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Submission + - What's After Big Data? (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: As the marketing hype around “big data” subsides, a recent wave of startups is solving a new class of data-related problems and showing where the field is headed. Niche analytics companies like RStudio, Vast, and FarmLink are trying to provide insights for specific industries such as finance, real estate, and agriculture. Data-wrangling software from startups like Tamr and Trifacta is targeting enterprises looking to find and prep corporate data. And heavily funded startups such as Actifio and DataGravity are trying to make data-storage systems smarter. Together, these efforts highlight where emerging data technologies might actually be used in the business world.

Submission + - The star that exploded at the dawn of time (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: To probe the dawn of time, astronomers usually peer far away; but now they've made a notable discovery close to home. An ancient star a mere thousand light-years from Earth bears chemical elements that may have been forged by the death of a star that was both extremely massive and one of the first to arise after the big bang. If confirmed, the finding means that some of the universe’s first stars were so massive they died in exceptionally violent explosions that altered the growth of early galaxies.

Submission + - I Contain Multitudes (simonsfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Your DNA is supposed to be your blueprint, your unique master code, identical in every one of your tens of trillions of cells. It is why you are you, indivisible and whole, consistent from tip to toe.

But that’s really just a biological fairy tale. In reality, you are an assemblage of genetically distinctive cells, some of which have radically different operating instructions. This fact has only become clear in the last decade. Even though each of your cells supposedly contains a replica of the DNA in the fertilized egg that began your life, mutations, copying errors and editing mistakes began modifying that code as soon as your zygote self began to divide. In your adult body, your DNA is peppered by pinpoint mutations, riddled with repeated or rearranged or missing information, even lacking huge chromosome-sized chunks. Your data is hopelessly corrupt.

Submission + - Solid State Drives Break The 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives and may never with, at least with the current technology, the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba's 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it's possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ's new ARX 100 240GB solid state drive didn't lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100's strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3 year warranty.

Submission + - NASA's NuSTAR Sees Black hole bends light, space, time (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: NASA's black-hole hunting telescope has captured a cosmic battle between dark and light.

NuSTAR, formally known as the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, has observed a supermassive black hole's gravity tugging on X-ray light that's being emitted near that black hole.

That light is getting stretched and blurred, and researchers are getting to see it all in unprecedented detail, said NASA in a news release issued today.
In this instance, the corona — a source of X-ray light that sits near a black hole — recently collapsed in toward the black hole that's named Markarian 335.

The NuSTAR telescope has been collecting X-rays from black holes and dying stars for the past two years.

The craft completed its primary mission earlier this year, and it was redirected to investigate Markarian 335 once scientists noticed that the black hole had become dramatically brighter. NuSTAR observed that Markarian 335's gravity sucked the corona's light, an illuminating action that NASA likened to someone shining a flashlight for astronomers.

Submission + - Schoolboy investigated under sedition act for 'liking' pro-Israel facebook pages (malaysiakini.com) 1

Submitted by oysterman
oysterman writes: In the first landmark case of the entire planet, Malaysian police is investigating a schoolboy for 'liking' pro-Israel facebook pages under draconian seditious laws. Whether the schoolboy deliberately liked the page, or was tricked into clicking links which causes the like, or possibly facebook liking the page for him without his knowledge (this has happened many times in other cases), this highlights the asinine policies of the Malaysian authorities that has been hit with a number of controversies and embarrassment this year besides losing 2 boeing 777 planes.

Malay language news at http://www.malaysiakini.com/ne...
subscription only English version. http://www.malaysiakini.com/ne...

Context
http://www.thestar.com.my/News...

Submission + - Giant Greek tomb discovered (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Archeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great.

The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander’s generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as “clearly extremely significant”.

A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb.

The excavations began in 2012, and by this month hope to identify who actually was buried there.

Submission + - UCSD To Test Safety Of Spinal Stem Cell Injection (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have launched a clinical trial to investigate the safety of neural stem cell transplantation in patients with chronic spinal cord injuries. This Phase I clinical trial is recruiting eight patients for the 5-year study.

Pre-clinical studies of these cells by Ciacci and Martin Marsala, MD, at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, showed that these grafted neural stem cells improved motor function in spinal cord injured rats with minimal side effects indicating that human clinical trials are now warranted.

Submission + - What happens to electric-car batteries once they leave cars? 1

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Skeptics will ask what happens to electric-car batteries once they leave the car? Do they just end up in landfills? This is a great question, and the answer is no, not really. While some could be recycled, that doesn't seem like a realistic plan as the stuff inside lithium-ion batteries is cheap, and technological breakthroughs will make it dated. But a secondary use, that's more realistic. The idea of these massive battery packs being re-purposed for something else is completely real. Maybe they'll be bundled to a solar panel system on a house to both create and store renewable energy for peak utility times. So will these battery packs end up creating more waste by going to landfills? Not likely, but they also might not get recycled.

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