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Submission + - Disabled Dog is Now Able to Run, Thanks to 3D-Printed Prostheses (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Derby the dog faced a challenge right from Day One. Due to a congenital deformity, he was born with very small forelegs and no front paws. This resulted in his ending up in the care of Hillsborough, New Hampshire-based dog rescue group, Peace and Paws. Fortunately, he then proceeded into the foster home of Tara Anderson. She works for 3D printing company 3D Systems (3DS), and set about using her employer's technology to make him a set of prostheses. As a result, he's now able to run for the first time.

Submission + - Ron Wyden introduces bill to ban FBI 'backdoors' in tech products (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is trying to proactively block FBI head James Comey's request for new rules that make tapping into devices easier. The Secure Data Act would ban agencies from making manufacturers alter their products to allow easier surveillance or search, something Comey has said is necessary as encryption becomes more common and more sophisticated. "Strong encryption and sound computer security is the best way to keep Americans' data safe from hackers and foreign threats," said Wyden in a statement. "It is the best way to protect our constitutional rights at a time when a person's whole life can often be found on his or her smartphone."

Submission + - Electric eel shocks like a Taser (vanderbilt.edu)

Submitted by Science_afficionado
Science_afficionado writes: After a nine month study, a Vanderbilt biologist has determined that the electric eel emits series of millisecond, high-voltage pulses to paralyze its prey just before it attacks. The high-voltage pulses cause the motor neurons in its target to violently contract, leaving it temporarily immobilized in the same fashion as the high-voltage pulses produced by a Taser. He documented this effect using high-speed video. The eel, which is nocturnal and has very poor eyesight, also uses closely spaced pairs of high-voltage pulses when hunting for hidden prey. He determined that the pulses cause the prey's body to twitch which produces water movements that the eel uses to locate its position even when it's hidden from view.

Submission + - SpaceShipTwo's Rocket Engine Did Not Cause Fatal Crash (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: It wasn’t SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor — which was flying on Friday with a new type of fuel — that caused the fatal crash, the head of the accident investigation agency said late Sunday. The ship’s fuel tanks and its engine were recovered intact, indicating there was no explosion. “They showed no signs of burn-through, no signs of being breached,” Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation and Safety Board, told reporters at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. Instead, data and video relayed from the ship show its hallmark safety feature — a foldable tail section designed for easy re-entry into the atmosphere from space — was deployed early, causing the in-flight break-up.

Submission + - Physicists identify possible new particle behind dark matter (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Like cops tracking the wrong person, physicists seeking to identify dark matter—the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to bind the galaxies—may have been stalking the wrong particle. In fact, a particle with some properties opposite to those of physicists' current favorite dark matter candidate—the weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP—would do just as good a job at explaining the stuff, a quartet of theorists says. Hypothetical strongly interacting massive particles—or SIMPs—would also better account for some astrophysical observations, they argue.

Submission + - 47 Years Ago - The X-15 And The Fastest Manned Aircraft Flight Ever (alert5.net) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tom Demerly at ALERT 5 writes, "It flew at nearly Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound and twice the speed of a rifle bullet. The speed record it set 47 years ago today still stands today. It flew so high its pilots earned Air Force astronaut wings: 280,500 feet or 53.1 miles above the earth. It pioneered technologies that were used on the SR-71 Blackbird, the space shuttle and the reusable spacecraft in Richard Branson’s future Virgin Galactic passenger space program. ... It was the North American X-15. ... The X-15 could be the most ambitious and successful flight test program in aviation history. Apollo astronauts flew it. It challenged the paradigms of aerospace design well beyond the limits of any prior program, including Chuck Yeager’s sound barrier busting Bell X-1. The X-15 program sits alongside the Wright Flyer as an aviation milestone. So much progress was made so quickly in the face of such great risk with such rudimentary technology that no other development program, with the exception of the Apollo missions, has come close."

Submission + - Bringing Back Quality Science Kits (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Harris-Educational
Harris-Educational writes: Big Box Stores and others have "science kits" but in many cases they are cheap, throw-away, with poor (if any) instructions. Most are not made in the USA. Parents will spend $50+ on a video game but what about spending $50+ on a quality and inspiring educational experience (and sharing that experience with their children). Some kids today are lucky and are able to play with micro-controllers, PC's on a chip, and 3D printers but how many of them know the basics and can troubleshoot a circuit when something goes wrong? Do they really understand their technological building blocks?

