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Submission + - New Brain-to-Brain Interface Allows Human to Control Another's Movements

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: Earlier this year, researchers at Harvard devised a system by which a human could control a rat's tail using only the person's thoughts. Now a team at the University of Washington have demonstrated that the same principle can be applied to human-to-human control. The Washington Post reports: "First, they placed electronic probes against their heads. Then one man looked at a computer game on a screen and thought about what move he wanted to make. Sure enough, the other man, who was across campus with no view of the screen, almost instantaneously moved his right index finger to make that move. He said it had the sensation of a nervous tic."

Submission + - Indian Government to ban use of US email services for official communications (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to it half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information and protect it from overseas surveillance.

Submission + - Raspberry Pi, Smart Highways Win World's Biggest Design Prize (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last night the €500,000 INDEX: Award was awarded to 5 designs that can improve life for millions of people around the world — including high-tech highways that light up at night, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer, and a simple piece of paper that can cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks.

Submission + - MobileIron unveils Anyware: Mobile management with no IT department required (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rjupstate
rjupstate writes: Anyware makes end-to-end mobile device and app management easy non-technical administrators, integrates with Salesforce, and offers a new model of mobile content management that functions like an enterprise app store. Its consumer-like management experience also points to a future when technology management can be done without an IT department.

Submission + - US electrical grid on the edge of failure (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse.
The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage.

Submission + - Google's Director of Regime Change (cryptome.org)

Submitted by Memroid
Memroid writes: 'It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA [...] Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

"Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do... [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag."'

Submission + - Secure Email in Dark Age of PRISM .. (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the specter of government surveillance hanging over this post-PRISM world, people are beginning to wonder if the idea of secure email is complete nonsense.

  “E-mail is going to be with us for a long time,” says Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, a software developer and member of the Icelandic Pirate Party. “We need to do what we can to make it more secure.”

Submission + - NSA Shuts down critics under guise of copyright violations (infowars.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Can a government agency block criticism by claiming copyright infringement? Sounds a bit ridiculous but it is happening. The NSA is effectively stopping one small business owner from criticism, claiming that by using its name he has infringed on their copyright,” according to a report by Infowars guest and investigative journalist Ben Swann.

Submission + - Boyfriend tracker app pulled from Google App store on privacy concerns (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by twitnutttt
twitnutttt writes: The NSA may be monitoring your phone and email, and retailers may be striving to automatically recognize you in their stores, but your girlfriend may be your biggest privacy threat right now. After 50,000 downloads since launch, the Brazilian "Boyfriend Tracker" app has been pulled from Google Play. It allows suspicious girlfriends to "obtain a call history, receive any incoming or outgoing text messages, identify a partner’s location on a map using GPS, and can [sic] turn on the phone to listen in to the surrounding environment. The app also lets users know when a phone is turned off or set to Airplane Mode." The various options are controlled via text message codes. If you have to track him, you probably should dump him.

Submission + - What's Causing the Rise In Obesity? Everything. (thesocietypages.org)

Submitted by Mr_Blank
Mr_Blank writes: We all know — because we are being constantly reminded — that we are getting fat. Americans are at the forefront of the trend, but it is a transnational one. Apparently, it is also trans-species: Over the past 20 years, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. Researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of 9% per decade. Lab mice gained about 11% per decade. Chimps are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35% per decade. What is causing the obesity era? Everything.

Submission + - Magma can survive in upper crust for hundreds of millennia (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Reservoirs of silica-rich magma – the kind that causes the most explosive volcanic eruptions – can persist in Earth’s upper crust for hundreds of thousands of years without triggering an eruption, according to new University of Washington modeling research. That means an area known to have experienced a massive volcanic eruption in the past, such as Yellowstone National Park, could have a large pool of magma festering beneath it and still not be close to going off as it did 600,000 years ago. Recent research models have suggested that reservoirs of silica-rich magma, or molten rock, form on and survive for geologically short time scales – in the tens of thousands of years – in the Earth’s cold upper crust before they solidify. They also suggested that the magma had to be injected into the Earth’s crust at a high rate to reach a large enough volume and pressure to cause an eruption. But new research by UW doctoral student Sarah Gelman and colleagues took the models further and found that the magma could accumulate more slowly and remain molten for a much longer period than the models previously suggested.

Submission + - Private investigators using license plate scanners to make their own databases

Submitted by scorp1us
scorp1us writes: I've noticed these cars driving around in Maryland. I've seen the same green Elantra in White Marsh many times. Today I saw one in Cockeysville. I trapped the guy in a private parking lot and asked him a few questions. He would not say who he was or who he was working for other than for a private investigator firm, and that they had 9(!) cars.
He was just driving around all the parking lots he could and the public ones. To me, that is trespassing, but they get to build their database anyway, unrestricted by any law on where or retention time. And who knows for what purpose?

Submission + - Colorado Teen Designs Robotic Arm With 3D Printing (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by coolnumbr12
coolnumbr12 writes: A Colorado teenager has used 3D printing to create a robotic prosthetic arm that is fully functional and costs less than $500 to make. At TedxMileHigh in Denver, Colo., 17-year-old Easton LaChappelle demonstrated his robotic arm, and how he constructed the arm to keep costs low.

“So in the end, I built this robotic arm up to the shoulder which was extremely strong,” LaChapelle said. “It could toss balls to you, it could shake your hand, it could pretty much do anything a human could if you program it correctly."

Submission + - Self-Healing Solar Cells Mimic Plant Leaves to Repair Themselves (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over time, solar cells wear down — just like plant leaves — due to degradation caused by ultraviolet light. A team of researchers from North Carolina State University revealed this week that they have created a new type of solar cell that can repair and reinvigorate itself by mimicking the functioning of organic vascular systems found in leaves.

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