95094239
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
In a move that could revolutionize aerial combat, the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) has awarded Lockheed Martin a US$26.3 million contract to design, develop, and produce a high-power laser weapon that the AFRL wants to install and test on a tactical fighter jet by 2021. The new test weapon is part of the AFRL Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program tasked with developing airborne laser systems.
Airborne laser weapons are nothing new. Experimental lasers mounted on aircraft date back to the US Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, but producing a practical weapon system has proven difficult. Previous attempts have resulted in dodgy chemical laser weapons so bulky that they had to be mounted in a 747, but the development of solid state fiber optic lasers is starting to change the game.
94401905
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Google has stopped its Home Mini speakers responding when users touch them.
It permanently turned off the touch activation feature after it found that sensors primed to spot a finger tap were too sensitive.
Early users found that the touch sensors were registering "phantom" touches that turned them on.
This meant the speakers were recording everything around them thousands of times a day.
Google said it disabled the feature to give users "peace of mind".
Google's Home Mini gadgets were unveiled on 4 October as part of a revamp of its line of smart speakers. The intelligent assistant feature on it could be activated two ways — by either saying "OK, Google" or by tapping the surface.
94321785
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
A key focus of electric vehicle (EV) makers is maximizing the range users can get from each charge, and for that reason new battery technologies are poised to play a huge part in driving their adoption. Toshiba has developed a new fast-charging battery it claims could allow EVs to travel three times as far as they do now, and then be fully recharged again in a matter of minutes.
Toshiba's SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery) has been around in various forms since 2007, with its chief claim to fame an ability to charge to 90 percent of capacity in just five minutes. It also boasts a life-span of 10 years and high levels of safety, and has found its way into a number of notable EVs, including Mitsubishi's i MiEV and Honda's Fit EV.
94107113
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
The wonder material graphene gets many of its handy quirks from the fact that it exists in two dimensions, as a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. But to actually make use of it in practical applications, it usually needs to be converted into a 3D form. Now, researchers have developed a new and relatively simple way to do just that, using lasers to "forge" a three-dimensional pyramid out of graphene.
This isn't the first time graphene has been given an extra dimension. In 2015, researchers from the University of Illinois molded graphene into 3D structures by layering it onto shaped substrates, and early this year MIT scientists found that tubes of the stuff could be shaped into 3D coral-like structures 10 times stronger than steel but just five percent as dense. Rice University researchers have also recently made graphene foam and reinforced it with carbon nanotubes.
But this new technique, developed by researchers in Finland and Taiwan, might be an easier and faster method to make 3D graphene. By focusing a laser onto a fine point on a 2D graphene lattice, the graphene at that spot is irradiated and bulges outwards. A variety of three-dimensional shapes can be made by writing patterns with the laser spot, with the height of the shape controlled by adjusting the irradiation dose at each particular point
93013493
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Web hosting company GoDaddy has given a US neo-Nazi site 24 hours to find another provider after it disparaged a woman who died in protests in Virginia.
The Daily Stormer published a piece denigrating Heather Heyer, who was killed on Saturday after a car rammed into a crowd protesting at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
GoDaddy had faced calls to remove the white supremacist site as a result.
The web host said the Daily Stormer had violated its terms of service.
"We informed the Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy said in a statement on Twitter.
Previously, some web users had called on GoDaddy to remove the site — including women's rights campaigner Amy Siskind.
Violence broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, after white supremacists organised a controversial far-right march called "Unite the Right".
92961875
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
When the first manned mission to Mars sets out, it may be on the tail of an atomic rocket engine. The Space Race vintage technology could have a renaissance at NASA after the space agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama signed a contract with BWXT Nuclear Energy to develop updated Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) concepts and new fuel elements to power them.
The Apollo missions to the Moon demonstrated many things. They showcased human ingenuity, determination, and courage. They proved what American engineering and industry could accomplish in short order when let loose on a goal and demonstrated that humankind need no longer be confined to a single planet.
Unfortunately, it also showed the fact that chemical rockets, even at the dawn of the conquest of space, had reached their technical limits. True, they could send astronauts to the Moon, but only by using a disposable rocket the size of a skyscraper of which only a capsule with the roominess of an SUV returned. And even this was in no shape for anything except a museum.
At the very least it looks much more feasible than Project Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
92681779
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Desktop Metal – remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that's so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it's going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes.
We've been hearing for years now about 3D printing and how it's going to revolutionize manufacturing. As yet, though, it's still on the periphery.
Plenty of design studios and even home users run desktop printers, but the only affordable printing materials are cheap ABS plastics. And at the other end of the market, while organizations like NASA and Boeing are getting valuable use out of laser-melted metal printing, it's a very slow and expensive process that doesn't seem to scale well.
But a very exciting company out of Massachusetts, headed by some of the guys who came up with the idea of additive manufacture in the first place, believes it's got the technology and the machinery to boost 3D printing into the big time, for real.
91005425
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Undercover counter-extremism officers used hackers in India to access the emails of journalists and environmental activists, it has been claimed.
The police watchdog started an inquiry into claims against the Metropolitan Police after an anonymous tip-off.
It appealed for the whistleblower — believed to be a serving or retired police officer -to get in touch.
The Met said it was aware of the Independent Police Complaints Commission's (IPCC) investigation.
90658289
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Engineer Harry Huskey, who helped build many of the first ever computers, has died aged 101.
Dr Huskey was a key member of the team that built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (Eniac) which first ran in February 1946.
Eniac is widely considered to be one of the first electronic, general purpose, programmable computers.
Dr Huskey also helped complete work on the Ace — the Automatic Computing Engine — designed by Alan Turing.
87098301
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Biofuels are often touted as an alternative to fossil fuels, but many depend on raw materials that would quickly become scarce if production were scaled up. As an alternative to these alternatives, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day.
84916763
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Google says it has found a way to make adverts load faster on web pages viewed on smartphones and tablets.
The company said the ads would also be less taxing on the handsets' processors, meaning their batteries should last longer.
The technique is based on work it has already done to make news publishers' articles load more quickly.
But it is still in development, and one expert said Google still had questions to answer.
The California-based company's online advertising revenue totalled $67.4bn (£51.2bn) last year.
That figure included banners and animations placed via the Google Display Network — which would be affected by this project — as well as other types of ads, such as search result links and YouTube pre-roll clips, which would not.
83387499
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
A series of ransomware attacks on the House of Representatives has led US Congress to ban members from using Yahoo Mail, according to a leaked email.
Both Yahoo Mail and Gmail are named in the 30 April email, published on Thursday by Gizmodo, saying the attacks had increased "in the past 48 hours".
Yahoo Mail will be blocked "until further notice" it adds.
Ransomware encrypts victims' files and demands a ransom be paid for unlocking.
Meanwhile, an unnamed House of Representatives employee has told Reuters devices connected to the internet via its wi-fi or ethernet cables have been barred from accessing appspot.com, the domain where Google hosts custom-built apps.
"We began blocking appspot.com on 3 May 3 in response to indicators that appspot.com was potentially still hosting a remote access Trojan named BLT that has been there since June 2015," the news agency was told.
50528685
submission
Big Hairy Ian writes:
Researchers have found evidence to suggest that climate change, rather than humans, was the main factor that drove the woolly mammoth to extinction.
A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed.
It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago.
The results have published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The view many researchers had about woolly mammoths is that they were a hardy, abundant species that thrived during their time on the planet.