Harris Educational (a small "Maker Business") is working to change all that for the better by launching 'Reinventing Science' kits that hearken back to the great science kits of the 50's and 60's like those made by A.C. Gilbert, REMCO, and others. One example is "Reinventing Edison: Build your own Light Bulb" in which experimenters work with a vacuum chamber and build a working incandescent light bulb like Edison and Swan did. These kits won "Best in Class" and an "Editor's Choice" awards at World Maker Faire in New York last week and will be on display again on October 4th and 5th at Maker Faire Atlanta. In addition to Harris Educational's Kickstarter (also working to raise money to launch an educational maker space in Burlington NC) Harris Educational is also a finalist in the Martha Stewart American Made awards Is our society ready to invest again in quality hands-on STEM education like it did during the Space Race?

Submission + - The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VM's are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site’s database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site’s domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn’t appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.

Submission + - Egypt's Oldest Pyramid is Being Destroyed by its Own Restoration Team (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Taffykay
Taffykay writes: The oldest pyramid in Egypt, the Pyramid of Djoserat Saqqara, is being destroyed by the very company the Egyptian government has hired to restore it. The roughly 4,600-year-old structure has been in trouble since an earthquake hit the region in 1992, but in a difficult political and economic climate for the country, those now tasked with preserving the pyramid are said to be doing more harm than good.

Comment Re:It's a proxy for needing to revamp the post sys (Score 1) 215

by BDeblier (#47804805) Attached to: Hidden Obstacles For Delivery Drones

In Belgium we've got this: https://www.bpack247.be/. Part of the normal postal service. Basically you get a card with a barcode (to be scanned at the machine) and a pin code. A growing number of online stores will ship to these. Convenient if you're never at home during normal delivery hours. Since I pass through a train station equipped with one of these every evening, my problem's solved.

Submission + - Saturn's F Ring Is Now Three Times As Wide As During The Voyager Flybys

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1980 and 1981, Voyager 1 and 2 flew past Saturn providing unprecedented images of its magnificent ring system. At that time, its most distant discrete ring, the F ring, was about 200 kilometres wide. But puzzlingly, images sent back by Cassini show that the ring is now 580 kilometres wide and twice as bright as it was thirty years ago. Now astronomers think they have finally solved the mystery of the expanding F ring. The ring is shepherded by a number of small moons, the most famous of which is Prometheus. These moons interact gravitationally with the ring creating structures such as braids and spokes. The new thinking is that the moons' orbits resonate with the F ring, pushing clouds of dust and ice further away from Saturn. This makes the ring wider. But beyond a certain radius the orbit of the dust becomes unstable and it begins to spiral back towards Saturn and collides with the rest of the ring. This causes a chain reaction of collisions that dramatically increases the number of particles in the ring and hence its brightness. This theory also leads to a prediction--the resonant process is currently at a maximum but should reduce sharply in the coming years, if the theory is correct. So by 2018, the F ring should be back to the same configuration the Voyagers saw in 80/81.

Submission + - gcc LTO reduces firefox package size by 50% (gnu.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Link Time Optimization used to be a lot of promise for little gain, and typically unable to deal with packages in the MSLOC range. Seemingly no longer. Reported in gcc's bugzilla is an impressive result for firefox:
'Firefox since version 30 as well as Thunderbird since version 31 both compile fine with LTO enabled without the need of any additional patches. The package size was reduced by 51% (firefox ~420MB -> ~207MB) and 59% (thunderbird ~480MB -> ~200MB). Both programs work as intended, no crashes or unexpected behaviour so far.'
Has time come to rebuild the world using LTO ?

Submission + - What happens when the Universe's largest objects meet their twins?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You can imagine all sorts of objects in the Universe, from the very low mass like meteoroids to planets, stars, and even incredibly dense ones like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. But what happens to these different classes of object when you allow them to merge with another object that could pass for its identical twin? The answers are varied and spectacular and show us all sorts of things about the Universe, from blue stragglers to supernovae to gamma-ray bursts and more!

Submission + - Fossils of Cambrian predator preserved with brain impressions

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers on Wednesday described fossilized remains unearthed in China showing in fine detail the brain structures of a bizarre group of sea creatures that were the top predators more than half a billion years ago. The 520-million-year-old creature, one of the first predators of its day, sported compound eyes, body armor and two spiky claws for grabbing prey. "The animals of the Cambrian are noted for being a collection of oddballs that are sometimes difficult to match up with anything currently living on Earth. But even among these oddities, Anomalocarids stand out (as their name implies). The creatures propelled themselves with a series of oar-like paddles arranged on their flanks, spotted prey with enormous compound eyes, and shoveled them into a disk-like mouth with large arms that resided at the very front of their bodies—although some of them ended up as filter feeders."

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