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Submission + - Godot Engine Reaches 1.0, Releases First Stable (godotengine.org)

Submitted by goruka
goruka writes: Godot, the most advanced open source (MIT licensed) game engine, that was open-sourced back in February, has reached 1.0 (stable).
It sports an impressive amount of features, and it's the only game engine with visual tools (code editor, scripting, debugger, 3D engine, 2D engine, physics, multi-platform deploy, etc) on a scale comparable to commercial offerings. As a plus, the user interface runs natively on Linux. Godot has amassed a healthy user community (through forum, Facebook and IRC) since it went public, and was used to publish commercial games in the Latin American and European markets such as "Ultimo Carnaval" with publisher Square Enix, or "The Mystery Team" by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Submission + - Israeli cave offers clues about when humans mastered fire (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Mastering fire was one of the most important developments in human prehistory. But it’s also one of the hardest to pin down, with different lines of evidence pointing to different timelines. A new study of artifacts from a cave in Israel suggests that our ancestors began regularly using fire about 350,000 years ago—far enough back to have shaped our culture and behavior but too recent to explain our big brains or our expansion into cold climates.

Submission + - How Data From The Kepler Space Telescope Is Changing The Drake Equation

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The Drake equation describes how the number of other extraterrestrial civilisations in the galaxy depends on factors such as the percentage of stars with planets, the percentage of those that are capable of hosting life, the percentage of these on which life actually forms, and so on. It has been a famous rallying point for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the early 1960s when Frank Drake first formulated it. Since then, critics have argued that many of the parameters are unknown so the equation produces numbers that are little better than guesses. Now one astronomer points out that the Kepler Space Telescope is changing that. Kepler was specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around other stars, something it has done remarkably well. For example, the Kepler data suggests that up to 15 per cent of Sun-like stars have Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. These kinds of figures dramatically change that inferences that can be made using Drake's equation. For instance, the new data applied to the Drake equation suggests that the nearest life-bearing planet may be within 10 light years of here. But it also suggests that the nearest civilisation is likely to be thousands of light years away.

Submission + - NOAA: Climate Change Did Not Cause Calif. Drought (discovery.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NOAA: Climate Change Did Not Cause Calif. Drought

Climate change is usually discussed in extremes: Epic heat in Australia. A deadly heat wave in Europe. Hurricane Sandy grinding New York to a halt.

The extreme California drought? Maybe not so much.

A new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study released Monday shows that the three-year California drought may have been caused by natural variability and not necessarily human-caused climate change.

The study follows a series of studies released in September that were inconclusive about the role of climate change in the California drought, and another published last week showing that the drought is the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.

Submission + - $35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size And I/O (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Hardkernel has again set its sites on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, a extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet. More info is at Odroid-C1 product page.

Submission + - Monochromatic light as a species-selective insecticide (nature.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The harmful effects of ultraviolet light have been long known. But now researchers at Tohoku University in Japan claim that visible blue light is also lethal to many insects, possibly even more so than UV, even at reasonable daylight intensities. Moreover, they report that certain species are more sensitive to specific wavelengths: Given the same intensity (3x10^18 photons/sec/m2), light in the 440-467nm range was far more lethal to fruit flies than light of longer or shorter wavelengths. The wavelength 417nm was three times as effective at killing mosquito larvae than the shorter 404nm light, contradicting the notion that higher-energy photons always cause more damage. The research has wide implications for modeling the effect of natural and manmade environmental changes on insect populations and for selectively controlling populations of certain species.

Submission + - New effort to grant legal rights to chimpanzees fails (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Advocates of “legal personhood” to chimpanzees have lost another battle. This morning, a New York appellate court rejected a lawsuit by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to free a chimp named Tommy from captivity. The group had argued that the chimpanzee deserved the human right of bodily liberty. Despite the loss, the NhRP is pursuing more cases in the hopes of conferring legal rights to a variety of animals, from elephants to dolphins.

Submission + - 'Moneyball' Approach Reduces Crime in New York City

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” says Vance. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.” When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn’t quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn’t know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.

