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Phoenix666 writes:

Money doesn't grow on trees, but electricity might someday.

Iowa State University scientists have built a device that mimics the branches and leaves of a cottonwood tree and generates electricity when its artificial leaves sway in the wind.

Michael McCloskey, an associate professor of genetics, development and cell biology who led the design of the device, said the concept won't replace wind turbines, but the technology could spawn a niche market for small and visually unobtrusive machines that turn wind into electricity.

"The possible advantages here are aesthetics and its smaller scale, which may allow off-grid energy harvesting," McCloskey said recently in his ISU laboratory. "We set out to answer the question of whether you can get useful amounts of electrical power out of something that looks like a plant. The answer is 'possibly,' but the idea will require further development."

Also at:
techtimes.com

Reference:
Michael A. McCloskey, Curtis L. Mosher, Eric R. Henderson. Wind Energy Conversion by Plant-Inspired Designs PLOS ONE, 2017; 12 (1): e0170022 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0170022

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Tokyo Olympic organisers on Wednesday called on the Japanese public to donate old smartphones and other old electronic devices to help make medals for the 2020 Games.

In a push to give the Olympics an environmentally friendly hue, Tokyo's organising committee is aiming to collect eight tonnes of gold, silver and bronze at recycling bins across Japan from April, officials said, to make 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals.

Tokyo 2020 said e-waste such as digital cameras, laptops and games units can also be donated at collection boxes in more than 2,000 stores of mobile phone giant and Olympic sponsor NTT Docomo.

Recycled metals have been used in previous years to make Olympic medals, including in Rio last year where the silver and bronze medals were 30 percent made from recycled materials.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

LibreOffice 5.3 is the newest version of the popular open source Office suite, and one of the "most feature-rich releases in the history of the application".

The Office suite, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, is now also available as a private cloud version, called LibreOffice Online.

LibreOffice, at is[sic] core, is an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It features Writer, a text editing program similar to Word, Calc, the Excel equivalent, Impress which is similar to PowerPoint, and Draw, which enables you to create graphic documents.

LibreOffice 5.3 ships with a truckload of new features. One of the new features is a new experimental user interface called Notebookbar. This new interface resembles Office's ribbon UI, but is completely optional [submitters emphasis] right now.

In fact, the new user interface is not enabled by default, and if you don't look for it or know where to look, you will probably notice no difference at all to previous versions.

To enable the new Ribbon UI, select View > Toolbar Layout > Notebookbar. The UI you see on the screenshot above is enabled by default, but you may switch it using View > Notebookbar to either Contextual Groups or Contextual Single.

[...] One interesting option that the developers built-in to LibreOffice 5.3 is the ability to sign PDF documents, and to verify PDF document signatures.

[...] The Writer application got some exciting new features. It supports Table styles now for instance, and there is a new Page deck in the sidebar to customize the page settings quickly and directly.

There is also an option to use the new "go to page" box, and arrows in the drawing tools which were not available previously in Writer.

Calc got a new set of default cell styles offering "greater variety and better names", a new median function for pivot tables, and a new filter option when you are inserting functions to narrow down the selection.

The article also has 4 demo videos embedded.

In the comments there, Donutz notes that the Ribbon UI requires the Java Runtime Environment.
Oggy notes that the suite is available from PortableApps. (Martin's site is largely Windows-centric).

Original Submission

edIII writes:

The Army Corp of Engineers is now accepting public comment until February 20th regarding the permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline.

You may mail or hand deliver written comments to Mr. Gib Owen, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, 108 Army Pentagon, Washington, DC 20310-0108. Advance arrangements will need to be made to hand deliver comments. Please include your name, return address, and "NOI Comments, Dakota Access Pipeline Crossing" on the first page of your written comments. Comments may also be submitted via email to Mr. Gib Owen, at gib.a.owen.civ@mail.mil. If emailing comments, please use "NOI Comments, Dakota Access Pipeline Crossing" as the subject of your email.

The location of all public scoping meetings will be announced at least 15 days in advance through a notice to be published in the local North Dakota newspaper (The Bismarck Tribune) and online at https://www.army.mil/?asacw.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

Mr. Gib Owen, Water Resources Policy and Legislation, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, Washington, DC 20310-0108; telephone: (703) 695-6791; email: gib.a.owen.civ@mail.mil.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

The proposed crossing of Lake Oahe by Dakota Access, LLC is approximately 0.5 miles upstream of the northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation. The Tribe protests the crossing primarily because it relies on Lake Oahe for water for a variety of purposes, the Tribe's reservation boundaries encompass portions of Lake Oahe downstream from the proposed crossing, and the Tribe retains water, treaty fishing, and hunting rights in the Lake.

