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Submission + - The Quietest Place on Earth Will Cause You to Hallucinate in 45 Minutes

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Industry Tap reports that there is a place so quiet you can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe and your stomach digest. It's the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota where 3ft of sound-proofing fiberglass wedges and insulated steel and concrete absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world. "When it’s quiet, ears will adapt," says the company’s founder and president, Steven Orfield. "The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound." The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, to test how loud their products are and the space normally rents for $300 to $400 an hour. "It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things — heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard." But the strangest thing about the chamber is that sensory deprivation makes the room extremely disorienting, and people can rarely stay in the dark space for long. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to experience visual and aural hallucinations. "We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark — one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes," says Orfield who says even he can't stand the quiet for more than about 30 minutes. Nasa uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts putting them in a water-filled tank inside the room to see "how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it".

Comment Baseband security? (Score 1) 321

by DarkSkiez (#43972041) Attached to: Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense

They already support blacklisting IMEI serials on phones, but the problem being that there is no global IMEI blacklist, so stolen phones get shipped around the world very quickly. This solution from apple allows them to seize this control from the network operators, which is a good and bad thing.

Currently most phone security exists in its baseband. The baseband could easily have a hardware security mode that requires the equivalent of unlocking by the manufacturer to make it work again. Unlocking modern phones is still pretty tricky and is much harder to defeat than the standard OS security, for example, you can root an android phone, but still not unlock the baseband very easily. This whole thing could be standardised across all manufacturers too, yet allow freedom of OS on the device.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 858

by DarkSkiez (#36140528) Attached to: BitCoin, the Most Dangerous Project Ever?

Say you had received 10 bitcoins, you would have a private key which could generate a matching signature to unlock the public key it was transferred to.
When you spend say 4 coins, you create a transaction and publish it to the network. This transaction consists of
1) A point to the place in history where it was transferred to you
2) An amount, 4 bitcoins and an address of a recepient public key
3) An amount, 6 bitcoins and an address of a new public key you have just generated, and hold the private key for

Any attempt to respend this coin would be rejected by the network as it has been marked as used. To spend the remaining 6 you would have to point to its new location and if you had restored your wallet to an old version you'd have lost the private key for that, thus losing you all 10 sadly.
Handhelds

Apple Removes Wi-Fi Finders From App Store 461

Posted by timothy from the you've-been-very-very-naughty dept.
jasonbrown writes "Apple on Thursday began removing another category of apps from its iPhone App Store. This time, it's not porn, it's Wi-Fi. Apple removed several Wi-Fi apps commonly referred to as stumblers, or apps that seek out available Wi-Fi networks near your location. According to a story on Cult of Mac, apps removed by Apple include WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum, and yFy Network Finder."
Space

Astronomers Discover the Coolest Known Sub-Stellar Body 60

Posted by Soulskill from the miles-davis's-home-planet dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports that using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system. Too small to be stars and with insufficient mass to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, 'brown dwarfs' have masses smaller than stars but larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, with an upper limit in between 75 and 80 Jupiter masses. 'This looks like the fourth time in three years that the UKIRT has made a record breaking discovery of the coolest known brown dwarf, with an estimated temperature not far above 200 degrees Celsius,' says Dr. Philip Lucas at the University of Hertfordshire. Due to their low temperature these objects are very faint in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths. The object known as SDSS1416+13B is in a wide orbit around a somewhat brighter and warmer brown dwarf, SDSS1416+13A, and the pair is located between 15 and 50 light years from the solar system, which is quite close in astronomical terms."

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