Vance divided Manhattan’s 22 police precincts into five areas and assigned a senior assistant D.A. and an analyst to map the crime in each area. CSU staff members met with patrol officers, detectives and Police Department field intelligence officers and asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct’s 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose “incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community’s safety.” Seeded with these initial cases, the CSU built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal records. A large percentage are recidivists who have been repeatedly convicted of grand larceny, one of the top index crimes in Manhattan, but the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,” which currently stands at 81. “These are people we want to know about if they are arrested,” says Kerry Chicon. “We are constantly adding, deleting, editing and updating the intelligence in the Arrest Alert System. If someone gets out of a gang, or goes to prison for a long time, or moves out of the city or the state, or ages out of being a focus for us, or dies, we edit the system accordingly — we do that all the time.”

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,” says Chauncey Parker. “The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.”

Submission + - What gets little girls interested in science? (slate.com) 1

Submitted by nbauman
nbauman writes: Programmer David Auerbach is dismayed that, at a critical developmental age, his 4-year-old daughter wants to be a princess, not a scientist or engineer, he writes in Slate. The larger society keeps forcing sexist stereotypes on her, in every book and toy store. (Et tu, Lego?) How do you non-coercively inspire girls that age to go down the STEM path? What actually works?

If you are a little girl, or once were a little girl, or were the parent of a little girl, what worked for you?

Submission + - Why Pluto Still Matters

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Nearly a century ago, Pluto was discovered, and for 48 years it remained the only known object whose orbit takes it beyond the gravitational pull of Neptune. In a single generation, we've now discovered more than 1,000 additional objects in the Kuiper Belt, but does that make Pluto any less special? A strong argument for why Pluto might matter now more than ever.

Submission + - Chinese CEO Said Free Is the Right Price for Mobile Software (recode.net)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Sheng Fu, CEO of Cheetah Mobile, a public Chinese mobile software company you probably haven't heard of but have top downloaded products in Android markets around the world, said that the intense competition of the Chinese market leads to products that can compete globally. There are so many recent university graduates working in tech, all with their startups looking to find their place in the market, he said. Chinese companies saw the impact that piracy played in the PC software era, and China’s mobile companies grew up knowing they would need to make money without getting consumers to open their wallets. “Chinese companies are so good at making free but high-quality products,” he said. Sounds like we have a good race to the bottom.

Submission + - ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Sony Movie Leaks, UK MP Says (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister's former IP advisor, as "facilitators" web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.

Mike Weatherley MP, the recent IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, has published several piracy reports including one earlier in the year examining the advertising revenue on pirate sites. He believes that companies with no direct connection to the hack or subsequent leaks should shoulder some blame.

“Piracy is a huge international problem. The recent cyber-attack on Sony and subsequent release of films to illegal websites is just one high-profile example of how criminals exploit others’ Intellectual Property,” Weatherley writes in an email to TF.

“Unfortunately, the theft of these films – and their subsequent downloads – has been facilitated by web-hosting companies and, ultimately, ISPs who do have to step-up and take some responsibility.”

Weatherley doesn’t provide detail on precisely why web-hosts and ISPs should take responsibility for the work of malicious hackers (possibly state-sponsored) and all subsequent fall out from attacks. The theory is that “something” should be done, but precisely what remains elusive.

Submission + - The moment of truth for BICEP2

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe, going all the way back to before the Big Bang! By looking at the photon polarization data, they claimed to have surpassed the gold “5” standard for announcing a discovery in physics. But recently, that’s been walked back, as there could have been a systematic error at play: simple emission from our own Milky Way. Later this month, the Planck team will release their results, and either confirm or refute BICEP2. Here’s where we stand on the eve of that announcement.

Submission + - The ZX Spectrum is back (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by techfilz
techfilz writes: The Daily Mail reports that Sir Clive Sinclair has announced he is launching a modernised version of his 80's 8 bit computer, the ZX Spectrum.

The new Sinclair Spectrum Vega has less buttons than the original retro favourite, but should be able to run all the old games and accept SD cards as input. The product is ready and is currently undergoing funding via an Indiegogo campaign.

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