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Submission + - Could Prison be a Killer App for an Apple Watch?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After seeing all the ways cops reportedly screwed up the manhunt for escaped killers David Sweat and (the late) Richard Matt, one wonders what could be done to prevent a recurrence of the need to have 1,200 police search 22 square miles for 1 man. If you've been to the movies lately, perhaps the tracking device for the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World comes to mind. Or could it be that a next-gen Apple Watch — with some combination of location tracking, cameras, and biometrics — is just what the doctor ordered for tracking incarcerated prisoners? In a world where Google is encouraging the use of technology to keep tabs on babies and pets, shouldn't prisoners be fair game for surveillance technology? Any ideas what that might look like?

Comment Re:If there ever is a real collision risk... (Score 1) 76

by sys64764 (#50017523) Attached to: Asteroid Day On June 30 Aims To Raise Awareness of Collision Risks

Exactly.
It will be known among intergalactic circles as "Man's Final Fiasco". Boards and committees of useless heads will be created to 'go over the science and verify the numbers', some nut jobs will claim it's a hoax while others will get upset if the interrogated scientist wears the wrong shirt.

Submission + - Reddit blocked in China, Wayback Machine blocked in Russia (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: It is becoming increasingly common for governments around the world to block access to websites they don’t approve of for one reason or another. The most frequent censor is China, and the latest site to fall victim to the Great Firewall of China is Reddit. If you're not able to pop over to China to check whether the site is blocked, you can use Blocked In China to test whether any site is accessible from within the country.

This is not the only site which people are having trouble accessing. Over in Russia, the Internet Archive — responsible for the nostalgia-inducing Wayback Machine — is also blocked. While the blocking of Reddit in China has probably been done on purpose, the same may not necessarily be true in Russia.

Submission + - Red Hat CEO Publishes Open Source Management Memoir (redhat.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization , a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also chock full of interesting anecdotes about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done" he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.

Submission + - Academics build a new Tor client designed to beat the NSA (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In response a slew of new research about network-level attacks against Tor, academics from the U.S. and Israel built a new Tor client called Astoria designed to beat adversaries like the NSA, GCHQ, or Chinese intelligence who can monitor a user's Tor traffic from entry to exit. Astoria differs most significantly from Tor's default client in how it selects the circuits that connect a user to the network and then to the outside Internet. The tool is an algorithm designed to more accurately predict attacks and then securely select relays that mitigate timing attack opportunities for top-tier adversaries.

Submission + - Mysterious osmosis lets spiders weave graphene-reinforced webs (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Italian researchers in Trent have enabled 15 Pholcidae spiders to spin graphene-strengthened dragline silk just by spraying them with a solution containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes. The resulting fiber is as strong as Kevlar 49, and ranks among the most resilient and ductile in the world of manufacturing. But Emiliano Lepore’s research [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.06751v1] has not succeeded in understanding by what process the spiders are able to incorporate the ambient materials into their webs. Since spider-farming is historically unproductive, the possibility of continuing the research on silk-worms has been presented.

Submission + - Did Neurons Evolve Twice? (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla., first began studying comb jellies, he was puzzled. He knew the primitive sea creatures had nerve cells — responsible, among other things, for orchestrating the darting of their tentacles and the beat of their iridescent cilia. But those neurons appeared to be invisible. The dyes that scientists typically use to stain and study those cells simply didn’t work. The comb jellies’ neural anatomy was like nothing else he had ever encountered.

After years of study, he thinks he knows why. According to traditional evolutionary biology, neurons evolved just once, hundreds of millions of years ago, likely after sea sponges branched off the evolutionary tree. But Moroz thinks it happened twice — once in ancestors of comb jellies, which split off at around the same time as sea sponges, and once in the animals that gave rise to jellyfish and all subsequent animals, including us. He cites as evidence the fact that comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from our own. “When we look at the genome and other information, we see not only different grammar but a different alphabet,” Moroz said.

Submission + - Shape Shifting Frog Goes From Spiky to Smooth, Poses Problems for Taxonomists

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Carrie Arnold reports at National Geographic that on a nighttime walk through Reserva Las Gralarias in Ecuador in 2009, Katherine Krynak spotted a well-camouflaged, marble-size amphibian that was covered in spines. The next day, Krynak pulled the frog from the cup and set it on a smooth white sheet of plastic for Tim to photograph. It wasn't "punk "--it was smooth-skinned. She assumed that, much to her dismay, she must have picked up the wrong frog. "I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss," says Krynak. "The spines came back... we simply couldn't believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth."

Krynak didn't find another punk rocker frog until 2009, three years after the first sighting. The second animal was covered in thorny spines, like the first, but they had disappeared when she took a closer look. The team then took photos of the shape-shifting frog every ten seconds for several minutes, watching the spines form and then slowly disappear. It's unclear how the frog forms these spines so quickly, or what they're actually made of. The discovery of a variable species poses challenges to amphibian taxonomists and field biologists, who have traditionally used skin texture and presence/absence of tubercles as important discrete traits in diagnosing and identifying species. The discovery illustrates the importance of describing the behavior of new species, and bolsters the argument for preserving amphibian habitats, says Krynak. "Amphibians are declining so rapidly that scientists are oftentimes describing new species from museum specimens because the animals have already gone extinct in the wild, and very recently."

Submission + - Neck Pain Can Be Changed Through Altered Visual Feedback

Submitted by sys64764
sys64764 writes: Using virtual reality to misrepresent how far the neck is turned can actually change pain experiences in individuals who suffer from chronic neck pain, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our findings show that the brain does not need danger messages coming from the tissues of the body in order to generate pain in that body part — sensable and reliable cues that predict impending pain are enough to produce the experience of pain,” says researcher G. Lorimer Moseley of the University of South Australia. “These results suggest a new approach to developing treatments for pain that are based on separating the non-danger messages from the danger messages associated with a movement.”

Pretty soon we'll all be going to the gym wearing VR headsets while running appropriate programs and that sore neck or aching back won't mean a thing anymore!

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