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NASA

NASA's Orion Spaceship Passes Parachute Test 75

Posted by samzenpus from the first-step dept.
An anonymous reader writes The spacecraft it is hoped will take man to Mars has passed its first parachute tests. Nasa's Orion spacecraft landed gently using its parachutes after being shoved out of a military jet at 35,000 feet. "We've put the parachutes through their paces in ground and airdrop testing in just about every conceivable way before we begin sending them into space on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 before the year's done," Orion program manager Mark Geyer said in a NASA statement. "The series of tests has proven the system and will help ensure crew and mission safety for our astronauts in the future."
Google

Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works 126

Posted by samzenpus from the if-youd-like-to-make-a-call-please-wait dept.
An anonymous reader writes Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group demonstrated Tango, a tablet with 3D cameras similar to Microsoft's Kinect and a version of the Ara phone that could almost boot to the Android home screen (it froze during the demo) at Google I/O today. Project Ara will give $100,000 to anyone who can create an Ara module that does something current smartphones can't. From the article: "Ara moved from concept render to physical mockup in about six months, and onstage today Google demonstrated a version of the phone that could just about boot to the Android home screen. In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing. The full boot time (had the demo worked as intended) would be about a minute, which would be a long time for a shipping phone but is reasonably impressive for such an early prototype. Software is the other thing that Ara's developers need to figure out. Current Android builds ship with support for the hardware the phone runs, but they don't include a whole bunch of extraneous drivers for other modems or Wi-Fi modules or cameras or SoCs. Current phone hardware doesn't change, so Android doesn't typically need to worry about this kind of thing."
Transportation

New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel 380

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the plant-engine-hybrid dept.
A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'" The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.
Social Networks

Human Language Is Biased Towards Happiness, Say Computational Linguists 86

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the didn't-analyze-slashdot dept.
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes The idea that people tend to use positive words more often the negative ones is now known as the Pollyanna hypothesis, after a 1913 novel by Eleanor Porter about a girl who tries to find something to be glad about in every situation. But although widely known, attempts to confirm the hypothesis have all been relatively small studies and so have never been thought conclusive.

Now a group of researchers at Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont have repeated this work on a corpus of 100,000 words from 24 languages representing different cultures around the world. They first measured the frequency of words in each language and then paid native speakers to rate how they felt about each word on a scale ranging from the most negative or sad to the most positive or happy. The results reveal that all the languages show a clear bias towards positive words with Spanish topping the list, followed by Portuguese and then English. Chinese props up the rankings as the least happy. They go on to use these findings as a 'lens' through which to evaluate how the emotional polarity changes in novels in various languages and have set up a website where anybody can explore novels in this way. The finding that human language has universal positive bias could have a significant impact on the relatively new science of sentiment analysis on social media sites such as Twitter. If there is a strong bias towards positive language in the first place, and this changes from one language to another, then that is obviously an important factor to take into account.

Submission + - Epic Fail: World Cup Security Team Accidentally Reveals Internal Wi-Fi Password (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Israel-based security firm RISCO Group are clearly very proud of their good work in securing the World Cup, which includes monitoring and maintaining hundreds of wirelessly-connected CCTV security cameras dotted all over the 41,000-seat Arena Pantanal football stadium in Cuiaba, Brazil.

So proud, in fact, that they have made a huge faux pas this week by posting a photo of Luiz Cravo Dorea, head of international cooperation at the Brazil Federal Police, standing right in the middle of the World Cup's main command and control security centre.

Clearly visible in the picture are a bank of computer monitors showing the security centre's Wi-Fi SSID and password, as well as a secret internal email address used to communicate with some Brazilian government agency.
Transportation

Making an Autonomous Car On a Budget 61

Posted by samzenpus from the computer-take-the-wheel dept.
cartechboy writes Tired of waiting for self-driving cars from the automakers? If 2017 and 2020 just feel too far away there's now a solution. It's called Cruise, and for $10,000 it'll turn your current ride into a self-driving car. Kyle Vogt started the company and recruited a team of engineers and roboticists from MIT to work on autonomous vehicles. Cruise plans to market the hardware as something that can be retrofitted to existing cars using roof-mounted sensors near the windshield, actuators to operate the controls, and a trunk-mounted computer that manages everything. The idea is that drivers can merge onto the highway and simply hit the "Cruise" button on the dashboard. This will engage the system and basically turns the car on autopilot. The system can use the steering, brakes, and throttle to keep the car in its lane. Currently the first system, called RP-1, only works on current-generation Audi A4 and S4 models. RP-1 is currently available for pre-order with the launch set for near year.
Intel

