51153909
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet, and slap a big sign on it that says "United States Not Welcome."
At least, that's the version of the story that's been making the rounds. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA’s sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years.
51113573
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Today, applied technology startup TrackingPoint Solutions is working tirelessly to turn novice shots into precision snipers. The company made headlines in early 2013 when it unveiled the precision guided firearm (PGF). Think of it as a long-range, laser-guided robo rifleâ"as much Linux-based computer as traditional firearm. The PGF's closed-loop system comprises not just the gun itself, a custom Surgeon rifle, but also custom ammunition and, notably, a proprietary (and WiFi-enabled) scope. The technology packed into TrackingPoint's initial PGF package is so advanced that we'd heard it could have an inexperienced shooter, maybe even someone who hasn't ever fired a gun, putting lead on targets at over 1,000 away in mere minutes.
50931431
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Yamauchi was born in 1927 in Kyoto. Raised by his mother and grandparents, his career and studies were put on hold by World War II. Although he was too young to fight, he began working at a factory to help the war effort. After the war, he attended Waseda University, but dropped out after his grandfather had a stroke and was unable to lead their family playing-card business, Yamauchi Nintendo Ltd.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 by Yamauchi’s great-grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi, as a hanafuda playing-card manufacturer that specialized in a Japanese-style playing card that circumvented the Japanese embargo on western goods. Hanafuda became a popular step-in for poker sets in gambling dens in Japan, and Nintendo continued to produce these cards from their native Kyoto for many years.
50927741
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Astrobiologists at the University of East Anglia have estimated that the Earth will sustain life for at least another 1.74 billion years, and maybe as long as 3.25 billion years from now. The researchers were able to estimate how long Earth will be in the Sun's "habitable zone," which is the distance from a star where liquid water could conceivably be found. Habitable zones vary based on the size and age of the star, which, as they age, grow hotter. The habitable zone around smaller stars can last for tens of billions of Earth years. The Earth gets to bask in the habitable zone for about 6.29 billion years, and three-fourths of that time has already passed.
“After this point, Earth will be in the ‘hot zone’ of the sun, with temperatures so high that the seas would evaporate,” said Andrew Rushby, a PhD student at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences. “We would see a catastrophic and terminal extinction event for all life.”
50868755
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
At the California Institute of Technology, student volunteer behaviors were studied as they traded in a fantasy style market. Participant brains were mapped using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which scans blood flow in the brain as an indication of activity.
By watching traders form bubbles in a make-believe market, a strong correlation was found between separate areas of the brain responsible for a) processing value judgments, and b) predicting the behavior of others by inferring their intentions. Financial 'bubble' formation, when trading and asset prices rush beyond the asset's intrinsic value, was connected to increased activity in the area that performs value judgments. Traders more likely to lose their money to a bubble exhibited a spike of activity in that area of the brain.
50812989
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Ever notice that whenever some clown writes a truly abhorrent, asinine blog post, it ends up being the most-shared article in your Twitter or Facebook feed that day? It's annoying as a reader—and as a journalist with at least a modicum of professional interest in having stories shared—to have everyone and their mother jump out of the digital woodwork to shout "Boo this man! [link]" when there's so many superior stories worth reading every day.
Hate-sharing seems like an undeniable force on the web. Now, a team of researchers have appeared to quantify it. According to work published on the arXiv pre-print server, anger is viral.
50776907
submission
Wattos writes:
On my daily commute to work, it is my habit to check several websites for the latest news. Imagine how surprised I was that when slashdot.org was not accessible anymore. Instead I received a 403 Restricted error page. Initially I thought that this would have been a simple mistake by my mobile ISP, so I connected to my home VPN. Slashdot was blocked including many links to websites with vpn services. After connecting to a VPN provider outside of the country (in Poland) slashdot was accessible again.
50708449
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
These numbers are never supposed to change. You might say that they are nature itself, if such a thing as “nature itself” were to exist. The numbers behind the constants look ugly and arbitrary, like G, which is 6.6726 × 1011. But that ugliness is more of a function of the units we impose. With G, the units are mkgs, which is some combination of distance, mass, and time. We could apply different units to G through some equivalency and wind up with a really nice number, like 1 (the nicest number actually)... The new value is 240 parts per million bigger than the latest official value, set in 2010. This would be 6.6742 × × 1011, rather than the currently accepted 6.6726 × 1011. It’s a significant deviation. What’s more, the newest measurement, courtesy of Terry Quinn of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, was designed to mimic the 2001 measurement, but with every possible source of error removed an checked against a second method. They should be different, but aren’t. Either both experiments made the same dramatic and very, very hidden error, or gravity is fluctuating.
