58527917
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
When it comes to military tech, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) usually makes the headlines with its gadgets, gizmos, and kickass robots. It’s a prolific supporter of robo-defence projects, from Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah and its cousin Big Dog to autonomous hands and unsteady humanoids.
But the latest piece of military robot news comes from across the Atlantic at the UK’s Ministry of Defence, which has unveiled an animatronic man to test suits and equipment for the British armed forces. “Porton Man” looks pretty impressively modern and human-like until you realise he’s stuck to a clunky external frame that moves his limbs like a puppet. But hey, at least he’s not stumbling through steps at a snail’s pace before inevitably crashing to the ground, like DARPA's cyborg hopefuls.
The frame lets Porton Man run, walk (sorry, “march”), sit, and kneel in mid-air, to mimic the common movements of a human soldier. He can also hold his arms up as if sighting a weapon.
58402369
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
It's a strange world indeed when anyone can buy a life-saving gadget at their local drug store, especially when the device is meant to save people from illegal substances. Yet that's the world we live in, starting this summer, when a newly approved gadget to treat opiate overdoses will be made available to anyone with a prescription, no medical skills necessary.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the device yesterday, making it the first automatic injector to reverse the effects of opiates, both street drugs like heroin and prescription meds like OxyContin, Vicodin, or morphine.
Called Evzio, the auto-injector works just like an EpiPen. It's designed to be very user-friendly so you don't need professional training to administer the treatment, just a prescription from your doctor. It injects a dose of naloxone, the opiate antidote used for decades to treat overdoses in ambulances and ERs.
58398623
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Up until now, the clock by which US time was set—the standard used by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—was an atomic clock so precise it would only stray a single second over a period of 100 million years.
With such precision, you might have thought there’s little room (or time) for improvement. But in their ongoing quest to reach ever more standardised standards, NIST has launched a new atomic clock that’s three times as accurate. That is, it won’t gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
NIST-F2 is the most accurate clock of its kind in the world, and it’ll join its predecessor NIST-F1 in setting the standard for US civilian time and frequency (military time is maintained by the Naval Observatory instead), keeping the country punctual to within fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds.
58370805
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
On Monday, US Attorney Sarah Saldaña filed a superseding indictment in the government’s case against Barrett Brown.
“It’s conceivable,” attorney Jay Leiderman told me yesterday, that the prosecution, which dismissed 11 of Brown’s charges last month, “is about to reach a plea deal with Barrett.”
It appears now, that a plea deal has been reached. After bringing multiple cases against Brown, three of which he had pleaded "not guilty" to, federal prosecutors have salvaged a minute victory over Brown. Originally, they sought to put him behind bars for 105 years. The prosecutors were granted a seal on the plea agreement by the court.
58327983
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If NASA is serious about deep space missions, it’s going to have to change its safety guidelines, because there’s no conceivable way that, within the next few years, our engineering capabilities or understanding of things like radiation exposure in space are going to advance far enough for a mission to Mars to be acceptably “safe” for NASA. So, instead, the agency commissioned the National Academies Institute of Medicine to take a look at how it can ethically go about changing those standards.
The answer? It likely can't.
In a report released today, the National Academies said that there are essentially three ways NASA can go about doing this, besides completely abandoning deep space forever: It can completely liberalize its health standards, it can establish more permissive “long duration and exploration health standards,” or it can create a process by which certain missions are exempt from its safety standards. The team, led by Johns Hopkins University professor Jeffrey Kahn, concluded that only the third option is remotely acceptable.
58327559
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
For all the disparate ongoing attempts to perfect stealth technology, it's still not possible to fully cloak an object from the naked eye.
Part of the problem, up until recently, has simply been a matter of scale. Scientists have known for years that metamaterials made from synthetic textiles can be used to to control the propagation of light. The artificial material bends light around an object, rendering it invisible to certain wavelengths. But, they could only fabricate the stuff in microscopic sizes.
Now, a team of researchers at the University of Central Florida, led by Debashis Chanda, have perfected a nanotransfer printing technique that makes it possible to create larger swaths of the metamaterial—about four by four inch squares. From there, multiple pieces can be stitched together with an automated tool to create a very large area of coverage, Chanda explained in an email.
58327401
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Ye sci-fi writers hard up for new material should spend an hour or so perusing the DoD's 2015 budget proposal, especially the section covering the far-out research projects underway at DARPA, where the agency's mad scientists are working to develop brain-controlled drones, biowarfare, engineer new life forms, and possibly attempt immortality.
If last year was the year of battlefield robots, cyborg soldiers, and weaponized drones, it looks like the next couple years will see the Pentagon gearing up for a deep dive into biotech. DARPA announced today it now has a unit devoted to studying the intersection of biology and engineering, the Biological Technologies Office.
The agency is betting that the next generation of defense tech will be take a cue from natural life, and as such one of the major focuses of the new unit will be on synthetic biology. It'll ramp up research into manufacturing biomaterials, turning living cells, proteins, and DNA into a sort of genetic factory.
