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Submission + - Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers' DNA (fusion.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.
Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient.

Submission + - American Pharoah Beats Science to Win Triple Crown 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: There's some good reasons it's been 37 years since the last triple-crown winner as Lexi Pandell wrote on June 3 that post-race recovery is no joke for a thousand-pound animal that can run more than 40 miles per hour. There are two weeks between the Derby and the Preakness, and three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont. That tight schedule—and the super-specific needs of racehorses—means horses competing in the grueling back-to-back-to-back Triple Crown races have a big disadvantage against fresh horses. First, as a horse races, its muscles produce lactic acid. In humans, glycogen recoup takes about 24 hours. But horses take several days to process lactic acid and restore glycogen reserves. Trainers make sure their charges drink plenty of water and sometimes even use intravenous fluids to aid that repair process. Secondly, in addition to being the last race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes is also the longest. That’s no easy feat, even for a racehorse. When a horse runs a tough race (or has a new workout at a longer distance), its muscles break down. Then, during rest, they reknit and adapt. A horse that has skipped the Preakness, however, has the luxury of time. Mubtaahij, who some picked to win the Belmont, had plenty of rest so he could be pushed for hard workouts two weeks prior to the Belmont.

Finally, at different points in its stride, a galloping horse puts all its weight on a single leg. That limb bears three times more weight than usual when galloping on a straightaway and, thanks to centrifugal force, a load five to 10 times greater on turns. This translates to skeletal microdamage. Race a horse during that critical period and you increase the risk of serious injuries mid-race. Two weeks ago, vets were forced to euthanize the promising gray thoroughbred filly, Eight Belles, when she collapsed on the track after completing the race at Churchill Downs, suffering from two shattered ankles in her front legs. A fresh horse won’t face any of those problems. Even a horse that ran in the Derby but skipped the Preakness will have five weeks to rest, and plenty of time for normal skeletal damage to repair, before the Belmont. "So, American Pharoah, it’d be awesome if you win the Triple Crown, but you probably won’t," concluded Pandell. "It’s not your fault. It’s science and those pesky fresh horses." Science was wrong.

Submission + - DARPA contest sends new humanoids into 'nuclear reactor' (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The DARPA Robotics Challenge — the "Robolympics", unofficially, according to a couple of engineers laughing next to the Trac Labs garage, where a Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid dangled from a scaffold — completes its final competition, with 25 teams of engineers and scientists giving orders to huge machines trundling across a landscape designed to simulate the impassible environment that greeted aid workers after the Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan melted down multiple times in 2011.

Engineers tried to help, but no robots could navigate the hazardous terrain and disaster ensued, rendering a huge area around the plant uninhabitable after toxic steam exploded into the skies. The radioactive leftovers are still emitting a million watts of heat.

If a Darpa contestant is able to navigate the terrain successfully, and in a short amount of time (each team has an hour to run the course) it will become the richest robot in town: first prize is $2m, second prize is $1m, and third gets $500,000.

Submission + - Satellites make a load of difference to bridge safety (esa.int)

Submitted by __roo
__roo writes: In an effort to detect crumbling infrastructure before it causes damage and costs lives, the European Space Agency is working with the UK’s University of Nottingham to monitor the movements of large structures as they happen using satellite navigation sensors. The team uses highly sensitive satnav receivers that transmit real-time data to detect movements as small as 1 cm combined with historical Earth observation satellite data. By placing sensors at key locations on the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland, they detected stressed structural members and unexpected deformations.
Communications

AT&T Breach May Be Worse Than Initially Thought 102

Posted by Soulskill from the i-smell-class-action dept.
ChrisPaget writes "I'm somewhat of an authority on GSM security, having given presentations on it at Shmoocon (M4V) and CCC (I'm also scheduled to talk about GSM at this year's Defcon). This is my take on the iPad ICCID disclosure — the short version is that (thanks to a bad decision by the US cell companies, not just AT&T) ICCIDs can be trivially converted to IMSIs, and the disclosure of IMSIs leads to some very severe consequences, such as name and phone number disclosure, global tower-level tracking, and making live interception a whole lot easier. My recommendation? AT&T has 114,000 SIM cards to replace and some nasty architectural problems to fix." Reader tsamsoniw adds that AT&T has criticized the security group responsible for pointing out the flaw, while the group claims they did it 'as a service to our nation.'

Comment What disk drives? In a Wii? Needed for production? (Score 1) 290

by analogduck (#21731424) Attached to: Wii Shortages Costing Nintendo 'A Billion' In Sales

"He added that there had been a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had hurt Nintendo as well as makers of many other devices."

Where are these Wii's with disk drives? I want one! Last I checked, they not only don't have any, but Nintendo has gone so far as to say that they never will.

Perhaps he meant to say "disc drives".

I'll reference this well written article Apple has provided regarding the difference between the words "disk" and "disc":
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302152

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