61121711
submission
the_newsbeagle writes:
The equipment that neuroscientists use to record brain signals is plenty expensive, with a single system costing upward of $60,000. But it turns out that it's not too complicated to build your own, for the cost of about $3000. Two MIT grad students figured out how to do just that, and are distributing both manufactured systems and their designs through their website, Open Ephys. Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments.
61121377
submission
jfruh writes:
AMD, once on the ropes in its uphill battle against Intel, is now riding high, especially after getting its chips into both the PlayStation 4 and the XBox One. But years of cost-cutting and layoff have hollowed out the company, particulary in its chipset division, and now AMD may be outsourcing chipset design to companies in Asia. Is AMD giving up one of its core competencies? As blogger Andy Patrizio puts it, "No one gets excited about new chipsets like they do over a CPU, but CPUs absolutely need chipsets to run."
61120863
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ectoman writes:
Proponents of patent reform in the United States glimpsed a potential victory late last year, when the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act, designed to significantly mitigate patent abuse. Just months ago, however, the Senate pulled consideration of the bill. And since then, patent reform has been at a standstill. In a new analysis for Opensource.com, Mark Bohannon, Vice President of Corporate affairs and Global Public Policy at Red Hat, explains three reasons why. "For this year, at least," he writes, "the prospect of addressing abusive patent litigation through Congressional action is on ice"—despite the unavoidable case for reform.
61118535
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, has announced it will start selling low-cost smartphones in India within the "next few months". Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the firm's chief operating officer suggested the handsets, which will be manufactured by two Indian companies, would retail at $25 (£15). They will run Mozilla's HTML5 web-based mobile operating system, Firefox OS. The firm already sells Firefox-powered phones in Europe and Latin America.
61088749
submission
redletterdave writes:
TweetDeck, Twitter’s tool for real-time tracking and engagement of posts, was found to be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS), a type of computer vulnerability commonly found in web applications that allows hackers to inject script into webpages to access user accounts and important security information. As a result of the hack, a tweet with an emoticon heart is being shared more than 38,000 times — automatically.
49361325
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Adi Robertson reports in The Verge that classic science fiction magazine Omni, created in 1978 by Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione and partner Kathy Keeton, is coming back — and with it, questions about how our vision of science and science fiction has changed since Omni closed up shop in 1996. "There’s a heavy dose of nostalgia in the proceedings, and it’s not just about bringing back an old name," writes Robertson. "Longtime editor Ben Bova has described Omni as 'a magazine about the future,' but since his time as editor, our vision of the future has been tarnished — or, at the very least, we’ve started looking at the predictions of the past with rose-tinted glasses." Omni’s resurrection comes courtesy of Jeremy Frommer, a collector and businessman who acquired Guccione’s archives earlier this year. Like the original magazine, now available at the internet archive, the new Omni will publish a mixture of new fiction and nonfiction publishing the old illustrations that helped define Omni alongside the stories. Longtime science writer Claire Evans will edit the new online project described as an “Omni reboot" but plans to jettison one of the magazine’s most dated elements — a fondness for extraterrestrials and conspiracy theories. "Omni always had a distressing new agey tinge to it," says Bruce Sterling. "There was a lot of ‘aircraft of the pharaohs’ rubbish going on, which I didn't have very much tolerance for."
49361319
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ectoman writes:
Can sociology shed some light on developers' decisions to adopt more permissive open source licenses? Dr. Nicolas Suzor, Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, summarizes two studies that seem to say so. Suzor writes that "the choice of license appears likely to be substantially determined by social norms" and programmers' sense of "social obligation" or "duty towards society." The studies also note that "intrinsic motivations (beliefs about redistribution rights or social benefits of FLOSS) have a stronger effect on license choice than extrinsic motivations (expection of reputation or economic gain). Suzor's review contains other interesting tidbits, too. For example: "Less experienced managers of free software projects, in particular, are strongly susceptible to influence from others, and the licenses chosen by similar projects has a strong influence on license choice."
49353049
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notscientific writes:
Bacteria invest in proteins in an attempt to reduce stress or increase energy intake, while humans invest in cash. In both cases, better tradeoffs pay off. The similarities in tradeoffs faced by both bacteria and humans during investment are actually quite similar. Now, using synthetic biology, a group of scientists has shown that the outcomes of investment decisions in bacteria can be precisely defined, alluding to the idea that human investment activities, such as financial markets, can be thoroughly understood as well, and even modelled.
49305207
submission
coondoggie writes:
Reducing the friction of a racing engine is the purview of an engine lubricant known as molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, but the oil ingredient can also apparently help speed up imaging applications as well. UC Berkeley researchers said the combined a thin film of MoS2 with a sheet of amorphous silicon. Because of the molecular structure of MoS2, the photo-generated electrons it collects are able to move through quickly.
49301979
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minty3 writes:
The world famous painting has been “painted” on a surface that is approximately 30 microns in width using an atomic microscope and process known as ThermoChemical NanoLithography.
49301463
submission
Freddybear writes:
According to measurements from NASA solar observatories, the sun's magnetic field is about to reverse polarity. The event is predicted to occur within the next three to four months and will have effects throughout the solar system. These magnetic reversals happen regularly about every eleven years as part of the solar cycle.
49301329
submission
dcblogs writes:
The Director of National Intelligence is solicting help to develop a superconducting computer. The goal of the government's solicitation is "to demonstrate a small-scale computer based on superconducting logic and cryogenic memory that is energy efficient, scalable, and able to solve interesting problems." The NSA, in particular, has had a long interest in superconducting technology, but "significant technical obstacles prevented exploration of superconducting computing," the government said in its solicitation. Those innovations include cryogenic memory designs that allow operation of memory and logic in close proximity within the cold environment, as well as much faster switching speeds. U.S. intelligence agencies don't disclose the size of their systems, but the NSA is building a data center in Utah with a 65 MW power supply.
49301007
submission
ectoman writes:
Government IT departments are producing more open data. Civic participation is on the rise. And where these trends overlap, a new figure emerges: the citizen CIO. Jason Hibbets, author of The Foundation for an Open Source City , writes that increasingly "citizens are identifying—and some are creating themselves—the next wave of applications and resources for their municipalities, such as a crowdsourced answering platform for city services, an open data catalog, and a civic infrastructure adoption website for fire hydrants and storm drains." Hibbets notes that around the country—in cities like Boudler, Raleigh, and Oakland—tech-savvy citizens are partnering with local officials to influence the decisions regarding technical adoption and to help solve municipal problems. "I can’t stress enough how important the partnership component is," Hibbets writes. "In order for government CIO’s to embrace community enthusiasm, citizen CIO’s need to have a good plan."
49301001
submission
zacharye writes:
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A smartphone vendor plans to launch a new smartphone platform that isn’t really just a smartphone platform, but rather an operating system that will some day power everything from phones and tablets to cameras and cars. Palm and HP tried it with webOS, and that didn’t work out very well. BlackBerry is currently trying it with BlackBerry 10, and its U.S. market share plummeted to just 1.1% last quarter. But that won’t stop Samsung, which is next in line to launch a new OS that it hopes will decrease its dependence on Android and someday power anything and everything that connects to the Internet...
49299519
submission
itwbennett writes:
The TOR Project is advising that people stop using Windows after the discovery of a startling vulnerability in Firefox that undermined the main advantages of the privacy-centered network. The zero-day vulnerability allowed as-yet-unknown interlopers to use a malicious piece of JavaScript to collect crucial identifying information on computers visiting some websites using The Onion Router (TOR) network. 'Really, switching away from Windows is probably a good security move for many reasons,' according to a security advisory posted Monday by The TOR Project.
