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Science

Multicellular life made in months->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth’s history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.

Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study.

The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells.

Many single-celled organisms, including yeast, often form clumps of genetically distinct cells. But Ratcliff’s snowflakes were made up of genetically identical cells that had budded off and stuck together. Many other multicellular organisms may well have evolved through a similar 'divide-and-stick' process."
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Firefox

Notes on Reducing Firefox's Memory Consumption->

Submitted by Skuto
Skuto writes "At yesterdays linux.conf.au Browser miniconference in Ballarat, Australia, Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote gave a detailed presentation about the history of Firefox's memory consumption. The 37 slides-with-notes explain in gritty detail what caused Firefox 4's memory usage to be higher than expected, how many leaks and accidental memory use bugs were tracked down with Valgrind plugins, as well as the pitfalls of common memory allocation strategies. Current work is now focused on reducing the memory usage of popular add-ons such as AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and Firebug.
Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage."
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In pictures: Nasa's next Mars rover->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "In August 2012, the Nasa rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. The size of a small car, it's four times as heavy as predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and comes with a large robot arm, a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven metres, a percussive drill and a weather station. Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. Wired has some high-resolution photographs from lab that is putting the next rover together."
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United States

America - Like it or Unfriend It

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "As we celebrate America's birthday today, head over the to the NY Times and take a look at a very clever "op-art" creation, "Like it or Unfriend It" by Teddy Wayne, Mike Sacks, and Thomas Ng that represents what "America's Wall" would look like through our history. Beginning with "Christopher Columbus wrote on America's wall: 'This IS India, right?", through "America added Great Britian to Kingdoms I am Fighting With", through "The South has changed its privacy settings to accept carpetbaggers," and finishing with " America stopped playing the game Wild-Goose Chase While Nation-Building," and "America has joined the China Network" the wall includes dozens of invitations, likes, posts and changes to privacy settings that shows a summary of American history as seen from a Facebook perspective. Our favorite from the 1980's: "Ronald Reagan created a page: "Trickle-Down Economics" followed by "Half a million upper-income people like this.""
Power

Giant Fluid Batteries Store Energy for 2,000 Homes->

Submitted by PeteRoss
PeteRoss writes "A consortium of scientists is developing a new type of large fluid battery that will be able to store enough renewable energy to power 2,000 homes. One of the roadblocks to large-scale renewable energy adoption is that it is intermittent — if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing power can’t be generated, so there is a tremendous need for systems that store excess power to be released as needed. These new batteries are based on redox flow technology — which converts chemical energy to electrical currents very quickly — and each one will be the size of a handball court."
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Government

FCC compromises on Net Neutrality rules->

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes "The new rules provide fewer protections for mobile broadband subscribers and may lead to a fractured Internet, critics said. The new rules, a compromise championed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, would bar wireline-based broadband providers — but not mobile broadband providers — from "unreasonable discrimination" against Web traffic, prompting some consumer groups to call the rules "fake" net neutrality.

Genachowski's plan, approved after more than seven years of debate about whether net neutrality rules are needed, also contains several loopholes for broadband providers, critics said, including an exception for managed services separate from the public Internet.

But Genachowski defended the rules as "strong and balanced.""
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bank lost 5.5m due to security hole->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Dutch police have arrested 13 people in connection with stealing of €5.5m from a Dutch bank by manipulating the bank's computer system. Police refused to say which bank was involved but said the money was taken directly from the bank rather than private accounts. Later on the dutch state owned ABN Amro declared to the press agency ANP they had an "open gate" in their trading system wich was quickly located and closed as a result of the breach. So far about 2 million of the stolen money has been traced back and police is still investigating the case."
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Microsoft

Microsoft: mules, not phishing victims, lose money->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Our examination of mules has interesting implications. First, it suggests that it is not the victims of phishing and keylogging that lose money but money mules. Second, mule recruitment is the major bottleneck in the fraud pipeline: without them stolen credentials are worth little. Third, this explains why credentials sell for small fractions of their face value; i.e. there is an insufficient supply of mules to drain the number of compromised accounts. Finally, it shows there is no shortage of compromised accounts. Thus a reduction in the rate of account compromise will not reduce fraud at all, at least until account compromise is at a level small enough that it becomes the bottleneck. The only effective way to reduce online fraud is by making mule recruitment even harder."
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Privacy

Supreme Court of Canada rules on electric meters->

Submitted by perp
perp writes "According to the privacy blagosphere, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) released an important decision today that considered whether an individual home owner had a reasonable expectation of privacy in electric meter data.

The police had asked a local utility company to attach a digital recording ammeter (DRA) to the electric meter on a home in order to monitor electrical usage. The data gleaned from the DRA and from other sources was then used to obtain a warrant to search the home. The search resulted in exposing a marijuana grow op.

The SCC ultimately decided that DRA technology merely indicates electricity use, not what the electricity was used for, so it was a reasonable loss of privacy."
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The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble. -- Thomas Carlyle