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Submission + - Supercomputer Becomes Massive Router for Global Radio Telescope (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Astrophysicists at MIT and the Pawsey supercomputing center in Western Australia have discovered a whole new role for supercomputers working on big-data science projects: They’ve figured out how to turn a supercomputer into a router. (Make that a really, really big router.) The supercomputer in this case is a Cray Cascade system with a top performance of 0.3 petaflops—to be expanded to 1.2 petaflops in 2014—running on a combination of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors. The machine, which is still being installed at the Pawsey Centre in Kensington, Western Australia and isn’t scheduled to become operational until later this summer, had to go to work early after researchers switched on the world’s most sensitive radio telescope June 9. The Murchison Widefield Array is a 2,000-antenna radio telescope located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, built with the backing of universities in the U.S., Australia, India and New Zealand. Though it is the most powerful radio telescope in the world right now, it is only one-third of the Square Kilometer Array—a spread of low-frequency antennas that will be spread across a kilometer of territory in Australia and Southern Africa. It will be 50 times as sensitive as any other radio telescope and 10,000 times as quick to survey a patch of sky. By comparison, the Murchison Widefield Array is a tiny little thing stuck out as far in the middle of nowhere as Australian authorities could find to keep it as far away from terrestrial interference as possible. Tiny or not, the MWA can look farther into the past of the universe than any other human instrument to date. What it has found so far is data—lots and lots of data. More than 400 megabytes of data per second come from the array to the Murchison observatory, before being streamed across 500 miles of Australia’s National Broadband Network to the Pawsey Centre, which gets rid of most of it as quickly as possible.

Submission + - US Gained A Decade of Flynn Effect IQ Points After Adding Iodine to Salt (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: I wish it was always this easy. From Business Insider: "Iodized salt is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Few people know why it even exists. Iodine deficiency remains the world's leading cause of preventable mental retardation. According to a new study, its introduction in America in 1924 had an effect so profound that it raised the country's IQ. A new NBER working paper from James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David N. Weil finds that the population in iodine-deficient areas saw IQs rise by a full standard deviation, which is 15 points, after iodized salt was introduced.... The mental impacts were unknown, the program was started to fight goiter, so these effects were an extremely fortunate unintended side effect." — The Nation Bureau of Economic Research paper (Restricted / Paywall )
Security

Submission + - LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked Online

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A user in a Russian forum (which?) is claiming to have hacked LinkedIn to the tune of almost 6.5 million account details. The user uploaded 6,458,020 SHA-1 hashed passwords, but no usernames. Several people have said on Twitter that they found their real LinkedIn passwords as hashes on the list. The Verge spoke with Mikko Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, who thinks this is a real collection. He told us he is 'guessing it's some sort of exploit on their web interface, but there's no way to know.' We will have to wait for LinkedIn to report back to be sure what exactly has happened.
Space

Submission + - NASA finds 'Alien' Matter From Beyond Our Solar Sy (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy, researchers announced today (Jan. 31).
This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth.

"This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of — it's really important to be measuring it," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a news briefing today from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Iphone

Submission + - IPhone 4S's Siri is a bandwidth guzzler (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Frankie70
Frankie70 writes: Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

A study by Arieso shows that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in the 2010 study.

In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S “appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent.”
Android

Submission + - Android Malware May Have Infected 5 Million Users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: A massive Android malware campaign may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users into downloading the Android.Counterclan infection from the Google Android Market. The trojan collects the user's personal information, modifies the home page, and displays unwanted advertisements. It is packaged in 13 different applications, some of which have been on the store for at least a month. Several of the malicious apps are still available on the Android Market as of 3 P.M. ET. Symantec has posted the full list of infected applications.
Microsoft

Submission + - Asus working on Kinect Windows 8 laptop (winbeta.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New reports are appearing on the web today suggesting that Asus are working on a new laptop that will include Kinect gestures and will be compatible with Windows 8. What does this mean for the consumer? Portable gestures in Windows 8!
Education

Submission + - Gates Paying Murdoch for System to Track U.S. Kids

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Discussing U.S. education in his 2012 Annual Letter, Bill Gates notes the importance of 'tools and services [that] have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.' Well, Bill is certainly putting his millions where his mouth is. The Gates Foundation has ponied up $76.5 million for a controversial student data tracking initiative that's engaged Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation to 'build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content.' If you live in CO, IL, NC, NY, MA, LA, GA, or DE, it's coming soon to a public school near you. Gates is also funding other billionaires' aligned initiatives and bankrolling astrotuf-likened school advocacy, raising concerns about undue influence and prompting a call for eliminating the charitable giving tax deduction. 'This year, governments may lose $50 billion because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector,' writes David Morris. 'We can't stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes. But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.' Hey, what could go wrong?

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One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is... If they do foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little. -- Joe Martin

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