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Submission + - World's largest laser reaches for perfect power (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility announced Tuesday a successful test of its ultrapowerful laser system, which melds 192 laser beams into a single incredible burst of energy. On Aug. 13, the facility was activated for 14 billionths of a second and aimed at a tiny capsule of fuel. The result: approximately 350 trillion watts of power — hundreds of times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant. “We’re working in a place where no human has ever gone before,” Ed Moses, principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science, said. “We’re working on the bleeding edge of fusion physics.”

Submission + - Meet the next Martians (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The group was down to Earth — but not for long, they hope. These folks want to go to Mars. “I want off the planet – I want humanity off the planet,” declared Leila Zucker, 45, also known as “Dr. Leila,” because she is, in fact, a doctor who works nearby in the emergency room at Howard University Hospital. She has yearned to be an astronaut — and a doctor — since the age of 3, she told FoxNews.com. “One dream fulfilled, one to go,” she said happily. Zucker joined not a million, but 100 or so “aspiring Martians” from across the country, one with green hair and costume antennae, for a “Million Martian Meeting” held Saturday in Washington, D.C., which was sponsored by the Facebook page of the same name. The group came together as applicants of the Mars One project, an ambitious 10-year plan for a one-way trip to colonize the Red Planet.

Submission + - GPS flaw could let terrorists hijack ships, planes (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The world’s GPS system is vulnerable to hackers or terrorists who could use it to hijack ships – even commercial airliners. Todd Humphreys, a GPS expert at the University of Texas just completed a frightening real-time, real-life experiment that has exposed a huge potential hole in national security. Using a laptop, a small antenna and an electronic GPS “spoofer” built for $3,000, Humphreys and his team took control of the sophisticated navigation system aboard an $80 million, 210-foot super-yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. “We injected our spoofing signals into its GPS antennas and we’re basically able to control its navigation system with our spoofing signals,” Humphreys told Fox News.

Submission + - Retail stores plan elaborate ways to track you (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Retailers are experimenting with a variety of new ways to track you, so that when you pick up a shirt, you might get a message about the matching shorts. Or pick up golf shoes at a sports store and you see a discount for a new set of clubs. New technologies like magnetic field detection, Bluetooth Low Energy, sonic pulses, and even transmissions from the in-store lights can tell when you enter a store, where you go, and how you shop. Just last year, tracking was only accurate within 100 feet. Starting this year, they can track within a few feet. ByteLight makes the lighting tech, which transmits a unique signal that the camera in your phone can read. The store can then track your location within about 3 feet — and it's already in use at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Submission + - Declassified NSA report on cryptography back online at FoxNews.com (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The clandestine National Security Agency is partly responsible for the modern PC era, a newly declassified document reveals, thanks to decades of custom computers built for one thing: espionage. Declassified by the NSA on May 29 and posted online on Monday, the 344-page report “It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis,” details the unknown high-tech history of computers so secretive even their code names were kept confidential. A Slashdot link on Monday took down the computers hosting the documents at Government Attic (the slashdot effect still happens!) FoxNews.com has reposted the docs: Part One. Part Two.

Submission + - Ancient Fossils of 380-Million-Year-Old Placoderm Show Evolution of 'Six Pack'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found the 380-million-year-old fossils of a pre-historic fish that may help explain how strong abdominals evolved. The placoderm fish from north west Australia may be responsible for these well-developed powerful abdominal muscles that Swedish researchers note are "not unlike the human equivalents displayed on the beaches of the world every summer."

Submission + - Could your next HDTV roll up like a blind? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Japan's Shinoda Plasma Co. demonstrated a giant, flexible, plasma display at the Display Week 2013 conference last month in Vancouver, British Columbia, winning an award for “Best Prototype at Display Week.” It’s the latest effort to create the flexible gizmos of the future. The company calls its invention a “Luminous Array Film,” or LAFi; instead of being made from one large, flat sheet of glass, the display uses a thousand tiny glass tubes, each 1 mm in diameter and a bit more than 3 feet long. In spite of their tiny size, the tubes are hollow, and can hold the inert gas and phosphors required to make the light to create an image. Shinoda’s secret is that the display can only bend in one dimension. Consider a typical bamboo screen that you might use to cover a window, where a flexible fabric connects the relatively rigid bamboo sticks. You can roll up the screen so that all the bamboo pieces remain parallel to each other — forming a cylinder less than 4 inches across.

