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Submission + - Researchers make bottles easier to open by making them parallelograms (geek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: If glass could be made easier to open, perhaps it could make a bit of a comeback outside of the premium-level food brands that now comprise most of its users. A new patent granted to a team of Japanese researchers sets out to do just that — with simple geometry.

The biggest issues in lid stickiness is shape; a shirt or kitchen towel can help provide some extra grip, but a smooth circular lid is still hard to hold onto against great force. The researchers performed an ingenious series of tests with various jar shapes, from a self-reported level of difficulty to electromyographs measuring muscle use in the hands. The result? A parallelogram shape works best.

Submission + - 3D Bioprinting Regenerates Vincent van Gogh's Severed Ear from Relative's DNA (ibtimes.co.uk)

concertina226 writes: Artist Diemut Strebe has teamed up with scientists to create a living replica of post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh's severed ear using 3D printing and DNA from his great-great grandson.

Lieuwe van Gogh is the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo, and he shares a Y chromosome and 1/16 of the same genes with the famous painter.

Strebe and the scientists used Lieuwe's DNA samples, together with a sophisticated 3D bioprinter and computer software, to bioprint skin cells in a shape exactly resembling van Gogh's ear. The ear was then grown in the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Submission + - Geophysicists Discover How Rocks Produce Magnetic Pulses

KentuckyFC writes: Since the 1960s, geophysicists have known that some earthquakes are preceded by ultra-low frequency magnetic pulses that increase in number until the quake takes place. But this process has always puzzled them: how can rocks produce magnetic pulses? Now a group of researchers has worked out what's going on. They say that rocks under pressure can become semiconductors that produce magnetic pulses under certain circumstances. When igneous rocks form in the presence of water, they contain peroxy bonds with OH groups. Under great temperature and pressure, these bonds break down creating electron-holes pairs. The electrons become trapped at the site of the broken bonds but the holes are free to move through the crystal structure. The natural diffusion of these holes through the rock creates p and n regions just like those in doped semiconductors. And the boundary between these regions behaves like the p-n junction in a diode, allowing current to flow in one direction but not the other. At least not until the potential difference reaches a certain value when the boundary breaks down allowing a sudden increase in current. It is this sudden increase that generates a magnetic field. And the sheer scale of this process over a volume of hundreds of cubic metres ensures that these magnetic pulses have an extremely low frequency that can be detected on the surface. The new theory points to the possibility of predicting imminent earthquakes by triangulating the position of rocks under pressure by searching for the magnetic pulses they produce (although significantly more work needs to be done to characterise the process before then).

Submission + - Unmanaged Comments Sections are Harmful to Readers and Publications

Lord Satri writes: The title of the article might not apply to Slashdot thanks to its moderation system, but the Close your comments; Build a community article argues that allowing unmanaged comments are harmful to both readers and publishers. From the article:

"Last year, Popular Science decided to close comments, citing studies that blamed them for the spread of misinformation. TechCrunch has changed platforms several times, to Livefyre, and back to Facebook comments. [...] It’s a Petri dish that grows trolls and frightens away those who actually want to contribute. At worst, an unmoderated comments section can contain threats and personal attacks, invalid criticisms and spam. [...] Moderation goes to great lengths to fix these problems. A moderator can ban dangerous trolls, protecting equitable commenters and increasing reply rates and time-on-site between those readers. [...] So, why did you want comments in the first place? Many organizations cite “engagement,” but what they actually mean is “action.” They want to motivate their readers to do something, whether that action is clicking a share button, emailing a tip, or contributing some form of user generated content.

"

Submission + - Talks and presentations of the openQRM IaaS Cloud Community Summit 2014 (openqrm-enterprise.com)

matteverywhere writes: You have missed the openQRM Community Summit 2014? Now worries! For your convenience we have recorded all the talks of this event on video. They are available on youtube now!