The proposed crossing of Corps property requires the granting of a right-of-way (easement) under the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA), 30 U.S.C. 185. To date, the Army has not made a final decision on whether to grant the easement pursuant to the MLA. The Army intends to prepare an EIS to consider any potential impacts to the human environment that the grant of an easement may cause.

Specifically, input is desired on the following three scoping concerns:

(1) Alternative locations for the pipeline crossing the Missouri River;

(2) Potential risks and impacts of an oil spill, and potential impacts to Lake Oahe, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's water intakes, and the Tribe's water, treaty fishing, and hunting rights; and

(3) Information on the extent and location of the Tribe's treaty rights in Lake Oahe.

Those wishing to submit comments opposing the pipeline can do so directly at the email address listed above, or use web pages setup to do so by the following groups:

Action Network

Sierra Club

Likewise, if you support the pipeline you can comment as well and respond to the questions asked via email or letter to the addresses listed above.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ishee, a member of what's called the "biohacker" movement, says he is hoping to use inexpensive new gene-editing techniques to modify the genes of Dalmatians. By repairing a single DNA letter in their genomes, Ishee believes, he can rid them of an inherited disease, hyper uricemia, almost as closely associated with the breed as their white coats and black spots.

In early January, Ishee sent the agency a sketch of his plans to fix Dalmatians expecting to be told no approval was needed. He didn't immediately hear back—and soon found out why. On January 18, the agency released a sweeping new proposal to regulate cattle, pigs, dogs, and other animals modified with gene-editing.

The federal health agency already regulates transgenic animals—those with DNA added from a different species. But what about a dog whose genome has been tweaked to repair a disease gene? Or to endow it with the gene for a trait, like fluffy fur, already found in another canine? According to the newly proposed regulations, such creations will also need federal approval before entering the marketplace.

Is it government overreach, or do such restrictions make sense?

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

A number of news outlets (BBC, Al Jazeera, RT) report that Russian authorities have charged two former officers in the Federal Security Service and an employee of cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab with committing treason in the interests of the United States.

RT (quote) seem to provide more details (or not):

Ruslan Stoyanov, head of Kaspersky Lab's computer incidents investigations unit, Sergey Mikhailov, a senior Russian FSB officer, and his deputy Dmitry Dokuchayev are accused of "treason in favor of the US," lawyer Ivan Pavlov said on Wednesday, as cited by Interfax.

Pavlov chose not to disclose which of the defendants he represents, adding, however, that his client denies all charges.

The charges against the defendants do not imply they were cooperating with the CIA, Pavlov added. "There is no mention of the CIA at all. [The entity] in question is the US, not the CIA," he stressed, according to TASS.

The lawyer maintained the court files included no mention of Vladimir Anikeev, an alleged leader of 'Shaltai Boltai', a hacking group that previously leaked emails from top Russian officials, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

The hacking group's name was in the news earlier in January, when Russian media reports linked Mikhailov and Dokuchayev to 'Shaltai Boltai'. In an unsourced article last Wednesday, Rosbalt newspaper claimed Mikhailov's unit was ordered in 2016 to work with the group.

Previously:
Kaspersky Lab's Top Investigator Reportedly Arrested in Treason Probe

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mark Zuckerberg's first courtroom testimony hasn't gone over so well. A jury has awarded ZeniMax Media Inc. $500 million in damages in the Oculus Rift case:

The virtual reality headset maker that Facebook Inc. bought in 2014 for $2 billion used stolen technology, a jury said in awarding $500 million damages to ZeniMax Media Inc.

Jurors in Dallas federal court on Wednesday sided with ZeniMax in its trade-secrets case over the Oculus Rift, the device that has put the social media giant at the forefront of the virtual reality boom. The verdict is a rebuke of Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who isn't a defendant but who told jurors in his first-ever courtroom testimony that it was important for him to be there because the claims by ZeniMax Media Inc. were "false."

The case is ZeniMax Media Inc. v. Oculus VR Inc., 3:14-cv-01849, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Texas (Dallas). Not to be confused with the Eastern District of Texas. From a 2013 article in Dallas News:

Judges in the Northern District, which includes Dallas and Fort Worth, saw an 18 percent increase in patent cases filed. And legal experts expect that number will significantly increase in 2013 now that three judges in Dallas have committed to focusing more of their time and expertise on intellectual property disputes.

Also at The Verge.

