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Submission + - Developer Saved Years Later by His Own Hardware (hackaday.com)

Submitted by szczys
szczys writes: Would you do a better job designing hardware if your life depended on it? Chris Nefcy is in that exact position. Years ago he developed an Automatic External Defibrilator for First Medic. The device allows non-doctors to restart a human heart in the field. When Chris had a heart attack his ticker was restarted with shocks from his own hardware.

His story isn't just heartwarming, he also covers the path that led him into developing the AED and the bumpy road encountered getting the hardware to market.

Submission + - Forgetting Firefox (medium.com)

Submitted by trawg
trawg writes: It’s been more than 10 years since Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, one of their first steps in their mission to “preserve choice and innovation on the Internet”. Firefox was instrumental in shattering the web monoculture, but the last few years of development have left users uninspired. Perhaps it is time to move on to the next challenge — ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.

Submission + - How many fundamental constants does it take to describe our Universe?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Our Universe is the way it is for two reasons: the initial conditions that it started off with, and the fundamental particles, interactions and laws that govern it. When it comes to the physical properties of everything that exists, we can ask ourselves how many fundamental, dimensionless constants or parameters it takes to give us a complete description of everything we observe. Surprisingly, the answer is 26 (not 42), and there are a few things that remain unexplained, even with all of them.

Submission + - Homemade RC Millennium Falcon Is The Drone You've Always Dreamed Of Flying (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Here's a dose of Rebel goodness to tide you over while you wait for the next Star Wars trailer. A drone enthusiast in France recently graced the web with a few videos of a self-built quadcopter with a shell designed to look like the Millennium Falcon. It's enough to make a Star Wars fan tear up. The drone features a blue thruster light, just like the real Millennium Falcon, and has bright front lights as well. Its creator, who goes by "Oliver C", has some serious modding skills. The shape of the Millennium Falcon presented Oliver with some challenges, but he has the balance more or less handled by the time the spaceship (or quadcopter) takes its first flight outside.

Submission + - Navy: More railguns and lasers, less gunpowder (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: “Number one, you’ve got to get us off gunpowder,” said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. “Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine—because that’s where all the explosives are.”

Submission + - Shattered chromosome cures woman of immune disease (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Call it a scientific oddity—or a medical miracle. A girl who grew up with a serious genetic immune disease was apparently cured in her 30s by one of her chromosomes shattering into pieces and reassembling. Scientists traced the woman’s improvement to the removal of a harmful gene through this scrambling of DNA in one of her blood stem cells—a recently identified phenomenon that until now had only been linked to cancer.

Submission + - The strangest moon in the Solar System

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Moons in our Solar System — at least the ones that formed along with the planets — all revolve counterclockwise around their planetary parents, with roughly uniform surfaces orbiting in the same plane as their other moons and rings. Yet one of Saturn's moon's, Iapetus, is unique, with a giant equatorial ridge, an orbital plane that doesn't line up, and one half that's five times brighter than the other. While the first two are still mysteries, the last one has finally been solved!

Submission + - Massive Worldwide Layoff Underway At IBM (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. At more than 100,000 people, it is projected to be the largest mass layoff by any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Alliance@IBM, the IBM employees’ union, says it has so far collected reports of 5000 jobs eliminated, but those are just numbers of those getting official layoff notices. According to anecdotal reports, IBM appears to be abusing the performance appraisal system to cut additional employees without officially laying them off. And all this comes at the same time that CEO Ginni Rometty gets a big raise. "Just call her Machete Rommety" says one employee.

Submission + - Astronomers Find Vast Ring System Eclipsing a Distant Star (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Astronomers from the Leiden Observatory, Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, New York, have discovered a massive ring system obscuring the light of the young star J1407b. It is believed that the rings belong to a massive planet or possibly a brown dwarf, with an orbital period of roughly 10 years. The giant planet boasts a ring system around 200 times larger than that of Saturn, the only planet in our solar system hosting a ring system of its own.

Submission + - Game Theory Says Pete Carroll's Super Bowl Call at Goal Line Is Defensible

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Justin Wolfers writes in the NYT that Seahawks coach Pete Carroll's reasoning behind the play that led to the Patriots' interception that clinched Super Bowl XLIX is defensible in terms of game theory. The key insight of game theory for an NFL coach is that when you think about what choice you should make, you need to also consider the response from the opposing coach, understanding that he is also thinking strategically. There is no play that cannot be stopped if the defence knows it is coming. If the Seahawks were to sign a blood oath promising to have Mr Lynch run the ball, the Patriots could simply throw all 11 defenders at him and stop him in his tracks.

"This line of thinking suggests that you should not necessarily call a run play, even if you’re blessed with a great running back. Likewise, it’s not clear that you should definitely pass," writes Wolfers. "Rather, your choice should be somewhat random — a choice that game theorists call a “mixed strategy.”" The logic is that if you always choose to run in this situation, then you make the opposing coach’s job too easy, as he will set a defensive formation aimed at stopping your running back. Instead, you need to keep your opponents guessing, and the only way to do this is to be unpredictable essentially playing the football equivalent of Rock-Paper-Scissors. According to Wolfers this leads to the intriguing possibility that if that fateful final play were to be run in a dozen parallel universes, with each coach continuing to play the same mixed strategy, the actual plays called would differ, as would their outcomes. "And so the same teams pursuing the same strategies under the same circumstances might have yielded a different Super Bowl champion." The only reason Carroll is being raked over the coals is because the play happened to end in an exceedingly improbable interception. Not one of the previous 106 passing plays that NFL teams launched from the one-yard line in 2014 was picked off.

Submission + - Is Google Fiber Worth the Hype?

Submitted by kstatefan40
kstatefan40 writes: Last week, Google announced that they will be bringing Google Fiber to four additional communities in the United States. Residents in Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham are next on Google’s list of expansion cities, and many in these towns might wonder just what Google Fiber is, how it works, and whether they should be early adopters when it comes to town. PCMech has a review of Google Fiber which sets out to answer those questions and more, from my experience in Kansas City – the first city to have Google Fiber service.

Submission + - New multi-core Raspberry Pi board launches. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by MicroHex
MicroHex writes: Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. I'm sure there will be more info available on Monday.

Submission + - Users as guinea pigs for Windows 10

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: In a blog post that outlined enterprise options for deploying Windows 10's faster update tempo, Microsoft formalized what has been a long-standing practice by savvy customers: wait to accept an update until unwitting others shake out the bugs and Microsoft fixes them.

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Submission + - Human Exploration of Planets cheaper than sending Robots (arxiv.org)

Submitted by buchner.johannes
buchner.johannes writes: Putting humans on Mars will get you more bang for the buck, according to a new analysis by the Director of the UCL/Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Humans are simply better at complex tasks like drilling, while robots have a difficult time just navigating through the rugged terrain, and can thus cover less ground. Small, autonomous, cheap and very intelligent rovers have thus not become a reality — instead the size (and cost) of robots has steadily increased, contrary to Moore-law-like predictions. The autonomous navigation is a hard problem that is not easily solved technically. The article compares the cost of the Apollo missions and the Mars Science Laboratory in detail to illustrate the comparison of human vs. robotic exploration programs. The original article (PDF) also notes that human space-flight benefits from non-scientific motivations, which can further increase the available budget.

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