50280479
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a city like New York, where convenience is king, it can be challenging to get individuals to take the initiative to addressing climate change—that is, until extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy rip their lives apart. Thankfully, New York, and many other large cities have begun to combat global warming on a massive scale. To celebrate such efforts, the first City Climate Leadership Awards ceremony was held in London last night. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group awarded ten cities for making the biggest and most innovative efforts to undertake green infrastructure projects and to fight the effects of climate change. Here are the winners from last night—and how 10 cities are fighting climate change in ten different ways.
50204137
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The Barents Observer reports the 19,000-ton Yong Sheng, a container ship operated by China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO)—though not the exact one pictured at the top of this article—left port in China in the first week of August and is now in the Russian Arctic. For a few years now the Northern Sea Route has become passable in summer, at least by vessels designed for icy Arctic waters. Last summer an icebreaker became the first Chinese vessel to make the passage. In 2010, a Norwegian vessel carrying iron ore to China became the first non-Russian vessel to complete the journey.
49811827
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A secret court opinion from October 2011 that ruled the NSA's surveillance activities unconstitutional has finally been unveiled, thanks to a successful challenge by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Big internet high five to the EFF by the way.) The document is heavily redacted, but as it hinges on the NSA's data collection methods, it offers interesting insight. The NSA admittedly collected data from people that had no relation to any of its searches. That's no surprise. It is troubling that the above disclosures only came in a letter to the court on May 2, 2011, a month after proceedings started and the bulk of opening documents were presented... Credit to the EFF's Trevor Timm for first pointing it out.
49811459
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
As a result of the sequester-induced budget cuts, the CIA is closing the Historical Collections Division office, which declassifies historical documents, and transferring the divisions responsibilities to the office that handles FOIA requests. The Historical Collections Division is described on its website as “an important part of CIA's ongoing effort to be more open and to provide for more public accountability.” It is a “voluntary declassification program that focuses on records of historical value,” including information on the Vietnam War, spy satellites, the Bay of Pigs and other historical scandals and operations.
49735433
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The city's emotional divide has remained mostly one of conjecture: we know the people are typically happier in Central Park than they are in Penn Station, obviously. But now, researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute have taken a mathematical stab at quantifying NYC's geographical happiness. They're using Twitter, of course. By mapping the emotional content of New Yorkers' tweets, they hope to build a real-time map of who's happy and who's bummed out across the five boroughs. NECSI developed a way to classify tweets, "using key words, phrases and emoticons to determine the mood of each tweet, this method, combined with geotagging provided by users, enables us to gauge public sentiment on extremely fine-grained spatial and temporal scales."
49732815
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last week, the White House filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to sort out whether or not police can search a suspect's cell phone without a warrant. The Obama administration came down firmly on the side of warrantless searches, and has found leverage in its argument by focusing on a case from 2007 that features outdated technology: a flip phone.
Even as decades-old laws allow authorities loopholes for warrantless searches in myriad ways—ECPA's 180 day rule allowing the government to read emails is a big one—the Obama administration is arguing for even more ability to search for evidence without a warrant.
49699759
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping. According to a new report from Navigant Research, in just over two decades, Google Cars and their ilk will account for 75 percent of all light vehicle sales worldwide. In total, Navigant expects 95.4 million autonomous cars to be sold every year by 2035. That's pretty astonishing. For one thing, that's more cars than are built every year right now. As of 2012, which was a record-breaking year for car production, 60 million cars were rolling off global assembly lines per annum.
49691181
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a word, everywhere. About 1.24 million people die on the roads each year already, and that figure is set to triple to 3.6 million by 2030. Fatal road accidents happen so frequently that it becomes easy to lose sight of their standing in today's taxonomy of death, especially throughout the developing world. There, road-death counts have hit pandemic levels, on pace to suprass HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other still-common killers as the fifith most common cause of death. Toggle around this new interactive feature from the Pulitzer Center and you'll get the idea. The map charts every traffic death in the world, color sorting deaths in 2010 (the most recent year for which we have data) by 100,000 people. Here are some key takeaways, among others.
49604107
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Shakira F. Suglia and co-authors surveyed 2,929 mothers of five-year-olds and found that 43 percent consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day. About four percent of those children (or 110 of them), drank more than four soft drinks per day, and became "more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people."