50663221
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A study from Albright College has found that people actually prefer the sound of their own voices. Imagine that! In an unwitting assessment of their own voices versus other people's voices, 80 men and women were attracted to their own voices more than others.' Science Daily explains: Researchers included three different samples of participants' own voice recordings in the group. Researchers believe that most participants did not recognize or realize their own voices were included, yet rated their own voices as sounding more attractive than how other raters judged their voices. Participants also rated their own voices more favorably than they had rated the voices of other people.
50630181
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Researchers recently spent some time forcing dogs and robots to hang out together, in order to better understand the social qualities of interactive robots. The scientists had two objectives: to find out whether canines would interact with a robot and also to see whether they would ascribe social qualities to a non-living, non-human-like being. Dogs were divided into two groups: one would have a social interaction with the robot while the other would have an asocial interaction. They were allowed to watch their owners interact with the robot before meeting it themselves, which was then followed by a session wherein the canine subjects had to obey gestural cues from either a robot or a human. The robot purposely did not look human, save for its arms and gloved hand, as the researchers wanted to explore sociality apart from anthropoid features.
50624577
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Take Generating Utopia, a new visualization by designer Stefan Wagner. The idea was to illustrate what our habitats might look like if and when we're able to shape them to the rhythms of residents' social-locational data. In this case, it's the mid-sized German town of Würzburg. By pulling publicly available information tagged to Würzburg from Foursquare, OpenStreetMap, and Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung, and straining it all through the Processing programming tool, Wagner gives us a real-time, interactive look at how some of its residents get to their jobs, or to wherever it is they let off steam or have fun or whatever.
50589259
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last week, we learned that the National Security Agency has led an aggressive effort to “break widely used Internet encryption technologies.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence claims it “would not be doing its job” if it didn't try to counter the encryption used by terrorists and cyber-criminals. There is speculation that many protocols or crypto implementations have been compromised, deliberately weakened, or have had backdoors inserted. In doing so, the NSA has made the Internet less safe for us all, perhaps including those that wish to take advantage of Bitcoin's privacy benefits.
Bitcoin is an open source cryptocurrency; a peer-to-peer (decentralized) electronic cash system. It's also the most powerful distributed computing project in the world. Those two factors have already brought it under government scrutiny.
50539947
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The Hyperloop created a perfect foil for the CHSR—a cheaper, faster, shinier future train of the future to contrast with the government’s outdated, bureaucracy-laden model. With public support for the CHSR already dwindling, Musk may have accelerated the process: Every story about the fuckups and general pokiness of the high-speed rail will now be accompanied by nods to Musk’s declaration that he can do it better. And that may have been Musk’s goal all along.
Looked at cynically, the Hyperloop was just a cleverly-disguised piece of anti-CHSR propaganda, an ostentatious display of Musk’s genius and billions masking average NIMBY-ism. Musk himself has acknowledged that the Hyperloop will probably never materialize. The 42-year-old Tesla CEO, who is currently focused on commercial space transport, seems to have little interest in actually building his superfast train, much less in navigating the bureaucratic landmines of building a mass transit system across California. But his idea has drawn attention to California’s high-speed rail clusterfuck, and sparked new debate about the future of mass transit.
50504171
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
“It's the first time any subglacial lake has been studied,” the study's author, David Pearce, said. Though a Russian team is currently studying water samples from Lake Vostok and a micro-submersible has explored the waters of Lake Whillans, the BAS team's report is indeed the groundbreaker when it comes to life in the sediments of Antarctica's 380 subglacial lakes.
100,000 years ago, Lake Hodgson was buried by advancing glaciers, and has remained covered in ice ever since. During the Last Glacial Maximum, some 20,000 years ago, over 1,500 feet of ice separated the lake from the surface. It's now categorized as an emerging subglacial lake thanks to global warming, which has caused glacial recession around the poles.
50503815
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Over the course of one day and the release of two consumer electronics, we have gleaned the following about some big and stirring changes afoot: Apple has officially launched its campaign to make you (or iYou, if you insist) its biggest product, Apple has begun its dominance of the digital camera market, Apple has made the color gold fashionable again, and Apple is about to destroy its competition with an indestructible-but-affordable step-up iPhone. Is any of it this true? Who knows? I said "might" after all.
Which, whatever. This bumrush to report, comment, and opine on Apple products on a release day is nothing new, and neither is pointing out how tired the whole ritual has become. But this go-round felt especially perfunctory; it was almost as if you could hear the groans between the page breaks as a small army of tech bloggers struggled to articulate how yet another iPhone in an interminable line of iPhone-numericals and iPhone-numerical-Ses, might just change everything.
