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Science

Submission + - Wanted: an 'adventurous' surrogate for a Neanderthal baby (theverge.com)

Submitted by
x0d
x0d writes: "It seems like fodder for a science fiction movie, but George Church is dead serious: he needs a surrogate mother for a Neanderthal baby. Church (oh, the irony), a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, says he's close to cloning a Neanderthal baby — the first in more than 30,000 years. Speaking to Der Spiegel, Church said that once such cloning technology has matured, all he would need is an "adventurous female human" to act as a surrogate.
Reviving an extinct human ancestor may seem like a ludicrous premise, but it's not as farfetched as it may seem. Church says he's already extracted enough fossil DNA to reconstruct the DNA of a Neanderthal child, and he's been very outspoken about the feasibility of bringing one to term. There's even a precedent for this breed of genetic resurrection, as well. In 2009, researchers in Spain successfully cloned an extinct subspecies of ibex, though it died just minutes after birth."
Facebook

Your Facebook Likes Conveyed As Simulated Hugs 40

Posted by timothy from the deep-pressure dept.
mikejuk writes "Next time you're dreaming up ways to make the users of your apps feel loved and wanted, think a little more wildly. How about giving them an actual hug? That's what MIT researchers Melissa Chow and her colleagues Andy Payne and Phil Seaton at MIT have come up with — a jacket that hugs the wearer when one of their friends 'likes' one of their posts on Facebook. The Like-A-Hug vest is described as receiving a signal when a Facebook friend 'likes' a post, then fills with air to give the wearer the sensation of being hugged."
Space

Warp Drive Might Be Less Impossible Than Previously Thought 867

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the warp-seven-engage dept.
runner_one writes "Harold 'Sonny' White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium that warp drive might be easier to achieve than earlier thought. The first concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy, studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter. But recent calculations showed that if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring the warp drive could be powered by the energy of a mass as small as 500 kg. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 8 Tells Microsoft About Everything You Install, Not Very Securely (nadim.cc)

Submitted by
x0d
x0d writes: "Windows 8 has a new featured called Windows SmartScreen, which is turned on by default. Windows SmartScreen’s purpose is to “screen” every single application you try to install from the Internet in order to inform you whether it’s safe to proceed with installing it or not. There are a few serious problems here. The big problem is that Windows 8 is configured to immediately tell Microsoft about every app you download and install.
This problem can however get even more serious: It may be possible to intercept SmartScreen’s communications to Microsoft and thus learn about every single application downloaded and installed by a target."

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