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Submission + - Fire Destroys Large Part of Tesla UK Service Centre

Submitted by AppleHoshi
AppleHoshi writes: The BBC is reporting that an accidental fire at Tesla's Gatwick Service Centre in the U.K. has damaged "at least half" of the facility. Initial reports are that the fire did not begin in the service area itself, but started in a parts storage area and spread from there. The fire was extinguished within three hours and no staff or customers were injured.

Submission + - UAE building giant simulated Mars city in the desert (newatlas.com)

Submitted by future guy
future guy writes: "The project is called the Mars Science City and will cover 1.9 million sq ft (176,516 sq m) at a cost of nearly US$140 million dollars. The city will span several domes, including a space for a team to live for up to a year as part of a Mars simulation."

Submission + - A Fourth Gravitational Wave Has Been Detected (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers have made a new detection of gravitational waves and for the first time have been able to trace the shape of ripples sent through spacetime when black holes collide. The announcement, made at a meeting of the G7 science ministers in Turin, marks the fourth cataclysmic black-hole merger that astronomers have spotted using Ligo, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The latest detection is the first to have also been picked up by the Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy, providing a new layer of detail on the three dimensional pattern of warping that occurs during some of the most violent and energetic events in the universe.

A tiny wobble in the signal, picked up by Ligo’s twin instruments and the Virgo detector on 14 August, could be traced back to the final moments of the merger of two black holes about 1.8bn years ago. The black holes, with masses about 31 and 25 times the mass of the sun, combined to produce a newly spinning black hole with about 53 times the mass of the sun. The remaining three solar masses were converted into pure energy that spilled out as deformations that spread outwards across spacetime like ripples across a pond. Detecting these tiny distortions has required detectors sensitive enough to measuring a discrepancy of just one thousandth of the diameter of an atomic nucleus across a 4km laser beam.

Submission + - Britain opens first subsidy-free solar power farm (reuters.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Britain’s first solar power farm to operate without a government subsidy is due to open in eastern England on Tuesday, as a sharp fall in costs has made renewable energy much more economical. Britain needs to invest in new energy capacity to replace aging coal and nuclear plants that are due to close in the 2020s. But it is also trying to reduce subsidies on renewable power generation. The 10 megawatt (MW) solar farm, in Clayhill, Bedfordshire, can generate enough electricity to power around 2,500 homes and also has a 6 MW battery storage facility on site.

Submission + - SPAM: Super-Accurate GPS Chips Coming to Smartphones in 2018 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: It’ll know where you are to within 30 centimeters(11.8 inches), rather than five meters. At least that’s the claim chip maker Broadcom is making. It says that some of its next-generation smartphone chips will use new global positioning satellite signals to boost accuracy. In a detailed report on the announcement and how the new signals work, IEEE Spectrum says that the new chips, which are expected to appear in some phones as soon as next year, will also use half the power of today’s and even work in cities where tower blocks often interfere with existing systems. All told, it sounds like a massive step change for those who rely on their phones to find their way.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Equifax Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin Has Retired (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by phalse phace
phalse phace writes: Following on the heels of a story that revealed that Equifax hired a music major with no education related to technology or security as its Chief Security Officer, Equifax announced on Friday afternoon that Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin has quit the company along with Chief Information Officer David Webb.

Chief Information Officer David Webb and Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin retired immediately, Equifax said in a news release that did not mention either of those executives by name. Mark Rohrwasser, who had been leading Equifax’s international information-technology operations since 2016, will replace Webb and Russ Ayres, a member of Equifax’s IT operation, will replace Mauldin.

Submission + - What's an Air-Raid Warning Like in the 21st Century? 2

Submitted by AppleHoshi
AppleHoshi writes: Those of us living in Japan found out at a little after six o'clock this morning when our phones went crazy on receipt of an automated alert from the "J-Alert" system. Shortly afterwards, loudspeakers broadcast another alert (there are loudspeakers everywhere in Japan, to warn of earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons).

As normal with any disaster situation in Japan, all of the available television channels immediately switched over to full-coverage mode, with a repetition of what the situation was ("There's a missile heading in the direction of north-central Japan") followed by basic instructions of what to do ("If it comes down in your area, try to extinguish any fires and immediately inform your local police and fire departments").

      Shortly before twenty past six we got the news that the missile had over-flown northern Japan and landed in the Pacific, about 1,000km from the coast of Hokkaido. The "all-clear" was broadcast over the local speakers a short while later.

      Strange as it may seem, this all had an air of normality about it. Japan gets more than it's fair share of natural disasters, so anyone living here gets plenty of exposure to this same routine (it's just that the reason is usually an earthquake, typhoon or tsunami, rather than a megalomaniac).

Submission + - Facebook Exec's New Startup Targets Wearable Brain Imaging (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: Display-tech guru Mary Lou Jepsen is leaving her post at Facebook/Oculus to work on a new startup called Open Water. Jepsen, a veteran of Google X and the MIT Media Lab, says the company will develop wearable MRI devices that could help doctors do early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Inspired in part by musician Peter Gabriel, Open Water also hopes to use advances in neural imaging and brain-machine interfaces to create a system for reading and communicating human thoughts electronically.