Previously:
Facebook to Buy Rift Maker Oculus VR for $2bn
Mark Zuckerberg Will Testify in Oculus VR Trade Secrets Trial

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward submitted an article from The Stack:

In November the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) announced the mandate, outlining February 2017 as the deadline for operators to facilitate the ID registration scheme, which was ostensibly created to prevent online fraud and increase security in mobile banking.

[...] Thailand's existing 106 million mobile users will not be constrained to register their current devices. This effectively gives non-ID SIM usage in Thailand a withering vine of 3-7 years, based on current upgrade patterns and smartphone turnover.

[...] In January of 2016 Saudi Arabia also announced a fingerprint ID registration scheme, which similarly does not include retroactive registration for existing users or devices. According to a report by the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), mobile subscribers dropped by three million to 51 million in the wake of the legislation, under which information on the SIM is shared with the National Information Centre to confirm the authenticity of the buyer during transactions.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has identified the farthest gamma-ray blazars, a type of galaxy whose intense emissions are powered by supersized black holes. Light from the most distant object began its journey to us when the universe was 1.4 billion years old, or nearly 10 percent of its present age.

"Despite their youth, these far-flung blazars host some of the most massive black holes known," said Roopesh Ojha, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "That they developed so early in cosmic history challenges current ideas of how supermassive black holes form and grow, and we want to find more of these objects to help us better understand the process."

[...] Blazars constitute roughly half of the gamma-ray sources detected by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). Astronomers think their high-energy emissions are powered by matter heated and torn apart as it falls from a storage, or accretion, disk toward a supermassive black hole with a million or more times the sun's mass. A small part of this infalling material becomes redirected into a pair of particle jets, which blast outward in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Blazars appear bright in all forms of light, including gamma rays, the highest-energy light, when one of the jets happens to point almost directly toward us.

Previously, the most distant blazars detected by Fermi emitted their light when the universe was about 2.1 billion years old. Earlier observations showed that the most distant blazars produce most of their light at energies right in between the range detected by the LAT and current X-ray satellites, which made finding them extremely difficult.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two teams of scientists claim to have found proteins in ancient dinosaur bone fossils:

One study, led by Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University in Raleigh who has chased dinosaur proteins for de­cades, confirms her highly controversial claim to have recovered 80-million-year-old dinosaur collagen. The other paper suggests that protein may even have sur­vived in a 195-million-year-old dino fossil. The Schweitzer paper is a "milestone," says ancient protein expert Enrico Cap­pellini of the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark, who was skeptical of some of Schweitzer's ear­lier work. "I'm fully convinced beyond a reasonable doubt the evidence is authen­tic." He calls the second study "a long shot that is suggestive." But together, Cappellini and others argue, the papers have the po­tential to transform dinosaur paleontology into a molecular science, much as analyz­ing ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of human evolution.

[...] The second paper, published this week in Nature Communications, goes back even fur­ther in time but offers weaker evidence, Cap­pellini says. In this work, researchers led by paleontologist Robert Reisz at the University of Toronto in Canada reported finding what they believe is collagen in a 195-million-year-old fossil rib from a large plant-eating dino­saur called Lufengosaurus that lived in what is now southwestern China. Reisz says his team's methods, called Raman spectroscopy and synchrotron radiation Fourier trans­form infrared microspectroscopy (SR-FTIR), can probe the chemical makeup of a sample without the need to purify it first, which low­ers the risk of contamination. The rib, he and his colleagues report, absorbed infrared light in wavelengths that match those of collagen from mod­ern animals.

Also at BBC.

Previous scientific papers about protein in fossils:

Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein (DOI: 10.1126/science.1138709) (DX)

'Protein' in 80-Million-Year-Old Fossil Bolsters Controversial T. rex Claim (DOI: 10.1126/science.324_578) (DX)

Protein power (DOI: 10.1126/science.349.6246.372) (DX)

This week's papers:

Expansion for the Brachylophosaurus canadensis Collagen I Sequence and Additional Evidence of the Preservation of Cretaceous Protein (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.6b00873) (DX)

Evidence of preserved collagen in an Early Jurassic sauropodomorph dinosaur revealed by synchrotron FTIR microspectroscopy (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14220) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-020&rn=news.xml&rst=6730

A new device on the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star, and separately, a cool, star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near its companion star. The device, called a vortex coronagraph, was recently installed inside NIRC2 (Near Infrared Camera 2), the workhorse infrared imaging camera at Keck. It has the potential to image planetary systems and brown dwarfs closer to their host stars than any other instrument in the world.