Intel Offering 3-D Printed Robot Kits 26

Posted by samzenpus from the I-don't-think-he-knows-I've-got-a-right-to-exist dept.
jfruh writes Intel is developing a series of robot kits for hobbyists, ranging from "Jimmy", a $1,500 "social robot," to a more robust $16,000 model. The robots are powered by Intel x86 chips, are programmable, and can have exoskeletons parts produced at home by 3-D printers. From the article: "The two-legged Jimmy will be one in a line of robots that Intel hopes do-it-yourself enthusiasts will embrace, developing more functionality for the robots, which will be able to handle tasks such as turning on lights, picking up newspapers and even having conversations, researchers said at the Intel Future Showcase 2014 in New York City Tuesday. Intel and its robotics partners will sell kits with servo motors, batteries, boards, a frame and other internal parts. Using 3D printers, users can create robot designs and place them on the exoskeleton."

Submission + - Neandertals ate their veggies, their feces reveal (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists excavating an archaeological site in southern Spain have finally gotten the real poop on Neandertals, finding that the Caveman Diet for these quintessential carnivores included substantial helpings of vegetables. Using the oldest published samples of human fecal matter, archaeologists have found the first direct evidence that Neandertals in Europe cooked and ate plants about 50,000 years ago.

Comment Can't fix the user (Score 1) 205

People will run malware for pennies.

The programmers, sysadmins, and netadmins can only do so much. If you completely lock them down, the users can't do their jobs effectively and/or whine and complain and not buy your software or use your service.

People do pay more for bulletproof software and systems, but most people aren't buying airliners.

Comment Driverless cars prevent more deaths and cheaper (Score 4, Insightful) 501

$160 million per mile, to prevent an average of 50-60 tornado deaths per year?

1) Build 1000 miles? Only $160 billion? Is that cost of labor alone? What about the cost of land?
2) Build just for cities? Which cities?
3) How does a city afford even 1 mile of wall?

We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.

Just last year, there were 32,850 vehicle fatalities in the good ol' USofA.

Driverless cars would've prevented 99% of the crashes. Let's concentrate on rolling those out first and soon.
Image

A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls Screenshot-sm 501

Posted by samzenpus from the up-against-the-wall dept.
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
Books

Barnes & Noble To Spin Off Nook Media, Will Take It Public 51

Posted by samzenpus from the split-up dept.
Nate the greatest writes It looks like the recent rumors about B&N splitting up were true. Along with could-have-been-worse financial news, Barnes & Noble just announced that it's going to spin off its two-year-old ebook subsidiary into a new publicly traded company. The move won't be finalized until 2015, but when it happens the new company is expected to have both existing parts of Nook Media, including the less than successful ebook division and B&N College, which is still managing to turn a profit.
Space

Astronomers Discover Earth-Sized Diamond 112

Posted by samzenpus from the we're-going-to-need-a-bigger-setting dept.
ygslash (893445) writes Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that they have discovered what appears to be the coolest white dwarf ever detected. The white dwarf is formerly a star similar to our own sun which, after expending all of its fuel, has cooled to less than a chilly 3000 degrees Kelvin and contracted to a size approximately the same as Earth. A white dwarf is composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, and the astronomers believe that at that temperature it would be mostly crystallized, forming something like a huge diamond.
Technology

Ask Slashdot: What Would It Take For You To Buy a Smartwatch? 427

Posted by Soulskill from the a-third-wrist-to-carry-in-my-pocket dept.
An anonymous reader writes: I don't wear a watch. I never have. So, to me, the push for smart watches has always been a non-starter. But I was discussing with friends some of the features of Android Wear that Google demonstrated at the I/O conference today, and it got me wondering: what set of features would be required for a smartwatch to become viable? Obviously, this is different for everybody — millions of people wear regular watches even though they could easily pull out their phone and check the time there. Any smartwatch can also tell time, but it has advantages (apps that do other things), and disadvantages (needs charging). Clearly, there are some functions for which it's useful to have an object strapped to your wrist, even if that function could be served by the device in your pocket. Telling time is one, and lots of people use sundry fitness doo-dads to measure exercise. It makes sense to me that checking the weather forecast would fall into this category, and perhaps checking notifications. (Conversely, other functions do not translate at all, like taking photos or playing games.) Thus, two questions: if you already wear a watch, what would it take for a smartwatch to replace it? If you don't wear a watch, what features would motivate you to get one?

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