Almost booked out the first openQRM Community Summit took place on the 20. May 2014 in Berlin. The summit started with a "get-together at the Spree" social event on the 19. May evening with perfect weather in a famous Berlin pub. The main summit day was filled with thrilling speakers and exciting talks packed with details and real-world examples of many different openQRM IaaS Cloud use-cases.
Please find the links to the videos and presentations below:

"Saas and PaaS infrastructure administration with openQRM" by Lukas Meyer (ninux.ch / Curaden IT Solutions)

"openATTIC, a software-defined storage (SDS) platform optimized for openQRM" by Steffen Rieger (Director Infrastructure & Operations it-novum GmbH)

"Short system deployment time of IT environments in large organizations" by Holger Koch (DB Systel GmbH)

"Automation of private, hybrid and multi Cloud IT infra-structures — Details about the new OpenStack integration in openQRM" by Matt Rechenburg (CEO openQRM Enterprise GmbH)

We hope you enjoy the talks!
your openQRM Team

Submission + - Why is long term storage so miserably slow - even SSDs? (slashdot.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Using data from the /. post earlier...about the fastest an SSD will spin data off is 550MB/s. Considering that some 8TB SSD drives are coming soon (http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/news/sandisk-unveils-4tb-ssd-says-6tb-and-8tb-ssds-are-due-next-year-1-518516) — even with the speed of 550MB/s — it will take about 4 hours to spool off. Back in "the day" you could back up a system in about an hour...why hasn't the speed of mass storage kept up?

Submission + - US Secret Service Looking for Software to Detect Sarcastic Smileys in Internet (ibtimes.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: The US secret service is looking for dedicated software to distinguish genuine posts from sarcastic comments and smileys. The agency, which is tasked with protecting the US president, intends to hire an online security firm to scrutinise cyberspace for them. In an online notice on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the agency has called for a software tool to "detect sarcasm and false positives" alongside several other features.

Submission + - Smartphone Chip Projects 3D Holograms Above the Screen

rofkool writes: A tiny computer chip has been developed that is capable of projecting three-dimensional images and videos from a smartphone without the need for 3D glasses.

Designed over the course of a decade by California-based Ostendo Technologies, the chipset is expected to cost around $30 and will be ready by mid-2015.

"Display is the last frontier," said Hussein El-Ghoroury, founder and chief executive of Ostendo. "Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display.

"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3D — all of your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data."

Submission + - AMD Kaveri Notebook APU Preview Shows Solid All Around Performance (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. Multimedia performance in these highly integrated designs can matter much more than desktop designs where discrete graphics engines are easily accommodated. Back in January of this year, AMD launched their Kaveri desktop APU. Targeted for desktops and with integrated AMD GCN graphics on board, Kaveri also had a number of optimizations and enhancements made to its Steamroller CPU cores as well. All told, Kaveri represents a much-needed upgrade to AMD's base APU lineup. Today, AMD is launching their Kaveri mobile variant and early testing shows it's relatively competitive versus mainstream Intel notebook chips, even the latest Haswell cores. With four AMD Steamroller CPU cores and up to 8 GCN-based GPU cores on board, AMD's Kaveri mobile APUs offer up competitive CPU performance and graphics performance that surpasses Intel's integrated graphics by a wide margin, with the exception of perhaps their rare, high-end Iris Pro variant.

Submission + - NASA Begins Testing of New Spectrograph on Agency's Airborne Observatory (nasa.gov)

stephendavion writes: Astronomers are eagerly waiting to begin use of a new instrument to study celestial objects: a high-resolution, mid-infrared spectrograph mounted on NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the world's largest flying telescope. This new instrument, the Echelon-Cross-Echelle Spectrograph (EXES), can separate wavelengths of light to a precision of one part in 100,000. At the core of EXES is an approximately 3-foot (1 meter) bar of aluminum called an echelon grating, carefully machined to act as 130 separate mirrors that split light from the telescope into an infrared "rainbow." SOFIA is a heavily modified Boeing 747 Special Performance jetliner that carries a telescope with an effective diameter of about 8-feet (2.5-meters) at altitudes of 39,000 to 45,000 feet (12 to 14 km), above more than 99 percent of Earth's atmospheric water vapor. Lower in the atmosphere, at altitudes associated with most ground-based observatories, water vapor obscures much of what can be learned when viewed in the infrared spectrum.

Submission + - Facebook rushes to encrypt data centre links (itnews.com.au)

littlekorea writes: Facebook's security engineering chief has promised the social network is 'aggressively' working to encrypt links between its data centers, following moves by Google to do the same. Revelations by former US intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA was able to tap data center links was incidental, he told journalists today, but "proved we were wearing our tin hats correctly."

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