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Medicine

Submission + - MIT Brings Us One Step Closer to Transdermal Drugs (exabites.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at MIT have discovered a new trick when it comes to delivering vital medicine through the skin—a development they say might revolutionize everything from how vaccinations are delivered to the way insulin is migrated to diabetes patients
NASA

Submission + - NASA to use 3D Printing for Self-Building Spacecraft aka Replicators (tech-stew.com)

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes: "A new spin on 3D printing technology could have spacecraft building themselves by taking materials from space junk or asteroids. The "SpiderFab" project has received $100,000 from NASA's innovative Advanced Concepts program to determine the feasibility of such a self-construction design. With some planning and more funding they hope to launch a 3D-printing test mission within several years.

"The system could then morph in orbit into a very large system a dozen or hundreds of meters in size," Hoyt told InnovationNewsDaily. "It would be like launching a CubeSat that creates a 50 meter-length boom."

The possibilities with this self-building technology would allow for space telescopes the size of ARICEBO in Puerto Rico. Or even more intriguing, such technology can be sent to distant star systems and then build arrays and communications transmitters to send signals back to Earth."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft patents whacking your phone to silence it (uspto.gov)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Patent 20120231838: Techniques and tools are described for controlling an audio signal of a mobile device. For example, information indicative of acceleration of the mobile device can be received and correlation between the information indicative of acceleration and exemplar whack event data can be determined. An audio signal of the mobile device can be controlled based on the correlation.

Microsoft's states that the types of audio signals that could be silenced by a whacking event include any of the following: a ringing, a ringtone, user-initiated audio, a tone, a played recording, an alarm, or the like. The audio signal could be in response to or indicate an incoming call, a message, an update, a reminder for a meeting or event, the playing of music or recording, or the like.
Censorship

Submission + - YouTube Refuses to Remove anti-Islamic Film Clip

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "BBC reports that Google officials have rejected the notion of removing a video that depicts the prophet as a fraud and philanderer and has been blamed for sparking violence at US embassies in Cairo and Benghazi on grounds it does not violate YouTube's policies, but restricted viewers in Egypt and Libya from loading it due to the special circumstances in the country. Google's response to the crisis highlighted the struggle faced by the company, and others like it, to balance free speech with legal and ethical concerns in an age when social media can impact world events. "This video – which is widely available on the Web – is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube," Google said in a statement. "However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt, we have temporarily restricted access in both countries." Underscoring Google's quandary, some digital free expression groups have criticised YouTube for censoring the video. Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says given Google' s strong track record of protecting free speech, she was surprised the company gave in to pressure to selectively block ithe video "It is extremely unusual for YouTube to block a video in any country without it being a violation of their terms of service or in response to a valid legal complaint," says Galperin. "I'm not sure they did the right thing.""

Submission + - RIPE region runs out of IPv4 adresses, now allocates from last /8 (ripe.net) 1

Submitted by 8-Track
8-Track writes: The RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, distributed the last blocks of IPv4 address space from the available pool. This means that we are now distributing IPv4 address space to Local Internet Registries (LIRs) from the last /8. This means that an ISP may receive one /22 allocation (1,024 IPv4 addresses), even if they can justify a larger allocation. This /22 allocation will only be made to LIRs if they have already received an IPv6 allocation from an upstream LIR or the RIPE NCC. Time to move to IPv6!
Android

Submission + - Motorola Mobility faces Android phones, tablets recall in Germany (zdnet.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: The war continues.

From the article, "Apple won a victory yesterday in the German court over a 'rubber-banding' patent that was key to the Cupertino, CA.-based technology giant's billion-dollar victory against Samsung last month in a U.S. court. "

Apple now can persue enforcing a ban, asking for the infringing devices to be destroyed, or for Motorola to recall the devices.
Security

Submission + - Is application virtualization a defense against exploits?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Several solutions out there make it possible to create portable programs which are not allowed to modify the operating system, such as Sandboxie, Cameyo and ThinApp. They do so by intercepting the write requests and redirecting them to a predefined directory what makes changes to the system itself impossible (at least that's the claim). Now if you convert e.g. your favorite browser into such a package, would this work as a useful protection against browser/flash based exploits? Should you assume that the website you just visited tried to exploit your browser, all you would need to do is to delete the sandbox directory to get rid of the possible trojan/virus. This is obviously simpler than using an entire virtual machine for browsing the Internet, but does it provide a comparable protection?
Space