Submission + - 'Serious misperception' on NSA spying, Google legal guy Drummond says (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: There is a "serious misperception" about the National Security Agency's PRISM program, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in an exclusive interview with Fox News. On Tuesday the company pushed back against the layers of secrecy surrounding the agency's alleged blanket snooping on American citizens. Speaking in an exclusive interview from the Netherlands, explained the company's decision to fight back against the FBI, NSA, and Attorney General's office. “We were as shocked about those revelations as anyone,” Drummond told Fox News.

Submission + - Inside the NSA's secret Utah data center (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: As Americans demand answers about the government's wholesale electronic snooping on its citizens, the primary snooper — the National Security Agency (NSA) — is building a monstrous digital datacenter in a remote corner of Utah capable of sorting through and storing every e-mail, voicemail, and social media communication it can get its hands on. This top-secret data warehouse could hold as many as 1.25 million 4-terabyte hard drives, built into some 5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes that make up your digital fingerprint. And that's just one way to catalog people, said Charles King, principal analyst at data center consulting firm Pund-IT. "The NSA — like any large organization — is using numerous kinds of storage systems," King told FoxNews.com, including "innovative SSD and in-memory systems for high performance applications like real time analytics."

Submission + - Could bitcoin go legit? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: On May 15, the Department of Homeland Security seized a digital bank account used by "MtGox," the world's largest exchange, where people buy and sell bitcoins. DHS alleged, and a judge agreed, that there is "probable cause" that MtGox is an "unlicensed money service business." If proven, the penalty for operating such a business is a fine and up to 5 years in jail. FoxNews.com caught up with several bitcoin exchanges, including CampBX, MtGox, CoinLab and more, to ask them how they've navigated the regulatory waters — and how to go legit.

Submission + - John McAfee's Belize home burns to ground (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Just when you thought the strange story of John McAfee was over.The former island home of anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee burned down Thursday afternoon under circumstance he told FoxNews.com were “suspicious.” It’s an odd choice of words from a man whom the Belize police found suspicious, following the November 2012 murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, a well-liked builder from Florida who was shot at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye. “I believe that there are a select few with great power in Belize that will go to great lengths to harm me,” McAfee said. “This fire was not just a strange coincidence."

Submission + - Can you train your brain? Lumosity, BrainHQ tested (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The popular Lumosity service has 40 million members. Its exercises are generally entertaining — if a little humbling at first. New users fill out a very simple questionnaire about their concerns and focus (do you want to better remember people's names or improve your concentration and avoid distractions). Then Lumosity creates a daily regime of exercises for you. Typical tasks include remembering ever more complex patterns, visual positions, or recalling multiple symbols or images in quick succession. The idea is to continually challenge the user in an attempt to increase particular mental functions, including working memory and executive function. Lumosity is $14.95 a month. A similar program, Posit Science's BrainHQ, is $14 a month. I've tried both and found them each to be engaging — at least for 20 minutes a day.

Submission + - Google Glass: Porn-Free (for Now, Anyway) (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Google’s wearable computer – glassless glasses that bundle an entire smartphone worth of brains into a tiny strip of plastic you wear on your head – most often return textual descriptions to your searches, snippets of information about movies, the weather, and other facts. Glass displays moving images beautifully, however. Just not pornographic ones. And that's how it's going to stay, because the adult film industry, widely believed to be the driver of new technologies, is taking a pass on Google Glass. "We've decided to take a wait-and-see approach to Google Glass,” Steven Hirsch, founder and co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, said. “We want to see how quickly our target audience chooses to adapt it before we make any decision to move ahead."

Submission + - Richard Branson plans orbital spaceships for Virgin Galactic (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Following the historic first rocket-powered flight of its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, Virgin Galactic plans to build a fleet of spaceships and begin ferrying hundreds of tourists into space in 2014. And then? A whole new kind of spacecraft, Sir Richard Branson said. “We’ll be building orbital spaceships after that,” Branson told Fox News Tuesday, "so that people who want to go for a week or two can.” Assuming the cost is on the same scale, would you pay a few hundred grand for a few weeks in orbit?

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