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Submission + - How Can the ACM Better Serve Professional Programmers?

Submitted by ChelleChelle2
ChelleChelle2 writes: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was founded in 1947. Today, it is considered one of the most prestigious scientific and educational computing societies in the world. For decades ACM membership was considered to be a mark of a professional; however, this is no longer the case. Many programmers today consider the ACM a purely academic institution of little use or relevance for professionals. In this article, Vinton Cerf—one of the “fathers of the internet” and a past president of the ACM—asks how can ACM “adapt its activities and offerings to increase the participation of professionals?” Is there anything the ACM can do to better serve professional programmers? Join in the conversation

Submission + - Could a quadcopter land rovers on Mars? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Taking a page from NASA’s rocket powered landing craft from it most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger’s Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.

Submission + - Google Glass wearers can steal your password (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Remember the kid who tried to cheat off you by looking over your shoulder to copy your test answers? He's baaaack.
But this time he's wearing Google Glass — and he's after your iPad PIN.

Cyber forensics experts at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell have developed a way to steal passwords entered on a smartphone or tablet using video from Google's face-mounted gadget and other video-capturing devices. The thief can be nearly ten feet away and doesn't even need to be able to read the screen — meaning glare is not an antidote.
The security researchers created software that maps the shadows from fingertips typing on a tablet or smartphone. Their algorithm then converts those touch points into the actual keys they were touching, enabling the researchers to crack the passcode.

They tested the algorithm on passwords entered on an Apple iPad, Google's Nexus 7 tablet, and an iPhone 5.

Why should you be worried?
"We could get your bank account password," researcher Xinwen Fu said.

Submission + - Tractor Beam Created Using Water Waves

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The idea that light waves can push a physical object is far from new. But a much more recent idea is that a laser beam can also pull objects like a tractor beam. Now a team of Australian physicists has used a similar idea to create a tractor beam with water waves that pulls floating objects rather than pushes them. Their technique is to use an elongated block vibrating on the surface of water to create a train of regular plane waves. When the amplitude of these waves is small, they gradually push the surface of the water along, creating a flow that pushes floating objects with it. However, when the amplitude increases, the waves become non-linear and begin to interact with each other in a complex way. This sets up a flow of water on the surface in the opposite direction to the movement of the waves. The result is that floating objects--ping pong balls in the experiment--are pulled towards the vibrating block, like a tractor beam.

Submission + - Foxconn To Begin Replacing Workers With Robots (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: The largest private employer in all of China and one of the biggest supply chain manufacturers in the world, Foxconn announced it will soon start using robots to help assemble devices at its several sprawling factories across China. Apple, one of Foxconn’s biggest partners to help assemble its iPhones, iPads, will be the first company to use the new service. Foxconn said its new 'Foxbots' will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices. According to Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the company will deploy 10,000 robots to its factories before expanding the rollout any further. He said the robots are currently in their 'final testing phase.'

Submission + - Gravity measurements can predict river flooding (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When ground water saturates a river basin, the risk for flooding goes up. So does the strength of Earth’s gravity in that region, ever so slightly, because of the extra mass of the underground water. By using tiny variations in gravity detected from space, researchers report online today in Nature Geoscience that they can identify basins that are primed for flooding if additional rains come—sometimes with several months' warning.

Submission + - Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Imagine showing up at the airport to catch your flight, looking at your plane, and noticing that instead of windows, the cockpit is now a smooth cone of aluminum. It may seem like the worst case of quality control in history, but Airbus argues that this could be the airliner of the future. In a new US patent application, the EU aircraft consortium outlines a new cockpit design that replaces the traditional cockpit with one that uses 3D view screens instead of conventional windows.

Submission + - How the NEPTUNE Project Wired the Ocean

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is by far one of the Earth's smallest. It spans just a few hundred kilometers of the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coast. But what the Juan de Fuca lacks in size it makes up for in connectivity. It's home to a unique, high-speed optical cabling that has snaked its way across the depths of the Pacific seafloor plate since late 2009. This link is called NEPTUNE—the North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment—and, at more than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles), it's about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. A team of scientists, researchers, and engineers from the not-for-profit group Oceans Network Canada maintains the network, which cost CAD $111 million to install and $17 million each year to maintain. But know that this isn’t your typical undersea cable. For one, NEPTUNE doesn’t traverse the ocean’s expanse, but instead loops back to its starting point at shore. And though NEPTUNE is designed to facilitate the flow of information through the ocean, it also collects information about the ocean, ocean life, and the ocean floor.

