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Biotech

Submission + - Technique to turn all blood into type 0

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: Is this the end of type-O blood shortages? In an article published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers figured out how to make bacterial enzymes turn type-A, -B, and -AB blood into type O blood, or "universal red blood cells." From the abstract:

The enzymatic conversion processes we describe hold promise for achieving the goal of producing universal RBCs, which would improve the blood supply while enhancing the safety of clinical transfusions.
Related story.
Movies

Submission + - TRON Classified "Sensitive" by Homeland Se

Submitted by
ewhac
ewhac writes: "Apparently a Jeff Bridges film is now a credible threat to the Republic. Reports are emerging from Hollywood that the Department of Homeland Security has classified the film TRON as "sensitive" and ordered Disney studios to surrender all its copies. Concern reportedly surrounds the live action scenes shot at the Shiva nuclear fusion research facility, which apparently after 25 years are now considered to reveal sensitive details about nuclear technology."
Space

Submission + - SpaceX Celebrates Launch of Falcon 1

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: Barely under a year since a fuel leak doomed their first launch, upstart aerospace company SpaceX has cleared the ground a second time with their Falcon 1 rocket. The flight proceeded smoothly until a roll control issue caused premature engine shutdown and loss of telemetry at T plus 5:05. News is currently limited to brief mission status reports. Although the ultimate fate of the rocket and payload are unknown, the company appears pleased with preliminary performance indications. "We in the Washington, D.C. office are celebrating with champagne," said company VP Gwynne Shotwell. "We don't have any information yet from the launch control center, but the Falcon clearly got to space with a successful liftoff, stage separation, second stage ignition and fairing separation."

The flight of the $7 million rocket was to demonstrate its capabilities for DARPA and included two NASA experiments. CEO Elon Musk noted many improvements had been made since the first launch attempt, and has cited similar challenges in the development of other rocket systems. A launch attempt yesterday was scrubbed to resolve telemetry issues with just 62 seconds left. Today's countdown was kept exciting by an automated abort after engine ignition due to marginal chamber pressure. The countdown was restarted after refueling the rocket, with launch at 01:10 GMT from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific.
Space

Submission + - SpaceX Successfully Lanuches Falcon I

Submitted by
Teancum
Teancum writes: "SpaceX Corporation and Elon Musk have succesfully launched the Falcon I rocket from Kwajalein Atoll today at about 6:00 PM PDT. While there were a few glitches including a launch abort at T+ 0:10 and a few other issues typical to all launches, the rocket was successful in launching and succesfully fired the second stage as well. This is in follow up to yesterday's abort that was due to a glitch moving from ground telemetry link switching over to radio links."
Data Storage

Submission + - Samsung Starts Shipping Hybrid Hard Drives

Submitted by
RX8
RX8 writes: "Samsung started shipping their new 2.5 inch hard drives today that feature 80, 120 and 160GB capacities with either 128 or 256 MB of onboard OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software. Samsung is claiming that these new hybrid drives will speed up boot times by as much as 50% and use up to 90% less power."
Space

Submission + - Scientists Break Speed of Light

Submitted by PreacherTom
PreacherTom writes: Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature.
The Courts

Submission + - Internet Radio Now Under RIAA Interdiction

Submitted by
music-in-a-box
music-in-a-box writes: "The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per performance" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange(a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA).

A "performance" is defined as one song being streamed to a single listener. In other words, a station with 1000 listeners is charged for 1000 performances of each song it broadcasts.

The new rates are retroactive to 2006, and increase rapidly each year. The rates per performance are as follows:

$0.0008 in 2006
$0.0011 in 2007
$0.0014 in 2008
$0.0018 in 2009

These may look like fairly small numbers, but the reality is grim for all but the richest broadcasters such as AOL and Yahoo!. As Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter points out, "That math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues."

More info here: save-internet-radio.com, savenetradio.org, blog.wired.com.

Paraphrasing one poster on the Wired blog, "The irony is that web radio in the United States is going to need the same technology to broadcast that people in China use to express views contrary to the government." .

Of course, the popular alternative for the time being is to move broadcast operations to Canada."
Businesses

Submission + - Best Buy Under Investigation

Submitted by
quibbs0
quibbs0 writes: ""Best Buy is getting into some hot water because of an intrastore version of its Web site. The Connecticut Attorney General's Office has launched a probe into the chain's use of an internal version of its Web site that looks and acts virtually identical to the public Web version except that it sometimes offers higher prices, according to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal."

Feed Scientists Call Carmakers' Bluff (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
The UCS unveils a minivan design that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than 40 percent, keep safety and performance intact, be cheaper to buy -- and it's not a hybrid. What's up automakers? In Autopia.


Security

Submission + - RSAkey revealed in few sec w/o Quantum Computer

Submitted by
QuantumCrypto
QuantumCrypto writes: "IRISA is reporting that Branch Prediction is NOT good for Security. Branch predictors allow processors to execute the next instructions without waiting for the previous ones to be resolved, which in turn allows the RSA key to be spied.
Old news. Right? Well André Seznec at IRISA has independently verified the claims. "I've tried to validate the principle. It works! Beautiful case study by the way!" said André Seznec. Onur Aciçmez and his colleagues managed to grab 508 bits out of a 512-bit key on RSA encryption , at first shot, in just a few thousandths of a second. Quite a feat when compared to the endless three months and the line-up of 80-some 2.2 GHz CPU computers that the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) once poured in to crack a SSL 640-bit key (3).

Background from the Artikle:
Until not so long ago,processors were executing threads in a time shared mode: T0 was executing during a time slice, then T1 was executing during the next time slice, then T0 again, ..."Each of these time slices lasts far longer than the processor execution cycle. Say a thread lasts around10 milliseconds, representing about 20 to 30 million processor cycles. As long as a spy thread and a cryptographic thread are not executed simultaneously, there is no way the former can grab very precise information on the latter." The impervious architecture keeps threads peep proof. But things have changed with the arrival of Pentium 4 HT processor generation (7), a SMT processor in PCs and servers. These CPUs run two threads at the same time: on the very same cycle, instructions from the two threads are executed on the CPU. Why? "Mainly to squeeze performance from the processor, Seznec answers. The processor can execute several instructions per cycle, but generally a significant part of the resource is lost if a single thread executes. When two threads execute at the same time, the hardware is significantly better utilized." Unfortunately, running two threads in parallel on the same hardware CPU can lead to some information leakage. "One can manage to grab an indirect view on a thread execution from a spying thread that is executed simultaneously. This indirect information about its execution can allow to recover critical information such an encryption key.""

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