"The vortex coronagraph allows us to peer into the regions around stars where giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn supposedly form," said Dmitri Mawet, research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Pasadena. "Before now, we were only able to image gas giants that are born much farther out. With the vortex, we will be able to see planets orbiting as close to their stars as Jupiter is to our sun, or about two to three times closer than what was possible before."

The new vortex results are presented in two papers, both published in the January 2017 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

Full of confidence in Ajit Pai – the new boss at the FCC, America's communications watchdog – groups representing US telcos are seeking a repeal of the regulator's privacy rules.

Citing the appointment of Pai and the imminent decision to roll back the previous administration's net neutrality protections, industry groups now hope that the little requirement for an opt-in for the collection of user data will be frozen, if not done away with completely.

[...] "For over twenty years, ISPs have protected their consumers' data with the strongest pro-consumer policies in the internet ecosystem," the group writes.

"ISPs know the success of any digital business depends on earning their customers' trust on privacy."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/31/net_neutrality_dead_privacy_next/

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

The NHS reply-all email fail last year involved 500 million emails being sent across the health service's network in just 75 minutes.

A test message sent on 14 November to what an unfortunate "senior associate ICT delivery facilitator" thought was a local distribution list she had created instead went to all 850,000 people with an NHSmail email account. The blank message, sent early in the morning with a subject line that simply read "test", was sent to a distribution list called "CroydonPractices". Around 80 irritated folk promptly hit "reply" to demand they be removed from the list – which was when the meltdown began.

[...] "A software configuration error meant that the system applied an 'All England' rule rather than one including only the administrator's organisation," continued the report on the snafu. "The administrator would not have known that this had occurred."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/31/nhs_reply_all_email_fail_half_billion_messages/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Spanish police have arrested three people they linked to the hacking of Gamma Group and Hacking Team:

Spanish police have arrested three people over a data breach linked to a series of dramatic intrusions at European spy software companies — feeding speculation that the net has closed on an online Robin Hood figure known as Phineas Fisher.

A spokesman with Mossos d'Esquadra, Catalonia's regional police, said a man was arrested Tuesday in Salamanca on suspicion of breaking into the website of the Mossos labor union, hijacking its Twitter feed and leaking the personal data of more than 5,500 officers in May of last year. Another man and a woman were arrested in Barcelona in connection to the same breach, he said. No more arrests are expected, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with force policy.

May's breach was claimed by Phineas Fisher, who first won notoriety in 2014 for publishing data from Britain's Gamma Group — responsible at the time for spyware known as FinFisher. The hacker cemented their reputation by claiming responsibility for a breach at Italy's Hacking Team in 2015 — a spectacular dump which exposed the inner workings of government espionage campaigns — and appearing as a hand puppet in an unusual interview for a 2016 documentary on cybermercenaries .

Also at Motherboard and The Hill.

Previously: Gamma FinFisher Hacked - 40 GB of Code and Docs Available
WikiLeaks Releases German Surveillance Malware
Italian Security Firm "Hacking Team" Has Been Compromised
Hacking Team Complains That its Leaked Zero-Days Will be Misused
Hacking Team Break-in Explained

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

What caused the rapid disappearance of a vibrant Native American agrarian culture that lived in urban settlements from the Ohio River Valley to the Mississippi River Valley in the two centuries preceding the European settlement of North America? In a new study, researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis reconstructed and analyzed 2,100 years of temperature and precipitation data—and point the finger at climate change.

Employing proxies of prehistoric temperature and precipitation preserved in finely layered lake sediments, somewhat analogous to tree-ring records used to reconstruct drought and temperature, the IUPUI scientists have reported on the dramatic environmental changes that occurred as the Native Americans—known as Mississippians—flourished and then vanished from the Midwestern United States. The researchers theorize that the catastrophic climate change they observed, which doomed food production, was a primary cause of the disappearance.

"Abrupt climate change can impose conditions like drought. If these conditions are severe and sustained, as we have determined that they became for the Mississippians, it is virtually impossible for societies, especially those based on agriculture, to survive," said paleoclimatologist Broxton Bird, corresponding author of the new study. "From the lake records, we saw that the abundant rainfall and consistent good weather—which supported Mississippian society as it grew—changed, making agriculture unsustainable." Bird is an assistant professor of earth sciences in the School of Science at IUPUI.

This failure of their principal food source likely destabilized the sociopolitical system that supported Mississippian society, according to archeologist Jeremy Wilson, a study co-author. He is an associate professor of anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.

Other theories have suggested they exceeded their environment's carrying capacity, or that disease wiped out large numbers of people.

Original Submission