Submission + - Elon Musk An Industrialist for the 22nd Century (businessweek.com) 1

Submitted by
pacopico
pacopico writes: "Elon Musk has just come off a pretty amazing run. SpaceX docked with the ISS. Tesla has started selling its all-electric luxury sedan, and SolarCity just filed to go public. Bloomberg Businessweek spent a few days with Musk and got a look inside his insane factories in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. It's like Willy Wonka time for geeks. Among the other proclamations in the story is Musk saying that he intends to die on Mars. "Just not on impact." Musk then goes on to describe a fifth mode of transportation he's calling the Hyperloop."

Submission + - Towards a 50% Efficient Solar Cell

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: IEEE Spectrum magazine has a feature article describing DARPA-funded work towards developing a solar cell that's 50% efficient, for a finished module that's 40% efficient — suitable for charging a soldier's gadgets in the field. Conventional silicon and thin-film PV tech can hit cell efficiencies of upwards of 20%, with finished modules hovering in the teens. Triple-junction cells can top 40%, but are expensive to produce and not practical in most applications. Current work by the Very High Efficiency Solar Cell program uses optics (dichroic films) to concentrate incoming sunlight by 20-200x, and split it into constituent spectra, which fall on many small solar cells of different chemistries, each tuned to maximize the conversion of different wavelengths.
Intel

Submission + - Intel says Clover Trail won't work with Linux (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by girlmad
girlmad writes: Intel's Clover Trail Atom processor can be seen in various non-descript laptops around IDF and the firm provided a lot of architectural details on the chip, confirming details such as dual-core and a number of power states. However Intel said Clover Trail "is a Windows 8 chip" and that "the chip cannot run Linux".

While Intel's claim that Clover Trail won't run Linux is not quite true — after all it is an x86 instruction set so there is no major reason why the Linux kernel and userland will not run — given that the firm will not support it, device makers are unlikely to produce Linux Clover Trail devices for their own support reasons.
Japan

Submission + - Japan Aims to Abandon Nuclear Power by 2030s (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Reuters reports "Japan's government said it intends to stop using nuclear power by the 2030s, marking a major shift from policy goals set before last year's Fukushima disaster that sought to increase the share of atomic energy to more than half of electricity supply.

Japan joins countries such as Germany and Switzerland in turning away from nuclear power after last year's earthquake unleashed a tsunami that swamped the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. Japan was the third-biggest user of atomic energy before the disaster.

In abandoning atomic power, Japan aims to triple the share of renewable power to 30 percent of its energy mix, but will remain a top importer of oil, coal and gas for the foreseeable future.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's unpopular government, which could face an election this year, had faced intense lobbying from industries to maintain atomic energy and also concerns from its major ally, the United States, which supplied it with nuclear technology in the 1950s."

Meanwhile the US nuclear renaissance appears to be unraveling. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/unraveling-the-nuclear-renaissance/
 "
Patents

Submission + - Easy Fix For Software Patents Found In US Patent Act (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
WebMink
WebMink writes: "What if there was an easy, inexpensive way to bring software patents under control, that did not involve Congress, which applied retrospectively to all patents and which was already part of the US Patent Act? Stanford law professor Mark Lemley thinks he's found it. He asserts that the current runaway destruction being caused by software patents is just like previous problems with US patent law, and that Congress included language in the Patent Act of 1952 that can be invoked over software patents just like it fixed the earlier problems. All it will take is a future defendant in a patent trial using his read of a crucial section of the Patent Act in their defence to establish case law. Can it really be that easy?"
Science

