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Submission + - Barnes & Noble to spin off Nook Media, will take it public (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: It looks like the recent rumors about B&N splitting up were true. Along with could-have-been-worse financial news, Barnes & Noble just announced that it's going to spin off its two year old ebook subsidiary into a new publicly traded company. The move won't be finalized until 2015, but when it happens the new company is expected to have both existing parts of Nook Media, including the less than successful ebook division and B&N College, which is still managing to turn a profit. Barnes & Noble hasn't revealed the price Nook Media stock will be selling for but I would bet that it will be valued at far under the $1.8 billion value B&N assigned when Nook Media was created in April 2012.

Submission + - Searching for Ocean Life On Another World (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: National Geographic has a detailed article about efforts underway to search for life in the oceans of Europa, which are buried beneath miles of ice. A first mission would have a spacecraft orbit just 16 miles over the moon's surface, analyzing the material ejected from the moon, measuring salinity, and sniffing out its chemical makeup. A later mission would then deploy a rover. But unlike the rovers we've built so far, this one would be designed to go underwater and navigate using the bottom surface of the ice over the oceans. An early design was just tested successfully underneath the ice in Alaska. "[It] crawls along under a foot of ice, its built-in buoyancy keeping it firmly pressed against the frozen subsurface, sensors measuring the temperature, salinity, pH, and other characteristics of the water." Astronomers and astrobiologists are hopeful that these missions will provide definitive evidence of life on other worlds. "Europa certainly seems to have the basic ingredients for life. Liquid water is abundant, and the ocean floor may also have hydrothermal vents, similar to Earth's, that could provide nutrients for any life that might exist there. Up at the surface, comets periodically crash into Europa, depositing organic chemicals that might also serve as the building blocks of life. Particles from Jupiter's radiation belts split apart the hydrogen and oxygen that makes up the ice, forming a whole suite of molecules that living organisms could use to metabolize chemical nutrients from the vents."

Submission + - Evidence Of A Correction To The Speed of Light

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realised that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer--the speed of light through space requires a correction. As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarisation. The new idea is that the gravitational potential of the Milky Way must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. This changes the energy of the virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy and speed of the photon. And since the analogous effect on neutrinos is negligible, light will travel more slowly than them through a gravitational potential. According to the new calculations which combine quantum electrodynamics with general relativity, the change in speed accounts more or less exactly for the mysterious time difference. Voila!

Submission + - US Court Rules Against Government for Using Seized Data Beyond Scope of Warrant

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit last week reversed a tax evasion conviction against an accountant because the government had used data from his computers that were seized under a warrant targeting different suspects. The Fourth Amendment, the court pointed out, 'prevents the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another.' Law enforcement originally made copies of his hard drives and during off-site processing, separated his personal files from data related to the original warrant. However, 1.5 years later, the government sifted through his personal files and used what it found to build a case against him. The appeals court held that '[i]f the Government could seize and retain non-responsive electronic records indefinitely, so it could search them whenever it later developed probable cause, every warrant to search for particular electronic data would become, in essence, a general warrant', which the Fourth Amendment protects against. The EFF hopes that the outcome of this appeal will have implications for the NSA's dragnet surveillance practice.

Submission + - Employees who stay more than 2 years paid 50% less (forbes.com)

Submitted by fleebait
fleebait writes: According to Forbes:

The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year. There are millions of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on one that we can control. Staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime by about 50% or more.

Submission + - "Stupid App" Yo Reached Over 1 Million Users (gizmobeast.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: YO, a one-tap messaging app that was labeled by a US TV host as a stupid app has surpassed 1 million users and raised over 1 million dollars in venture capital funding. What made it so appealing? Its simple and easy to use.
Here’s how this app works. Want to say “good morning” to your friends? Just Yo to them. wanna say “Baby I miss you” just simply put Yo. Possibilities are endless. Sound absurd? For some, not really. Why tweet 140 characters, when you can just Yo.

Some critics say the popularity will soon fade, but so far, the app is still currently in the top charts.

Submission + - How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore's Law (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005 and the 20nm process node is set to be more expensive than the 28nm node was for the first time ever. Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again — by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. It turns out that when you shrink a Vacuum transistor to absolutely tiny dimensions, you can recover some of the benefits of a vacuum tube and dodge the negatives that characterized their usage. According to a report, vacuum transistors can draw electrons across the gate without needing a physical connection between them. Make the vacuum area small enough, and reduce the voltage sufficiently, and the field emission effect allows the transistor to fire electrons across the gap without containing enough energy to energize the helium inside the nominal "vacuum" transistor. According to researchers, they've managed to build a successful transistor operating at 460GHz — well into the so-called Terahertz Gap, which sits between microwaves and infrared energy.

