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Submission + - Bacteria on pubic hair could be used to identify rapists (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When it comes to identifying a rapist, one of the main pieces of evidence police analyze are pubic hairs found at the crime scene. But most of these hairs are missing their roots and thus don’t harbor enough DNA for a proper match. Now, a new study suggests there may be a better way to finger the criminal: Look at the bacteria he left behind. Scientists have found that each person harbors a unique "microbial signature" on their pubic hair that can be traced back to the scene of the crime.
Communications

Skype Unveils Preview of Live English-To-Spanish Translator 99

Posted by timothy from the stick-this-in-your-ear dept.
mpicpp writes that Microsoft, after demoing the technology back in May, is giving some real-world exposure to its Skype-based translation. The Skype preview program will kick-off with two spoken languages, Spanish and English, and 40+ instant messaging languages will be available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device. Skype asked two schools to try Skype Translator – Peterson School in Mexico City, and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, USA – playing a game of 'Mystery Skype' in which the children ask questions to determine the location of the other school. One classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, Skype Translator removed this language barrier and enabled them to communicate.

Submission + - TorrentLocker Exposed: Investigation And Analysis

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ESET researchers analyzed a widespread case of ransomware generally known as TorrentLocker, which started spreading in early 2014. The ahlatest variant of the malware has infected at least 40,000 systems in the last few months targeting primary European countries. Family of this ransomware encrypts documents, pictures and other files on user’s device and requests ransom to get back access to their files. Its typical signature is paying ransom solely in crypto-currency – up to 4.081 Bitcoins (1180€ or $1500). In the last campaigns, TorrentLocker has infected 40-thousand systems and encrypted more than 280 million documents in targeted countries mainly from Europe, but addressing also users in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Out of these cases only 570 victims paid the ransom, which has earned the actors behind TorrentLocker the amount of US$585,401 in Bitcoins.
Earth

Denmark Makes Claim To North Pole, Based On Undersea Geography 191

Posted by timothy from the that-land-is-our-land dept.
As reported by The Independent, A scientific study has found that Greenland is actually connected to the area beneath the polar ice where the North Pole lies – thanks to a huge stretch of continental crust known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Since Greenland is a Danish territory, that gives the country the right to put its hat in the ring for ownership of the stretch of land, Denmark’s foreign minister [Martin Lidegaard ] said. ... Of the five Arctic countries – the US, Russia, Norway, Canada and Denmark —only Canada and Russia had indicated an interest in the North Pole territory until now. "This is a historical milestone for Denmark and many others as the area has an impact on the lives of lot of people. After the U.N. panel had taken a decision based on scientific data, comes a political process," Lidegaard told The Associated Press in an interview on Friday. "I expect this to take some time. An answer will come in a few decades. Why such a big deal? As Business Insider notes, The U.S. currently estimates that the Arctic sea bed could contain 15% of the earth's remaining oil, along with 30% of the planet's natural gas and 20% of its liquefied natural gas. Whichever country is able to successfully claim the Arctic would have the right to extract these resources.

Submission + - Skype Unveils Preview of Live English to Spanish translator (skype.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The Skype preview program will kick-off with two spoken languages, Spanish and English, and 40+ instant messaging languages will be available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device.

Skype asked two schools to try Skype Translator – Peterson School in Mexico City, and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, USA – playing a game of ‘Mystery Skype’ in which the children ask questions to determine the location of the other school. One classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, Skype Translator removed this language barrier and enabled them to communicate.

Submission + - Virtual reality experiment wants to put white people in black bodies (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: It's as simple as making a light-skinned person feel connected to a virtual, darker skinned self—a thought experiment pretty much impossible without the immersive potency of VR. The effect is achieved by outfitting participants in VR headsets with built-in head-tracking and motion capture capabilities that sync actual movement to virtual experience.

Submission + - The Vanishing Male Worker

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that the share of prime-age men, those 25 to 54 years old, who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s to 16 percent as many men have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment. Technology has made unemployment less lonely says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, who argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations. Perhaps most important, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs as foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs open to high school graduates. The trend was pushed to new heights by the last recession, with 20 percent of prime-age men not working in 2009 before partly receding. But the recovery is unlikely to be complete. "Like turtles flipped onto their backs, many people who stop working struggle to get back on their feet," writes Appelbaum. "Some people take years to return to the work force, and others never do "

A study published in October by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies estimated that 37 percent of the decline in male employment since 1979 can be explained by this retreat from marriage and fatherhood (PDF). “When the legal, entry-level economy isn’t providing a wage that allows someone a convincing and realistic option to become an adult — to go out and get married and form a household — it demoralizes them and shunts them into illegal economies,” says Philippe Bourgois, an anthropologist who has studied the lives of young men in urban areas. “It’s not a choice that has made them happy. They would much rather be adults in a respectful job that pays them and promises them benefits.”
It's funny. Laugh.

