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Submission + - Dark Energy Might Be Eating the Glue Holding the Universe Together 1

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: Dark energy is eating dark matter. Bit by bit, the supreme attractive force of the universe, gravitationally speaking, is being superseded by the supreme repulsive force. This is the theory, at least, being advanced in a new paper in Physical Review Letters describing a rather ominous-sounding “dark sector” interaction.

Submission + - Dark energy could be detected directly in a vacuum chamber

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The particles of the standard model, some type of dark matter and dark energy, and the four fundamental forces. That’s all there is, right? But that might not be the case at all. Dark energy may not simply be the energy inherent to space itself, but rather a dynamical property that emerges from the Universe: a sort of fifth force. This is speculation that's been around for over a decade, but there hasn't been a way to test it until now. If this is the case, it may be accessible and testable by simply using presently existing vacuum chamber technology!

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Professionally packaged tools for teaching kids to Program?

Submitted by Binestar
Binestar writes: I've been doing IT consulting for years, but I'm not a programmer beyond bash scripting, perl scripts to make administration easier and batch files to make Windows easier. I recently found an online course for modding minecraft that my 9 year old daughter is really enjoying (she built a custom sword that shoots lightning). Does anyone have any recommendations on online courses that would be age appropriate and worth the investment? It's been easy to get her interested in the Minecraft modding course because as any parent with young children knows, Minecraft is kinda popular...

The course she's taking now is teaching her Eclipse and Gimp, and I'm sure there are other tools installed that they haven't had her open yet. What other venders have stuff worth introducing her to? I've started looking also at things like the Kano and Learn to Mod but as a non-programmer, I'm not really sure which are most useful for introduction and which are accomplishing what they claim vs being a waste of money/time.

Anyone have experience or suggestions to help sort this out?

Submission + - Coding Bootcamps Now Mainstream, Presented as "College Alternative" (cnn.com)

Submitted by ErichTheRed
ErichTheRed writes: Perhaps this is the sign that the Web 2.0 bubble is finally at its peak. CNN produced a piece on DevBootcamp, a 19-week intensive coding academy designed to turn out Web developers at a rapid pace. I remember Microsoft and Cisco certification bootcamps from the peak of the last tech bubble, and the flood of under-qualified "IT professionals" they produced. Now that developer bootcamps are in the mainsteam media, can the end of the bubble be far away?

Submission + - Magic tricks created using artificial intelligence for the first time (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers working on artificial intelligence at Queen Mary University of London have taught a computer to create magic tricks. The researchers gave a computer program the outline of how a magic jigsaw puzzle and a mind reading card trick work, as well the results of experiments into how humans understand magic tricks, and the system created completely new variants on those tricks which can be delivered by a magician.

Submission + - Taking photos of Eiffel Tower at night is illegal (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The next time you're in the City of Lights and are about to snap nighttime pictures of the Eiffel Tower don't: you could be fined.

An obscure clause in EU law states that the tower's evening light display is an "art work" — and therefore is copyrighted.According to the Daily Mail, under the EU's 2001 information society directive, tourists could be fined for taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower at night and sharing them on Facebook, Twitter, or online.

Built in 1889, the structure is the most-visited paid monument in the world that attracts almost seven million of tourists to Paris each year. Tourist flock to see the glittering lightshow, which made its first appearance in 1985. Originally the work of Pierre Bideau, an electrician and lighting engineer, the golden lights that flank the sides of the tower sparkle for five minutes every hour from dusk til dawn.

The tower is classified as public domain, so when the lights are off, picture taking and sharing is permitted.

Submission + - How Baidu Tracked The Largest Seasonal Migration of People on Earth

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: During the Chinese New Year earlier this year, some 3.6 billion people travelled across China making it the largest seasonal migration on Earth. These kinds of mass movements have always been hard to study in detail. But the Chinese web services company Baidu has managed it using a mapping app that tracked the location of 200 million smartphone users during the New Year period. The latest analysis of this data shows just how vast this mass migration is. For example, over 2 million people left the Guandong province of China and returned just a few days later--that's equivalent to the entire population of Chicago upping sticks. The work shows how easy it is to track the movement of large numbers of people with current technology--assuming they are willing to allow their data to be used in this way.

