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Submission + - Ancient Fossils of 380-Million-Year-Old Placoderm Show Evolution of 'Six Pack'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found the 380-million-year-old fossils of a pre-historic fish that may help explain how strong abdominals evolved. The placoderm fish from north west Australia may be responsible for these well-developed powerful abdominal muscles that Swedish researchers note are "not unlike the human equivalents displayed on the beaches of the world every summer."

Submission + - Could your next HDTV roll up like a blind? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Japan's Shinoda Plasma Co. demonstrated a giant, flexible, plasma display at the Display Week 2013 conference last month in Vancouver, British Columbia, winning an award for “Best Prototype at Display Week.” It’s the latest effort to create the flexible gizmos of the future. The company calls its invention a “Luminous Array Film,” or LAFi; instead of being made from one large, flat sheet of glass, the display uses a thousand tiny glass tubes, each 1 mm in diameter and a bit more than 3 feet long. In spite of their tiny size, the tubes are hollow, and can hold the inert gas and phosphors required to make the light to create an image. Shinoda’s secret is that the display can only bend in one dimension. Consider a typical bamboo screen that you might use to cover a window, where a flexible fabric connects the relatively rigid bamboo sticks. You can roll up the screen so that all the bamboo pieces remain parallel to each other — forming a cylinder less than 4 inches across.

Submission + - 'Serious misperception' on NSA spying, Google legal guy Drummond says (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: There is a "serious misperception" about the National Security Agency's PRISM program, Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in an exclusive interview with Fox News. On Tuesday the company pushed back against the layers of secrecy surrounding the agency's alleged blanket snooping on American citizens. Speaking in an exclusive interview from the Netherlands, explained the company's decision to fight back against the FBI, NSA, and Attorney General's office. “We were as shocked about those revelations as anyone,” Drummond told Fox News.

Submission + - Inside the NSA's secret Utah data center (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: As Americans demand answers about the government's wholesale electronic snooping on its citizens, the primary snooper — the National Security Agency (NSA) — is building a monstrous digital datacenter in a remote corner of Utah capable of sorting through and storing every e-mail, voicemail, and social media communication it can get its hands on. This top-secret data warehouse could hold as many as 1.25 million 4-terabyte hard drives, built into some 5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes that make up your digital fingerprint. And that's just one way to catalog people, said Charles King, principal analyst at data center consulting firm Pund-IT. "The NSA — like any large organization — is using numerous kinds of storage systems," King told FoxNews.com, including "innovative SSD and in-memory systems for high performance applications like real time analytics."

Submission + - Could bitcoin go legit? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: On May 15, the Department of Homeland Security seized a digital bank account used by "MtGox," the world's largest exchange, where people buy and sell bitcoins. DHS alleged, and a judge agreed, that there is "probable cause" that MtGox is an "unlicensed money service business." If proven, the penalty for operating such a business is a fine and up to 5 years in jail. FoxNews.com caught up with several bitcoin exchanges, including CampBX, MtGox, CoinLab and more, to ask them how they've navigated the regulatory waters — and how to go legit.

Submission + - John McAfee's Belize home burns to ground (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Just when you thought the strange story of John McAfee was over.The former island home of anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee burned down Thursday afternoon under circumstance he told FoxNews.com were “suspicious.” It’s an odd choice of words from a man whom the Belize police found suspicious, following the November 2012 murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, a well-liked builder from Florida who was shot at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye. “I believe that there are a select few with great power in Belize that will go to great lengths to harm me,” McAfee said. “This fire was not just a strange coincidence."

Submission + - Can you train your brain? Lumosity, BrainHQ tested (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The popular Lumosity service has 40 million members. Its exercises are generally entertaining — if a little humbling at first. New users fill out a very simple questionnaire about their concerns and focus (do you want to better remember people's names or improve your concentration and avoid distractions). Then Lumosity creates a daily regime of exercises for you. Typical tasks include remembering ever more complex patterns, visual positions, or recalling multiple symbols or images in quick succession. The idea is to continually challenge the user in an attempt to increase particular mental functions, including working memory and executive function. Lumosity is $14.95 a month. A similar program, Posit Science's BrainHQ, is $14 a month. I've tried both and found them each to be engaging — at least for 20 minutes a day.