Submission + - Microsoft To End Nagging Windows 10 Upgrade Notifications Soon (winbeta.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has officially announced today it will end the annoying "Get Windows 10" notifications in July, when they end the free Windows 10 upgrade offer. In a statement to WinBeta, Microsoft said in a comment: "Details are still being finalized, but on July 29th the Get Windows 10 app that facilitates the easy upgrade to Windows 10 will be disabled and eventually removed from PCs worldwide. Just as it took time to ramp up and roll out the Get Windows 10 app, it will take time to ramp it down." This is great news for users who have decided to not install Windows 10 for whatever reason.

Submission + - After software upgrade, Kobo customers are losing books from their libraries (teleread.com) 2

Submitted by Robotech_Master
Robotech_Master writes: After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries--notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don't have this problem, of course.

Submission + - Tucows Cuts the Crap from its Download Site 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Tucows began as a software downloads site nearly 25 years ago and has since evolved beyond that early core business and into domain names, mobile phone service (Ting) and symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet in select towns and cities in the US (Ting Internet). Now Tucows has announced that as a gesture of goodwill, Tucows has banned deceptive ads, hidden download buttons, pop-ups, flypaper, toolbars and other such Internet nastiness from the the nearly 40,000 software titles it hosts for users on it's download sites. “On the Tucows downloads site today, you’ll find no flashing ads. No toolbars. No pop-ups,” says CEO Elliot Noss. “You might see a few plugs for other Tucows services, but nothing too egregious and certainly not anything that’s pretending to be a download button.” With Tucows’ success in domain names, mobile phone service (Ting) and fiber Internet (Ting Internet), Tucows' revenue from downloads has become less relevant when looking at the balance sheet. “We don’t lightly walk away from opportunities or revenue,” says Noss. “In the end, though, we’d rather have the Tucows name associated with good; with a belief in the power of the Internet to affect positive change. An ad-heavy site that packages browser toolbars along with every download isn’t something we want people to think of when they hear ‘Tucows,’."

Submission + - In search of a healthy gut, one man turned to an extreme DIY fecal transplant (theverge.com)

Submitted by Josiah Zayner
Josiah Zayner writes: Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge followed Dr. Josiah Zayner, a former Scientist at NASA turned BioHacker, as he attempted the first ever fullbody microbiome transplant. She writes "Over the course of the next four days, Zayner would attempt to eradicate the trillions of microbes that lived on and inside his body — organisms that helped him digest food, produce vitamins and enzymes, and protected his body from other, more dangerous bacteria. Ruthlessly and methodically, he would try to render himself into a biological blank slate. Then, he would inoculate himself with a friend’s microbes — a procedure he refers to as a 'microbiome transplant.'".

Submission + - The government wants your fingerprint to unlock your phone (latimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: As the world watched the FBI spar with Apple this winter in an attempt to hack into a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, federal officials were quietly waging a different encryption battle in a Los Angeles courtroom.

There, authorities obtained a search warrant compelling the girlfriend of an alleged Armenian gang member to press her finger against an iPhone that had been seized from a Glendale home. The phone contained Apple's fingerprint identification system for unlocking, and prosecutors wanted access to the data inside it.

It marked a rare time that prosecutors have demanded a person provide a fingerprint to open a computer, but experts expect such cases to become more common as cracking digital security becomes a larger part of law enforcement work.

The Glendale case and others like it are forcing courts to address a basic question: How far can the government go to obtain biometric markers such as fingerprints and hair?

Submission + - Global Catastrophe, Even Human Extinction, Isn't All That Unlikely

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in its annual report on “global catastrophic risk,” the Global Challenges Foundation estimates the risk of human extinction due to climate change—or an accidental nuclear war at 0.1 percent every year. That may sound low, but when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years. The report holds catastrophic climate change and nuclear war far above other potential causes, and for good reason citing multiple occasions when the world stood on the brink of atomic annihilation. While most of these occurred during the Cold War, another took place during the 1990s, the most peaceful decade in recent memory. The closest may have been on September 26, 1983, when a bug in the U.S.S.R. early-warning system reported that five NATO nuclear missiles had been launched and were bound for Russian targets. The officer watching the system, Stanislav Petrov, had also designed the system, and he decided that any real NATO first-strike would involve hundreds of I.C.B.M.s. Therefore, he resolved the computers must be malfunctioning. He did not fire a response.

Climate change also poses its own risks. According to Meyer, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Sebastian Farquhar says that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace. Other risks won’t stem from technological hubris. Any year, there’s always some chance of a super-volcano erupting or an asteroid careening into the planet. Both would of course devastate the areas around ground zero—but they would also kick up dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and sending global temperatures plunging. Natural pandemics may pose the most serious risks of all. In fact, in the past two millennia, the only two events that experts can certify as global catastrophes of this scale were plagues. The Black Death of the 1340s felled more than 10 percent of the world population. Another epidemic of the Yersinia pestis bacterium—the “Great Plague of Justinian” in 541 and 542—killed between 25 and 33 million people, or between 13 and 17 percent of the global population at that time. The report briefly explores other possible risks: a genetically engineered pandemic, geo-engineering gone awry, an all-seeing artificial intelligence. "We do not expect these risks to materialize tomorrow, or even this year, but we should not ignore them," says Farquhar. "Although many risks are addressed by specific groups, we need to build a community around global catastrophic risk. Cooperation is the only way for global leaders to manage the risks that threaten humanity."

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