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Medicine

UK Government Backs Three-Person IVF 132

Posted by Soulskill from the US-republicans-introduce-defense-of-test-tubes-act dept.
Dupple writes "The U.K. looks set to become the first country to allow the creation of babies using DNA from three people, after the government backed the in vitro fertilization technique. It will produce draft regulations later this year and the procedure could be offered within two years. Experts say three-person IVF could eliminate debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial diseases that are passed on from mother to child. Opponents say it is unethical and could set the UK on a 'slippery slope.' They also argue that affected couples could adopt or use egg donors instead. Mitochondria are the tiny, biological 'power stations' that give the body energy. They are passed from a mother, through the egg, to her child. Defective mitochondria affect one in every 6,500 babies. This can leave them starved of energy, resulting in muscle weakness, blindness, heart failure and death in the most extreme cases."
Robotics

DARPA-Funded Software Could Usher In the Era of Open-Source Robotics 17

Posted by Soulskill from the or-skynet,-either-one dept.
malachiorion writes "The best thing to come out of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, so far, isn't the lineup of nifty rescue bots being developed by teams around the world, or even Boston Dynamics' incredible Atlas humanoid. It's the pumped-up version of Gazebo, the free, open-source robotics simulation software whose expansion and further development is being funded by DARPA. This article has a look at how the software was used in the recent virtual leg of the competition, as well as how it could change the way robotics R&D is conducted (and create more roboticists, with its low-cost, cloud-based architecture)."
Technology

Festo's Drone Dragonfly Takes To the Air 45

Posted by samzenpus from the little-flyer dept.
yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."
GNOME

GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode 267

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the extend-freely dept.
Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions."
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the cycle-is-nearly-complete dept.
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comment Re:Can any one help... (Score 1) 786

by mehemiah (#43024969) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer
Ok, indeed, secure boot is pretty good anywhere but this really shouldn't go into the kernel mainline. Something as big as this can remain out of tree like xenkernel did for years. Like Linus said, there's already kernel module signing we can always extend the signing to support other key types but the actual binary parsing really shouldn't go in.

Comment Re:Can any one help... (Score 5, Informative) 786

by mehemiah (#43003007) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer
First of all, its not just ideological that he doesn't want such specific code in the Linux kernel. For the same reason he doesn't want to put tools/kvm in the kernel, its not germane to BEING A KERNEL so its NOT going into the kernel! read the mail yourself. Its like a government program, in that its likely to live forever, however, Linus wants Linux to outlast Microsoft AND RedHat and that code will become vestigial as soon as microsoft moves on to some other way to control hardware vendors. On the other hand, do servers need secure boot? NO, do tablets need secure boot? NO. So this is Linus admonishing developers for even SUGGESTING to include such a corner case in the code of the linux kernel.

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