Submission + - Astronomers fix the Astronomical Unit (nature.com) 1

Submitted by
gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: "The Astronomical Unit (AU) is known to most as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In fact, the official definition was a much more complex mathematical calculation involving angular measurements, hypothetical bodies, and the Sun's mass. That old definition created problems: due to general relativity, the length of the AU changed depending on an observer's position in the solar system. And the mass of the Sun changes over time, so the AU was changing as well. At the International Astronomical Union's latest meeting, astronomers unanimously voted on a new simplified definition: exactly 149,597,870,700 metres. Nobody need panic, the earth's distance from the sun remains just as it was, regardless of whether it's in AUs, meters, or smoots."
Hardware

Submission + - Intel says Clover Trail Atom CPUs can't run Linux (geek.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel hopes to change its fortunes in the mobile sector and better compete with ARM with the introduction of the next Atom chip, codenamed Clover Trail. But even before the Clover Trail processors are available, Intel has limited the market for them by stating Clover Trail Atom chips will only work with Windows 8. In other words, they won’t run Linux and Intel wont support them running Linux.

That decision is a little confusing, not because the dominant OS using Atom chips in tablets and laptops will be Windows 8, but because Clover Trail is still an x86 chip so the use of Linux shouldn’t even be an issue or a talking point. The Inquirer even goes so far as to suggest Intel has created an “artificial barrier” to help boost/force the use of Microsoft’s operating system with Atom. Intel hasn’t got specific, but it’s thought to be a software problem that is at the heart of this lack of support.
Science

Submission + - Mammoth Tooth Found Downtown San Francisco (sfgate.com)

Submitted by
DevotedSkeptic
DevotedSkeptic writes: "A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth.

This was no ordinary tooth. The 10-inch-long brown, black and beige chomper, broken in two and missing a chunk, once belonged to a woolly mammoth, an elephantine creature that roamed the grassy valley that's now San Francisco Bay 10 to 15 thousand years ago in the Pleistocene epoch.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mammoth-tooth-found-at-Transbay-dig-3861381.php#ixzz26RHWlcZI"
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox OS - Disruptive By Aiming Low (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "As Apple launches a new slightly-improved iPhone 5, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich says if you want a really disruptive phone you should look to Firefox OS. It's a low-cost low-end device — and that's the point. It uses standards so should be resistant to patent infringement suits, it will fit on featurephone-grade hardware, and it will run HTML5 apps without the restriction of native apps in an app store. In other words, it's aiming for the next 2 billion smartphone users, people who can't afford the iPhone/Android model."
Network

Submission + - Preventing another Carrier IQ: Introducing the Mobile Device Privacy Act (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Lawmakers in Washington have turned their sights on mobile device tracking, proposing legislation aimed at making it much harder for companies to track you without consent. The Mobile Device Privacy Act makes it illegal for companies to monitor device users without their expressed consent. The bill was introduced Thursday by Massachusetts Democrat Representative Edward Markey, co-Chair of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus. Much of the impetus for the bill came from last year’s Carrier IQ debacle, where it emerged that the company's software was found to exist on both iOS and Android devices on AT&T and Sprint’s networks. While the company denied any wrongdoing, the software captured keystrokes and sent the details of your device usage back to the carriers. That news set off a firestorm of criticism, including the attention of Senator Al Franken, who grilled the company and received some details on Carrier IQ’s intentions. If passed, the legislation would require the disclosure of including tracking software at the time of the purchase of the phone, or during ownership if a software update or app would add such software to the device, and the consumer gains the right to refuse to be tracked. This disclosure must include what types of information is collected, who it is transmitted to, and how it will be used."

Submission + - Patent troll sues X-Plane (x-plane.com) 2

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: X-plane is a cross-platform flight simulator app, notably the only serious one that supports Mac OSX and Linux. It's under threat by an NPE (Non Practicing Entity), Uniloc, suing for things X-Plane has done for decades. X-plane cannot afford to defend this suit, so if somebody doesn't step up and defend them then we lose X-plane forever.

Submission + - Patent troll sues X-Plane (x-plane.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: X-Plane is an awesome flight simulator that has survived the onslaught of Microsoft Flight Simulator, been the first to include NASA data in their terrain modelling, and remained Linux compatible through their whole history. They have a long and grand history.

They are now under attack from a patent troll, Uniloc, and will needs must shut down unless we help them out. If we fail to help, we lose X-plane — and we deserve to.

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