Submission + - NOAA: Earth smashed a record for heat in May, 2014, effects to worsen 2

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday said May's average temperature on Earth of 15.54 C beat the old record set four years ago. In April, the globe tied the 2010 record for that month. Records go back to 1880. Experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming. An El Nino is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters climate worldwide and usually spikes global temperatures.

Submission + - Islamic State of Iraq and Syria -- There's an app for that (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Eunuchswear
Eunuchswear writes: ISIS (aka Daech), the black flag waving, AK47 toting, extremists advancing rapidly towards Bagdhad have a social media marketing group.

You're probably thinking "Oh, just a few sad losers pretending to be Jihadis posting tweets from mom's basement", but no. They have an Android app that uses the Twitter accounts of anyone who downloads it for sending ISIS propaganda in organised campaigns, while avoiding Twitters spam detection filters. At one point ISIS managed to get their propaganda into the first results in a search for "Baghdad" — an image of an ISIS fighter with the words "We are coming, Baghdad".

The tweet is more powerful than the AK?

Submission + - HUGO Winning Author Daniel Keyes has died. (locusmag.com)

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: Author Daniel Keyes, 86, died June 15, 2014.

KKeyes is best known for his Hugo Award winning classic SF story “Flowers for Algernon” (F&SF, 1959), the Nebula Award winning and bestselling 1966 novel expansion, and the film version Charly (1968).

Keyes was born August 9, 1927 in New York. He worked variously as an editor, comics writer, fashion photographer, and teacher before joining the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, where he taught as a professor of English and creative writing, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He married Aurea Georgina Vaquez in 1952, who predeceased him in 2013; they had two daughters.

Submission + - Duverger's law in political science predicts exactly two Bitcoin mining giants (economics.com.au)

Submitted by purnima
purnima writes: It's not every day that the old area of Political Science can help us think in a new way about technology. The linked article tells us that Bitcoin is different sort of technology: it has a democratic system built into the protocol. So when recently, the mining pool GHASH.IO achieved 54% of computational power amongst all Bitcoin miner there was a great deal of `weeping and gnashing of teeth’ in the Bitcoin community. You see, anyone controlling more than 50% of mining power exercises complete control over the recording of Bitcoin transactions. But all is not lost, “Duverger’s law” in political science predicts that the eventual stable market structure for Bitcoin mining will be two large mining pools of equal size. Equal size means two mining consortiums that will each frequently cross the 50% computational power line and have temporary control of the recording of Bitcoin transactions. And that, unlike a persistent monopoly, need not be a bad thing for the longevity of the currency.

Submission + - Yahoo's Diversity Record Is Almost as Bad as Google's 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Comparing Yahoo's diversity numbers to Google's, writes Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku, is "like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges." Two weeks after Google disclosed it wasn't "where we want to be" with its 17% female and 1% Black U.S. tech workforce, Yahoo revealed its diversity numbers aren't that much better than Google's, with a U.S. tech workforce that's 35% female and 1% Black. The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce, only 15% of which is female. So, with Google and Yahoo having checked in, isn't it about time for U.S. workforce expert Mark Zuckerberg and company to stop taking the Fifth and ante up numbers to show students what kind of opportunities Facebook offers?

Submission + - Remains of 'end of the world' epidemic found in ancient Egypt (foxnews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an epidemic in Egypt so terrible that one ancient writer believed the world was coming to an end.

Working at the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru in the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor) in Egypt, the team of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor (MAIL) found bodies covered with a thick layer of lime (historically used as a disinfectant). The researchers also found three kilns where the lime was produced, as well as a giant bonfire containing human remains, where many of the plague victims were incinerated.

Pottery remains found in the kilns allowed researchers to date the grisly operation to the third century A.D., a time when a series of epidemics now dubbed the "Plague of Cyprian" ravaged the Roman Empire, which included Egypt. Saint Cyprian was a bishop of Carthage (a city in Tunisia) who described the plague as signaling the end of the world. [See Photos of the Remains of Plague Victims & Thebes Site]

Occurring between roughly A.D. 250-271, the plague "according to some sources killed more than 5,000 people a day in Rome alone," wrote Francesco Tiradritti, director of the MAIL, in the latest issue of Egyptian Archaeology, a magazine published by the Egypt Exploration Society.

Submission + - Tetris Turns 30 (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wildly popular video game Tetris launched 30 years ago today, and continues to capture the hearts of folks around the world.

Topping best-of video game lists for years, the colorful block puzzle has sold an estimated 170 million copies—about 100 million of which are played on mobile devices.

Submission + - Small Genetic Change Responsible for Blond Hair (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For all those brunettes wishing they were naturally blond, a small genetic change could have made all the difference. Scientists have found that replacing one of DNA’s four letters at a key spot in the genome shifts a particular gene’s activity and leads to fairer hair. Not only does the work provide a molecular basis for flaxen locks, but it also demonstrates how changes in segments of DNA that control genes, not just changes in genes themselves, are important to what an organism looks like.

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