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Submission + - Captchas - data on human failures?

Submitted by Anne Thwacks
Anne Thwacks writes: Today, once again, I failed to pass a captcha. I promise I am really human. However, my eyesight is not what it was 20 years ago.
I normally give up after two attempts. And no, MP3's are not the answer. As far as I am concerned, speakers on PCs are NSFW.
Does anyone have any data on what percentage of Captcha failures are actually humans? Does anyone ever check how much traffic they lose through humans failing captchas? How would you check anyway?

Submission + - Girls' Brains Really Are Different From Boys' Brains (medicalnewstoday.com)

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: Portions of the brain develop differently during puberty..

By the end of adolescence, females had significantly higher Cerebral Blood Flow than males, and this difference was most prominent in areas of the brain involved in social behaviors and emotion regulation, such as the orbitofrontal cortex. The findings give clues to sex-specific susceptibilities to certain psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.

Submission + - Microsoft demos real-time translation over Skype (technet.com)

Submitted by Z80xxc!
Z80xxc! writes: Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German.

Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.

Submission + - The Andromeda Galaxy Just Had a Bright Gamma Ray Event (io9.com)

Submitted by SpaceMika
SpaceMika writes: We just saw something bright in the Andromeda Galaxy, and we don't know what it was. A Gamma Ray Burst or an Ultraluminous X-Ray Object, either way it will be the closest of its type we've ever observed at just over 2 million light years away. It's the perfect distance: close enough to observe in unprecedented detail, and far enough to not kill us all.

Submission + - U.S. Military's 'Iron Man' Suit Prototype Could Debut Next Month (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The military could soon have its own "Iron Man" suit, a robotic exoskeleton designed to augment human abilities on the battlefield.

A prototype of the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, is expected to be available in June, and a more complete version should be ready between 2016 and 2018, according to Battelle, a science and technology research institute headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.

In addition to the TALOS, Battelle is helping develop other innovative technologies such as robotic underwater vehicles, digital "heads-up" displays and a de-icing aircarft coating.

Submission + - The Rule of Three Proved by Physicists 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 1970, Russian physicist Vitaly Efimov developed mathematical proof that any three-particle substance, referred to as a trimer, will scale up or down in size by a factor of 22.7 and that if the particles are not all of the same type, 'the scaling factor of 22.7 decreases according to the particles’ relative masses.' In 2006, physicists in Austria proved that Efimov's trimers can be created in laser-cooled environments. And now, in 2014, physicists in Austria, Germany, and the U.S. have physical proof that Efimov's trimers do indeed scale by a factor of 22.7 if they are comprised of the same particles or a lower ratio relative to their particles' masses if they are comprised of a mixture of different particles. 22.7 — a.k.a., the rule of three — now appears to be as significant as pi.

Submission + - Google Just Unveiled A Self-Driving Car With No Steering Wheel

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: We've already discussed and maybe even come to terms with the fact that autonomous cars are coming. In fact, many automakers including Mercedes-Benz and Tesla have committed to self-driving cars by 2017. Apparently that's too far in the future as Google has just unveiled an in-house-designed self-driving car prototype with no steering wheel or pedals. In fact, it doesn't have any traditional controls, not even a stereo. The as-yet-nameless car is a testbed for Google's vision of the computerized future of transportation. Currently the prototype is little more than programmed parking lot rides at a maximum of 25 mph, but Google plans to build about 100 prototypes with the first examples receiving manual controls (human-operated). Google then plans to roll out the pilot program in California in the next several years. So the technology is now there, but is there really a market for a car that drives you without your input other than the destination?

Submission + - "Belief In Evolution" Doesn't Measure Science Literacy (culturalcognition.net)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Dan Kahan at the Yale Law School Cultural Cognition Project writes, "Because imparting basic comprehension of science in citizens is so critical to enlightened democracy, it is essential that we develop valid measures of it, so that we can assess and improve the profession of teaching science to people. ... The National Science Foundation has been engaged in the project of trying to formulate and promote such a measure for quite some time. A few years ago it came to the conclusion that the item "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," shouldn't be included when computing "science literacy." The reason was simple: the answer people give to this question doesn't measure their comprehension of science. People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren't any more likely to get this item "correct" than those who do poorly on the remaining portions. What the NSF's evolution item does measure, researchers have concluded, is test takers' cultural identities, and in particular the centrality of religion in their lives." — A previous related post

Submission + - PHP Next Generation (php.net) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The PHP Group has put up a post about the future of PHP. They say, 'Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted. During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API's should be changed. This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API's. By making these improvements, the phpng branch gives us a considerable performance gain in real world applications, for example a 20% increase in throughput for Wordpress. The door may well now be open for a JIT capable compiler that can perform as we expect, but it's necessary to say that these changes stand strong on their own, without requiring a JIT capable compiler in the future to validate them.'

Submission + - Physicists Prove Surprising Rule of Threes (simonsfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 40 years after a Soviet nuclear physicist proposed an outlandish theory that trios of particles can arrange themselves in an infinite nesting-doll configuration, experimentalists have reported strong evidence that this bizarre state of matter is real.

Submission + - Four Weeks Without Soap or Shampoo (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A biotech start-up from Massachusetts has an unusual product: a bottle full of bacteria you're supposed to spray onto your face. The bacteria is Nitrosomonas eutropha, and it's generally harmless. Its main use is that it oxidizes ammonia, and the start-up's researchers suspect it used to commonly live on human skin before we began washing it away with soaps and other cleaners. In fact, it's an area of heavy research in biology right now. Scientists know that the gut microbiome is important to proper digestion, and they're trying to figure out if an external microbiome can be similarly beneficial to skin. A journalist for the NY Times volunteered to test the product, which involved four straight weeks of no showers, no soap, no shampoo, and no deodorant. The sprayed-on bacteria quickly colonized her skin, along with other known types of bacteria — and hundreds of unknown (but apparently harmless) strains. She reported improvements to her skin and complexion, and described how the bacteria worked to curtail (but not eliminate) the body odor caused by not washing. At the end of the experiment, all of the N. eutropha vanished within three showers.

Submission + - Severe vulnerability at eBay's website (golem.de)

Submitted by Golem.de
Golem.de writes: The German security expert Micheal E. discovered the persistent cross-site scripting vulnerability on eBay's website about two months ago and said he reported it to Ebay immediately. Ebay ceased to answer his emails, after writing that they considered it a mostly harmless error. Micheal E. sent Golem.de a PoC demonstrating that the error that has not yet been fixed. An attacker can manipulate an official auctioning web page and insert Javascript code. By visiting the malicious web page the code is executed by the victim and could potentially be used by the attacker to to execute arbitrary actions in the victim's Ebay account and gain full control over it. There is probably no connection to the huge database theft reported a few days ago. The XSS flaw can only be used to attack one victim at a time.

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