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Submission + - Google and CISCO face off at the IETF over video codecs in WebRTC (nojitter.com)

Submitted by Danathar
Danathar writes: Last week's RTCweb working group meeting at IETF 88 in Vancouver failed to reach agreement on a Mandatory to Implement (MTI) video codec for WebRTC. As Eric Krapf noted, the debate has been between Google's royalty free codec (VP8) and H.264, use of which can require royalty payment for use to MPEG-LA.

Submission + - Chrome Solves the Curse of the Banshee Tab 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Imagine this. You're sitting in the library using your laptop while your favorite professor—the one whose admiration you most desire—is leading a small, silent reading group in a corner of the room. Suddenly from your computer comes a blaring, a whining, a siren, a yowl. You have opened a YouTube page in the background, and now, in some hidden tab, it plays, brays, blats, and bellows an ungodly cacophony across the solemn stacks. Your blood pressure spikes, your face turns red, and your fingers become clumsy as you scramble to find and kill the tab that betrayed you. Where is it? What is it? Where is that ungodly sound coming from? Now Robinson Meyer writes in the Atlantic that Google has found a solution. The next version of the company’s browser, Google Chrome, will tell you which tab is the source of the din. If a tab plays music or a video, a small icon of a speaker will appear in the tab itself. So instead of hunting through tabs, with click after agonized click, when a tab contains an element that is making noise, the browser will pop up an indicator showing where that noise is coming from. Thank you Google.

Submission + - World Helium Supply Is Expected to Surpass Demand Within Five Years (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: After helium supplies were artificially diminished to critical levels through an act of congress in 1996 that required the U.S. to sell of its reserves, the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 has slowed the sell-off and is transitioning helium pricing from what had been public wholesale to private rates. In addition, by 2018, new gas mining operations in the U.S., Russia and Qatar should produce helium surpluses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Helium is a critical resource in technology development where it's used in a myriad of ways, from enabling the superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Collider and pressure purging operations in NASA rockets, to cooling silica strands the fiber optic manufacturing process.

Submission + - New Headphones Generate Sound With Carbon Nanotubes (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: A new type of headphone heats up carbon nanotubes to crank out tunes. The tiny speaker doesn’t rely on moving parts and instead produces sound through the thermoacoustic effect. When an alternating current passes through the nanotubes, the material heats and cools the air around it; as the air warms, it expands, and as it cools, it contracts. This expansion and contraction creates sound waves. The new nanotube speaker could be manufactured at low cost in the same facilities used to make computer chips, the researchers say.

Submission + - Engineers invent programming language to build synthetic DNA (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Similar to using Python or Java to write code for a computer, chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to “program” how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell. A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.

Submission + - Sinkhole Sucks Brains From Wasteful Bitcoing-Mining Botnet (techweekeurope.co.uk) 1

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: A sinkhole has taken a quarter of the bots out of the ZeroAcess botnet which was making money for its operators through click fraud and Bitcoin mining. This particular Bitcoin mining operation was only profitable through the use of stolen electricity — according to Symantec, which operated the sinkhole, ZeroAccess was using $561,000 of electricity a day on infected PCs, to generate about $2000 worth of Bitcoin/

Submission + - NASA's New FINDER Scans for Victim Vitals Through Disaster Rubble (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: NASA now has a new device, called FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response), which could be the next player in hastening the response time in such grim scenarios.

Although dogs have aided emergency responders for decades, a pooch relies on its sniffer in emergency situations. FINDER, on the other hand, uses microwaves in a Doppler-like fashion to sense respiration and pulse. The lightweight briefcase, as displayed in the video above, was developed for the Department of Homeland Security with remote-sensing radar technology NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab uses to locate spacecraft in flight. The unit includes a tablet, on which a hidden person's vitals are then displayed.