Submission + - Free Wi-Fi Supplier, Gowex, Files For Bankruptcy

Submitted by PuceBaboon
PuceBaboon writes: The BBC is reporting that a Spanish firm, Gowex, which provides free Wi-Fi services in major cities world-wide, has filed for bankruptcy, following revelations that financial accounts filed over the past four years were "false". The company supplies services in London, Shanghai, New York and Buenos Aires, as well as Madrid. Other sources report that up to 90% of the company's reported revenue came from "undisclosed related parties" (in other words, from Gowex itself) and that the value of the company's share price was now effectively zero.

Submission + - Biohackers are engineering yeast to make real vegan cheese. No cows needed!

Submitted by backslashdot
backslashdot writes: A collective of biohackers from the San Francisco Bay Area have joined forces to produce the world's first real vegan cheese in baker’s yeast. The aim of the project is to produce a renewable and sustainable, closed-loop food source that will provide the same nutritional value as non-vegan cheese and taste just as great! No cows, cruelty, or animal products needed. Additionally, the project will provide a real cheese for vegans, the lactose intolerant, and those that have food allergies to certain animal-derived milk proteins. A crowdfunding campaign launched on July 1st (today) has already raised nearly 25% towards the funding goal.

Submission + - Nathan Myhrvold's Recipe for a Better Oven (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: We cook our food today using technology invented to bake bricks. We can do a lot better. Nathan Myhrvold explains what's wrong with today's ovens and challenges oven designers make them better.

Submission + - Reproducing a Monet Painting with Aluminum Nanostructures (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: Plasmonic printing is a recently developed method to create color images using different shapes and sizes of gold or silver nanostructures. It relies on the oscillations of electrons in the metal surfaces and can produce images with a resolution 100 times that of a common desktop printer. Now researchers have expanded the color palette of the technique using tiny aluminum-capped nanopillars. Each pixel consists of four nanopillars; tuning the diameters and arrangement of the pillars produced a palette of more than 300 different colors. Using these pixels, the researchers created a microscale reproduction of Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise.”

Submission + - Choosing a new web language that's not too buzzy 1

Submitted by adelayde
adelayde writes: In my day job, I work on a web based service with a lot of legacy code written in that older (and some may say venerable) web-scripting language, Perl. Although we use Modern Perl extensions such as Moose the language just seems to be ossifying — http://ttfa.net/perldidntwin — and we're wanting to move to a more up-to-date and used language for web applications, or even an entire framework, to do new development. We're still planning to support the legacy code for a number of years to come; that's unavoidable.

This is a fairly big project and it's mission critical to the business. The thing we're afraid of is jumping onto something that is too new and too buzzy — http://ttfa.net/lemonmarket — as we'd like to make a technology decision that would be good at least for the next five years, if not more, and today's rising star could quite easily be in tomorrow's dustbin.

What language and/or framework would you recommend we adopt?

Submission + - India May Be Seeking Thermonuclear Bombs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Commercial satellite images of a new uranium enrichment plant are fueling concerns that India intends to build thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons. The new enrichment facility would allow India to produce about 80 kilos of excess weapons grade uranium each year. This is enough for five nuclear bombs.

India could blend this with its existing stockpiles of plutonium to build thermonuclear weapons, which use a fusion reaction to generate many times the destructive power of simple fusion atomic weapons. America’s first thermonuclear bomb had a yield of 10 megatons or 10,000 kilotons. By contrast, the highest yield of the five nuclear bombs India tested in 1998 was 0.045 megatons (45 kt).

Submission + - NASA merges vacuum tube tech with silicon (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA research merges vacuum tube technology with silicon to create "vacuum channel" transistors that can switch at more than 400GHz. What makes this vacuum-channel transistor useful? Speed. The switching speed of a transistor is governed by the speed of electron flow through the transistor. Electron flow through traditional semiconductors is quite fast, but electron flow through a vacuum (or, in this case, atmospheric helium) is faster still, and that enables faster switching.

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