by switching to biometric payments. Amitabh Kant said that even electronic payment methods may be "totally redundant" by 2020. Instead, all Indians will need for transactions is their thumb or eye.

"Each one of us in India will be a walking ATM," Kant said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. That would represent "the biggest technological leapfrogging ever in the history of mankind," he added.

Arundhati Bhattacharya, head of the State Bank of India, agreed that such a dramatic shift was possible.

"This is something that's eminently doable," she said, pointing out that nearly 1.1 billion of India's 1.3 billion people have already registered their biometric data under the government's unique identification program.

Source: CNN

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have quantified flavor-associated chemicals in 398 varieties of tomatoes in order to create a "roadmap" for improving flavor:

Bite into a supermarket tomato and you'll probably notice something missing: taste. Scientists think they can put the yum back into the grocery tomato by tinkering with its genetic recipe. Researchers are reinstalling five long-lost genetic traits that add much of the sweet-yet-acidic taste that had been bred out of mass-produced tomatoes for the past 50 years. They're using mostly natural breeding methods, not genetic modification technology.

[...] One key issue is size. Growers keep increasing individual tomato size and grow more per plant. The trouble is that there is a limit to how much sugar each tomato plant can produce. Bigger tomatoes and more of them means less sugar per tomato and less taste, Klee said. So Klee and colleagues looked at the genomes of the mass-produced tomato varieties and heirloom tomatoes to try to help the grocery tomatoes catch up to their backyard garden taste.

[...] Klee isolated some sugar genes and ones more geared to pure taste, but figured those won't work as well because they clash against shipping and size needs. So he found areas that affect the aroma of tomatoes but not size or heartiness. Reintroducing those into mass-produced tomatoes should work because smell is a big factor in taste, he said. Altering genes in a lab would make the process faster, but because of consumer distrust and regulations, Klee is opting for natural breeding methods – with help from an electric toothbrush to spread pollen.

It sounds like the quest for a tasty tomato will be delayed for years because GMOs are scaaaary.

Also at NYT.

A chemical genetic roadmap to improved tomato flavor (DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1556) (DX)

Previously: Breeding Wildness Back Into Our Fruits and Vegetables
Two Approaches to Enhancing Tomato Flavor
Tomatoes Grown in Australian Desert from Sunshine and Seawater

Original Submission