In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed.
49522515
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Two years ago, the New England Complex Systems Institute published a famous paper that sussed out the mathematical correlation between food prices and unrest: Every time food prices breached a certain threshold, riots broke out worldwide. That all-important threshold is about 210 on the FAO Food Price Index... In May 2013, right before millions of angry Egyptians took to Tahrir Square, the index was at 213. For most of the spring, it had hovered well above 210, meaning that food was prohibitively expensive for Egypt's poor for a full three months before people took to the streets in dissent. And sure enough, food acces is a crippling problem in Egypt even today. UPI reports that "Bassem Ouda, the minister of supplies in the government of President Mohamed Morsi—who was ousted by the army July 3—admitted last week the state has less than two months' supply of imported wheat in stock, or about 500,000 metric tons."
49492991
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
This week, New Zealand-based company Martin Aircraft became certified to take what it calls "the world's first practical jetpack" out for a series of manned test flights. If all goes well, the company plans to start selling a consumer version of the jetpack in 2015, starting at $150,000 to $200,000 and eventually dropping to $100,000. "For us it's a very important step because it moves it out of what I call a dream into something which I believe we're now in a position to commercialize and take forward very quickly," CEO Peter Coker told Agence France Presse .
49331187
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Two MIT students demonstrated this key hack at DEFCON last week. David Lawrence and Eric Van Albert wrote a piece of code that makes it possible create a 3D-printable model of any high-security Primus key. All thatâ(TM)s needed is a basic scanner, their software system to decipher the unique information in each key, and a 3D-printer to spit out the replica.
Thanks to high-tech cameras, would-be key pirates donâ(TM)t even need to have the key in their possession to duplicate it. A scanned photograph can be converted into a digital blueprint of the object, which can then be printed.
48676255
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The technology is here. So-called "smart guns" are being programmed to recognize a gun owner’s identity and lock up if the weapon ends up in the wrong hands. Entrepreneurs and engineers have been developing technology to make safer guns since the early '90s, and by now we've got working prototypes of guns that read fingerprints, hand grips or even sensors embedded under the skin. But after 15 years of innovation, personalized guns still haven't penetrated the marketplace.
48561283
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Atif Sayed and Zakareya Hussein, both with backgrounds in electronics and nanotechnology, are developing Nanject, a "pharmaceutical nano patch" that can "be applied to the skin and will deliver specific amounts of target drugs where necessary." The two are crowd-funding the project on Microryza.
Two years ago Sayed was doing research into swarm robotics and artificial immune systems, and found inspiration in biological species—specifically, birds. "I was always obsessed with artificial intelligence and wanted to automate a lot of things which are kind of repetitive (like people working in factories, McDonalds, etc.)," wrote Sayed in an email. "At the same time, I was fascinated with nanorobotics or nanobots and wanted to do more research into this. Having people in my own family and friends who passed away due to cancer, I wanted to use nanobots to tackle and destroy cancer cells with little or no pain."
From there he came up with the idea of a nano patch. In place of needles and syringes, he would use magnetic nanoparticles that are small enough to pass through a hair follicle. He then wrote his thesis on "the synthesis of magnetic nanoparticles for its use in bio-medicine and targeted drug delivery." Sayed said he is now "at the point of realizing and connecting the tiny dots into one single product—Nanject."
47096583
submission
derekmead writes:
If you get annoyed when your pictures of your cat Mopsy end up out of focus, imagine how frustrating out of focus images are in situation that are actually important, like surveillance. Researchers at Bell Labs have a potential solution: a lensless architecture for taking pictures that are never out of focus.
The new camera is based on the concept of compressive sensing, which, as the authors write in a paper available on the arXiv preprint server, makes it "possible to represent an mage by using fewer measurements than the number of pixels." In other words, it develops an image while tossing out superfluous data.
The architecture described by Gang Huang et al. is surprisingly simple: a single pixel sensor that can record three colors of light is arrayed behind an aperture assembly, potential made by an LCD, that can create a matrix of apertures of varying opacity. By using this matrix with multiple apertures to direct light to the sensor, multiple measurements of light data can be conducted at once. And because the sensor images what passes through the flat sensor, and not what's been focused on it through a lens, images physically can't be out of focus. Although, at this stage they aren't very sharp.