Submission + - Fracked Shale Could Sequester Carbon Dioxide (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice
MTorrice writes: The same wells that energy companies drill to extract natural gas from shale formations could become repositories to store large quantities of carbon dioxide. A new computer model suggests that wells in the Marcellus shale, a 600-sq-mile formation in the northeastern U.S. that is a hotbed for gas extraction, could store half the CO2 emitted by the country’s power plants from now until 2030.

Submission + - He Fixed 300,000+ machines - America's Oldest Typewriter Repairman Dies at 96 (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times reports, "For eight decades, Manson Whitlock kept the 20th century’s ambient music going: the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop ... bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys. From the early 1930s until shortly before his death last month at 96, Mr. Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven, cared for the instruments, acoustic and electric, on which that music was played. Mr. Whitlock was often described as America’s oldest typewriter repairman. He was inarguably one of the country’s longest-serving. Over time he fixed more than 300,000 machines, tending manuals lovingly, electrics grudgingly and computers never. “I don’t even know what a computer is,” Mr. Whitlock told The Yale Daily News, the student paper, in 2010. “I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me.” " (The music linked to by the Times is Leroy Anderson's classic The Typewriter for orchestra.)

Submission + - Exclusive photos of Amazon's completely redesigned next-gen Kindle Fire HD (bgr.com)

Submitted by redkemper
redkemper writes: There really isn’t much mystery remaining as Amazon prepares to unveil its second-generation Kindle Fire HD tablets and its third-generation Kindle Fire slate in the coming weeks. First we published exclusive details about Amazon’s entire 2013 tablet lineup and then we followed up by revealing all of the key specs for the upcoming new Kindle Fire HD tablets as well as the new entry-level Kindle Fire. Amazon’s new high-definition slates are shaping up to be two of the most impressive tablets in the world when they debut, and anticipation is certainly building. Now, BGR has obtained exclusive photos of the unannounced next-generation Kindle Fire HD that Amazon is preparing to unveil as soon as later this month, giving the world its first-ever look at Amazon’s new hardware for 2013...

Submission + - Amazon lists $4.5 million artwork - and gets funny reviews (corporate-ir.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last month Amazon opened up a fine art site, selling paintings by Claude Monet and Andy Warhol at multi-million dollar prices, including a rare Norman Rockwell for $4.5 million. "They're listed with the same buttons as other Amazon products — like 'Add to Wish List' and 'Add to Cart'," notes one technology site, which reports that the listings have already become the latest target for more funny fake reviews. ("Is shipping extra?" "Not expensive enough...") Amazon seems to appreciate the parodies, having recently acknowledged their own favorite fake reviews. But at least one reviewer notes that selling a painting on a web site is like something Andy Warhol might do himself, joking that if he were around today "He might even buy it!"

Submission + - Computer-designed proteins recognize and bind small molecules (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Computer-designed proteins that can recognize and interact with small biological molecules are now a reality. Scientists have succeeded in creating a protein molecule that can be programmed to unite with three different steroids. The achievement could have far wider ranging applications in medicine and other fields, according to the Protein Design Institute at the University of Washington. “This is a major step toward building proteins for use as biosensors or molecular sponges, or in synthetic biology — giving organisms new tools to perform a task,” said one of the lead researchers, Christine E. Tinberg, a UW postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry.

Submission + - Researchers hope to protect against another HIV-like outbreak (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Throughout Asia, humans and monkeys live side-by-side in many urban areas. An international research team has been examining transmission of a virus from monkeys to humans in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated countries.The scientists have found that some people in these urban areas are concurrently infected with multiple strains of simian foamy virus, including recombinant strains — those from more than one source — originally detected in the monkeys. Asian rhesus macaques are very responsive to change, researchers say, and unlike many other species of primates they will continue thriving in human-altered habitats. Simian foamy viruses, which are ubiquitous in nonhuman primates, are retroviruses that exhibit high levels of mutation and recombination – a potentially explosive combination. By analyzing what is happening at the human-primate interface, the researchers hope to protect humans from another deadly outbreak similar to HIV.

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