Submission + - Google Glass: Porn-Free (for Now, Anyway) (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Google’s wearable computer – glassless glasses that bundle an entire smartphone worth of brains into a tiny strip of plastic you wear on your head – most often return textual descriptions to your searches, snippets of information about movies, the weather, and other facts. Glass displays moving images beautifully, however. Just not pornographic ones. And that's how it's going to stay, because the adult film industry, widely believed to be the driver of new technologies, is taking a pass on Google Glass. "We've decided to take a wait-and-see approach to Google Glass,” Steven Hirsch, founder and co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, said. “We want to see how quickly our target audience chooses to adapt it before we make any decision to move ahead."

Submission + - Richard Branson plans orbital spaceships for Virgin Galactic (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Following the historic first rocket-powered flight of its SpaceShipTwo vehicle, Virgin Galactic plans to build a fleet of spaceships and begin ferrying hundreds of tourists into space in 2014. And then? A whole new kind of spacecraft, Sir Richard Branson said. “We’ll be building orbital spaceships after that,” Branson told Fox News Tuesday, "so that people who want to go for a week or two can.” Assuming the cost is on the same scale, would you pay a few hundred grand for a few weeks in orbit?

Submission + - Iranians are already on your computer, lawmaker says (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The House Intelligence Committee is warning that “time is running out” before the next major cyberattack: The Russians, Iranians, Chinese and others are likely already on your computer. "You have criminal organizations trying to get into your personal computer and steal your personal stuff. And by the way, the Chinese are probably on your computer, the Russians are probably on your personal computer, the Iranians are already there,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R.-MI) said. “They’re trying to steal things that they think are valuable or use your computer to help them steal from someone else,” he said. “That’s a real problem.”

Submission + - Navy to deploys lasers on ships in 2014 (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The Pentagon has plans to deploy its first ever ship-mounted laser next year, a disruptive, cutting-edge weapon capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles with a blast of infrared energy. Navy officials announced Monday that in early 2014, a solid-state laser prototype will be mounted to the fantail of the USS Ponce and sent to the 5th fleet region in the Middle East for real-world experience. "It operates much like a blowtorch ... with an unlimited magazine," one official said.

Submission + - An Apple iRadio service? It has a long way to go (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Turning Apple into cider is a popular sport these days. And Apple is certainly experiencing a lacuna in innovative product introductions (where's the Apple television? where's the Apple watch, when is Apple going to make a better-than-Samsung phone?). Now, the rumor mill is heralding the introduction of Apple radio this summer — but it may be too little, too late. Unlike when iTunes launched more than a dozen years ago, there's competition aplenty. And since the success of iTunes didn't translate into success for the music companies and artists — revenues are roughly half of what they were in the 90s — music execs (and artists) are a lot more skittish about making deals with Apple today. TuneIn CEO John Donham sees an Apple entry as competing more with the likes of Pandora and Spotify than traditional radio. "But Apple has a lot of catching up to do. So it's a story that's going to play out over the next 5 to 7 years," he says.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Asteroid Capture Mission to Be Proposed in 2014 Budget (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by asteroinauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Mulling Smaller Windows 8 Tablets (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Microsoft might want a piece of the mini-tablet market. The company lowered the minimum screen resolution for Windows 8 tablets, from 1,366 x 768 pixels to 1024 x 768 pixels. “This doesn’t imply that we’re encouraging partners to regularly use a lower screen resolution,” it wrote in an accompanying newsletter. “We understand that partners exploring designs for certain markets could find greater design flexibility helpful.” As pointed out by ZDNet’s Ed Bott—cited by other publications as the journalist who first noticed the altered guidelines—that lowered resolution “would allow manufacturers to introduce devices that are in line with the resolutions of the iPad Mini (1024 x 768) and the Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7 (both 1280 x 800).” Whatever the contours of the smaller-tablet market, it’s certainly popular enough to tantalize any potential competitor. But if Microsoft plunges in, it will face the same challenges that confronted it in the larger-tablet arena: lots of solid competitors, and not a whole lot of time to make a winning impression. There are also not-inconsiderable hardware challenges to overcome, including processor selection and engineering for optimal battery life."

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