The Joker Behind the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory Chip Hoax 100

Posted by Soulskill from the things-the-USPTO-would-totally-issue-a-patent-for dept.
New submitter st1lett0 writes: Now and in years past, electronic engineers and hobbyists alike have enjoyed the classic 1972 April Fool's joke by Signetics of the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory chip. Now it seems that the previously anonymous practical joker has identified himself and stepped forward with new information to correct and complete the story.
Wireless Networking

BT To Buy UK 4G Leader EE For £12.5 Billion 39

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
DW100 writes: The UK mobile market looks set for a radical shake-up after BT confirmed it is now in final stage discussions to buy EE for £12.5bn. The move will see the telecom giant return to the mobile market for the first time in over a decade and make the company the leader in both fixed and mobile markets. Whether or not telecom regulator Ofcom will agree to such a deal, though, remains to be seen.
Mars

Mysterious Martian Gouges Carved By Sand-surfing Dry Ice 26

Posted by Soulskill from the Iceman's-vacation-home dept.
sciencehabit writes: After the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began beaming back close-up images of the Red Planet, researchers spotted peculiar features along the slopes of dunes: long, sharply defined grooves that seem to appear and disappear seasonally. They look like trails left behind by tumbling boulders, but rocks never appear in the sunken pits at the trail ends. Researchers initially took these gullies as signs of flowing liquid water, but a new model suggests they're the result of sand-surfing dry ice that breaks off from the crests of dunes and skids down slopes. This is no ordinary tumble — according to the model, the bases of the chunks are continually sublimating, resulting in a hovercraftlike motion that gouges the dune while propelling the ice down slopes.
Robotics

Telepresence Store Staffed Remotely Using Robots 52

Posted by Soulskill from the meatspace-as-a-service dept.
Molly McHugh writes: What better way to sell telepresence technologies than having the store employees themselves appear via robot? At the Beam store in Palo Alto, Calif., no human salespeople physically appear, only robots. Users appear on the 17-inch display and control the robot via keyboard, mouse, or Xbox controller. Beam can roll as fast as two miles per hour. People behind the screen control the Beam through their computers, and two wide-angle cameras attached to the top of the bot lets them see everything happening around the store. It’s a bit eerie, watching floating heads tool around and talk to people in this video, and the customers’ react to the Beam with confusion and wonder.

Submission + - The three greatest advances in the Universe since 1980's Cosmos

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: 34 years ago, Carl Sagan became the first person to present — in a format accessible to the entire world — a synthesized story of all the most important scientific points and facts that we had learned about the cosmic story common to us all. No longer did we live in a Universe the size of our galaxy, dominated by Newtonian gravity, but in a Universe billions of years old, with more than 100 billion galaxies in it, that all started with a bang. But since 1980, we’ve learned so much more, and some of the best ideas that Carl knew — about the beginning, middle, and end of the Universe — have actually been improved upon, and the story as it was told in 1980 has been superseded by a more accurate one.
Science

Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible To Use 187

Posted by Soulskill from the but-my-space-elevator dept.
An anonymous reader writes: We keep hearing about the revolutionary properties of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon whose physical characteristics hold a great deal of promise — if we can figure out good ways to produce it and use it. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of graphene and its discoverer, Andre Geim, as well as one of the physicists leading a big chunk of the bleeding-edge graphene research, James Tour.

Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."

Submission + - Godot Engine Reaches 1.0, Releases First Stable (godotengine.org)

Submitted by goruka
goruka writes: Godot, the most advanced open source (MIT licensed) game engine, that was open-sourced back in February, has reached 1.0 (stable).
It sports an impressive amount of features, and it's the only game engine with visual tools (code editor, scripting, debugger, 3D engine, 2D engine, physics, multi-platform deploy, etc) on a scale comparable to commercial offerings. As a plus, the user interface runs natively on Linux. Godot has amassed a healthy user community (through forum, Facebook and IRC) since it went public, and was used to publish commercial games in the Latin American and European markets such as "Ultimo Carnaval" with publisher Square Enix, or "The Mystery Team" by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Submission + - Touring A Carnival Cruise Simulator: 210 Degrees Of GeForce-Powered Projection (hothardware.com) 2

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Recently, Carnival cruise lines gave tours of their CSMART facility in Almere, the Netherlands. This facility is one of a handful in the world that can provide both extensive training and certification on cruise ships as well as a comprehensive simulation of what it's like to command one. Simulating the operation of a Carnival cruise ship is anything but simple. Let's start with a ship that's at least passingly familiar to most people — the RMS Titanic. At roughly 46,000 tons and 882 feet long, she was, briefly, the largest vessel afloat. Compared to a modern cruise ship, however, Titanic was a pipsqueak. As the size and complexity of the ships has grown, the need for complete simulators has grown as well. The C-SMART facility currently sports two full bridge simulators, several partial bridges, and multiple engineering rooms. When the Costa Concordia wrecked off the coast of Italy several years ago, the C-SMART facility was used to simulate the wreck based on the black boxes from the ship itself. When C-SMART moves to its new facilities, it'll pick up an enormous improvement in processing power. The next-gen visual system is going to be powered by104 GeForce Grid systems running banks of GTX 980 GPUs. C-SMART executives claim it will actually substantially reduce their total power consumption thanks to the improved Maxwell GPU. Which solution is currently in place was unclear, but the total number of installed systems is dropping from just over 500 to 100 rackmounted units.

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