58298727
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The United States is currently gripped in a bout of earthquake mania, following a series of significant tremors in the West. And any time Yellowstone, LA, or San Francisco shakes, people start to wonder if it's a sign of The Big One to come. Yet even after decades of research, earthquake prediction remains notoriously hard, and not every building in quake-prone areas has an earthquake-resistant design. What if, instead of quaking in our boots, we could stop quakes in their tracks?
Theoretically, it's not a crazy idea. Earthquakes propagate in waves, and if noise-canceling headphones have taught us anything, it's that waves can be absorbed, reflected, or canceled out. Today, a paper published in Physical Review Letters suggests how that might be done. It's the result of French research into the use of metamaterials—broadly, materials with properties not found in nature—to modify seismic waves, like a seismic cloaking device.
58276195
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
As you've no doubt picked up on by now, the future car is, for better or worse, a computer with wheels. You log in to your car with a password to control the digitized features. The car comes with built-in internet and downloadable apps. Toyota's new electric concept is named the "iRoad." As Motherboard's Derek Mead reported from CES this year, the trend is crystal clear: "Every car is going to get smarter and more connected, and no car will be worth its salt unless it's got an app."
There's a lot of cool shit you can do with a smart car. The problem with having an automobile that works just like a computer is it can be hacked just like a computer—in other words, far too easily.
At the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore over the weekend, security consultant Nitesh Dhanjani demonstrated just how easily it is to break into and control a vehicle, specifically a Tesla Model S. Dhanjani focused his research on the all-electric car because it's leading the trend of computerized vehicles.
58273771
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public.
"We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions," explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. "It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people." The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps.
58195013
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You might remember House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, from his lovely, universally-hated (by 14-year-olds, at least) CISPA cybersecurity bill that would have allowed nearly seamless information sharing between companies and the federal government. You might also remember him from his c’est la vie attitude towards civil liberties in general.
Well, we’ve got some good news and some bad news: Rogers announced today that he won’t seek re-election and is instead retiring from politics to start a conservative talk radio show on Cumulus. The bad news? He’s got at least one terrible, civil liberties-killing bill to try to push through Congress before he goes.
Like CISPA, the newly introduced “FISA Transparency and Modernization Act,” seeks to make it easier for the federal government to get your information from companies.
58180893
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In far-flung rural Alaska, where electricity can cost as much as $1 per kilowatt hour—more than 10 times the national average, according to the New York Times —a wind turbine encased in a giant helium balloon is about to break a world record. The Bouyant Air Turbine (BAT) is about to be floated 1,000 feet into the air in the name of cleaner, cheaper, and mobile energy. That single airborne grouper—it's sort of a hybrid of a blimp, a kite, and a turbine—will power over a dozen homes.
The BAT is the brainchild of Altaeros, a company founded by MIT alumni, and, if everything goes according to plan, it's going to be the highest-flying power generator in history.
Floating turbines higher up in the air, where wind speeds are greater isn't a new concept.
58146683
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The FBI is intercepting the prison correspondence of infamous Internet troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, including letters from his defense team, according to his attorney.
“He’s sent me between 10 and 20 letters in the last month or two. I’ve received one,” Tor Ekeland, who had just returned from visiting Auernheimer at the federal corrections institute in Allenwood, PA., told the Daily Dot in a video interview.
Last March, Auernheimer was convicted of accessing a computer without authorization and sentenced to 41 months in prison. As a member of the computer security team Goatse Security, Auernheimer discovered a major security flaw in AT&T’s network, which allowed him to download the email addresses of some 114,000 iPad users. Goatse Security reported the flaw to Gawker and provided journalists with the information, who then published it in redacted form.
58135275
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last month, I wrote about the risk of a "technology doping" scandal during this year’s Olympic Games in Sochi, which were peppered with souped-up gear like nanotech swimsuits made by aerospace engineers, potentially toeing the line between utilizing the best modern-day equipment and cheating.
It's an ethical grey area in athletics that's just getting murkier as bio-enhancing devices improve, and it's even more complex in the Paralympic Games, where assistive devices like prosthetics are of course commonly used. But even parathletes have to comply with strict guidelines limiting how far your gear can take you; the goal is to match able-bodied human strength, but not to go beyond.
But this is the 21st Century, where technology is the star of the show. So I wasn't too surprised when I heard that in 2016, Switzerland will host the first Cybathlon, basically an Olympics for cyborgs, whose MO is that augmenting human ability with biotech shouldn't just be permitted, but encouraged.
58129985
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
People can’t do anything these days without getting hurt doing it—for every activity, there seems to be a corresponding injury that seems to go with it. Take, for instance, the recent case of a woman diagnosed with the first-ever case of “WhatsAppitis.”
The patient, a 34-year-old doctor, ironically enough, spent six hours on Christmas Eve sending WhatsApp messages to her friends and family. During that time, “she made continuous movements with both thumbs to send messages,” according to a report in The Lancet, one of the most well-respected medical journals in the world.
She woke up the next morning with pain in both wrists, which was diagnosed by a doctor as WhatsAppitis. She was given Tylenol and told to lay off the phone, a recommendation which she did NOT take, as the report notes that she “did not completely abstain from using her phone, with exchange of new messages on December 31.”