Submission + - Apple was warned about WireLurker months ago, Georgia Tech researcher says (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The WireLurker malware that may have infected hundreds of thousands of Mac OS and iOS devices is exactly similar to a proof-of-concept attack Apple was warned about at the beginning of this year, according to the researcher who first publicly described such attacks. The malware can siphon off data from iOS devices when they sync up with computers or are charged by computers via USB cables, but the potential for this type of attack can be much broader, says Tielei Wang, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who presented a paper https://www.usenix.org/system/... about such attacks at USENIX Security Symposium in August.

Submission + - Researchers Direct Growth Of Neurons With Silicon Nitride Microtubes (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: Bioengineers want to connect electronics and neurons to make devices such as new cochlear implants or prosthetic limbs with a seemingly natural sense of touch. They also could build synthetic neural circuitry to use to study how the brain processes information or what goes wrong in neurodegenerative diseases.

As a step toward these applications, a team of researchers has developed a way to direct the growth of axons, the connection-forming arms of neurons. They use transparent silicon nitride microtubes on glass slides to encourage the cells’ axons to grow in specific directions. The cultured nerve cells grow aimlessly until they bump into one of the tubes. The axon then enters the tube, and its growth is accelerated 20-fold.

Silicon nitride already is used in some orthopedic devices, and could serve as a substrate for electronics to interface with the growing neurons.

 

Submission + - Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.

Submission + - Laser-Propulsion Could Give Space Rockets a Serious Boost (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Russian scientists have proposed a novel way to accelerate a spaceship while in flight – firing a ground-based laser up its backside. The new technique uses a plasma flow caused by laser ablation to increase the exhaust efficiency of a traditional rocket propulsion system, and could theoretically accelerate an aircraft beyond Mach 10.

Submission + - Tech firm fined USD 3500 for paying workers $1.21 per hour (mercurynews.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "FREMONT — Electronics for Imaging paid several employees from India as little as $1.21 an hour to help install computer systems at the company's Fremont headquarters, federal labor officials said Wednesday.

"We are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior from employers," said Susana Blanco, district director of the U.S. Labor Department's wage and hour division in San Francisco."

Submission + - Detritus from cancer cells may infect healthy cells (nature.com)

Submitted by bmahersciwriter
bmahersciwriter writes: Tiny bubbles of cell membrane — called exosomes — are shed by most cells. Long thought to be mere trash, researchers had recently noticed that they often contain short, regulatory RNA molecules, suggesting that exosomes may be one way that cells communicate with one another. Now, it appears that RNA in the exosomes shed by tumor cells can get into healthy cells and 'transform' them, putting them on the path to becoming cancerous themselves.

Submission + - This app can solve differential equations, just by taking a photo of them (geektime.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Croatian startup MicroBlink built an an app that solves differential equations, just by taking a photo of the equation. If there was concern in higher education about smartphones being used to cheat in exams, now that fear has become even more justified.
The app, called PhotoMath operates in the most intuitive and easy to use manner: You just need to use your smartphone’s camera. After running the app, you aim the camera at the equation or exercise, and within seconds, without even pressing one button, the solution will appear on the screen. Just like that. To reach this level of simplicity, the application uses an advanced and fast OCR algorithm that identifies the characters and digits in front of you instantaneously. But the application does not stop there. If you want, with one click you can see all the steps taken to get to your final answer. The solution can be broken down into the step-by-step actions, and the user can simply browse back and forth between the different steps. The app currently supports arithmetic functions like addition, subtraction, division and multiplication; fractions and decimals; roots and powers; and simple linear equations with one or two unknown variables. Application developers are promising that additional, more complicated functions will be introduced in the near future to solve calculus and combinatorics equations.

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