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Submission + - SPAM: Japan team maps 'semi-infinite' trove of rare earth elements

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Japanese researchers have mapped vast reserves of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, enough to feed global demand on a “semi-infinite basis,” according to a new study.

The deposit, found within Japan’s exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The team, comprised of several universities, businesses and government institutions, surveyed the western Pacific Ocean near Minamitori Island.

In a sample area of the mineral-rich region, the team’s survey estimated 1.2 million tons of “rare earth oxide” is deposited there, said the study, conducted jointly by Waseda University’s Yutaro Takaya and the University of Tokyo’s Yasuhiro Kato, among others.

The finding extrapolates that a 2,500-sq. km region off the southern Japanese island should contain 16 million tons of the valuable elements, and “has the potential to supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world,” the study said.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The Orange Goo Used In Everything From Armor To Football Helmets (cnn.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: CNN has a story about a slimy, gooey orange gel developed by British company D3O as far back as 1999 that is very soft and fluid-like normally, but that hardens immediately when it receives an impact: It's a gel that acts as both a liquid and a solid. When handled slowly the goo is soft and flexible but the moment it receives an impact, it hardens. It's all thanks to the gel's shock-absorbing properties. "If I wrap it around my fingers, it's very soft," Felicity Boyce, a material developer at D3O, told CNN, "but if you hit it with great force, it behaves more like a solid that's absorbing the shock and none of that impact goes through my hand." American football has become a huge market for the British company, where the gel is incorporated in padding and helmets to absorb the impact of any hits a player receives. D3O claims it can reduce blunt impact by 53 per cent compared to materials like foam. The material can also be put inside running shoes to improve performance and reduce the risk of foot injury. Usain Bolt ran with D3O gel insoles in his shoes at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The material is being tested in body armor. "While we don't have a material that can stop a bullet, we do have a material that can reduce the amount of trauma that your body would experience if you got shot." There are also soft smartphone casings using the gel that harden when the phone is dropped and hits a hard surface.

Submission + - Mobile Phone Companies Appear To Be Selling Your Location To Almost Anyone (techcrunch.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember that last year, Verizon (which owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch) was punished by the FCC for injecting information into its subscribers’ traffic that allowed them to be tracked without their consent. That practice appears to be alive and well despite being disallowed in a ruling last March: companies appear to be able to request your number, location, and other details from your mobile provider quite easily. The possibility was discovered by Philip Neustrom, co-founder of Shotwell Labs, who documented it in a blog post earlier this week. He found a pair of websites which, if visited from a mobile data connection, report back in no time with numerous details: full name, billing zip code, current location (as inferred from cell tower data), and more. (Others found the same thing with slightly different results depending on carrier, but the demo sites were taken down before I could try it myself.)

Submission + - SPAM: Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: This is in addition to 47 already known about.

Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.

The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.

Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa’s volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.

And the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, they have warned. “If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica’s ice sheets,” said glacier expert Robert Bingham, one of the paper’s authors. “Anything that causes the melting of ice – which an eruption certainly would – is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - US Is Slipping Toward Measles Being Endemic Once Again, Says Study (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With firm vaccination campaigns, the US eliminated measles in 2000. The highly infectious virus was no longer constantly present in the country—no longer endemic. Since then, measles has only popped up when travelers carried it in, spurring mostly small outbreaks—ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred cases each year—that then fizzle out. But all that may be about to change. With the rise of non-medical vaccine exemptions and delays, the country is backsliding toward endemic measles, Stanford and Baylor College of Medicine researchers warn this week. With extensive disease modeling, the researchers make clear just how close we are to seeing explosive, perhaps unshakeable, outbreaks. According to results the researchers published in JAMA Pediatrics, a mere five-percent slip in measles-mumps-and-rubella (MMR) vaccination rates among kids aged two to 11 would triple measles cases in this age group and cost $2.1 million in public healthcare costs. And that’s just a small slice of the disease transmission outlook. Kids two to 11 years old only make up about 30 percent of the measles cases in current outbreaks. The number of cases would be much larger if the researchers had sufficient data to model the social mixing and immunization status of adults, teens, and infants under two.

Submission + - First bicycle tax in nation (washingtontimes.com)

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: In Oregon, a state known for its avid bicycling culture, the state legislature’s approval of the first bike tax in the nation has fallen flat with riders.
Democratic Gov. Kate Brown is expected to sign the sweeping $5.3 billion transportation package, which includes a $15 excise tax on the sale of bicycles costing more than $200 with a wheel diameter of at least 26 inches.Even though the funding has been earmarked for improvements that will benefit cyclists, the tax has managed to irk both anti-tax Republicans and environmentally conscious bikers alike.

Submission + - Paypal disguises 13% price hike as 'Policy Update'. (paypal.com) 2

Submitted by turbotalon
turbotalon writes: In an email sent to users February 7th, Paypal is disguising a 13% rate hike as a 'Policy Update.' Roughly one quarter of the 'policy changes' are rate hikes, yet their emailed summary glosses over the rate hike, focussing instead on a few of the 'policy changes' with one sentence at the end about 'changing some of the fees we charge'.

Additionally, they have added a "non-discouragement clause" for sellers that provides:

"In representations to your customers or in public communications, you agree not to mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method. At all of your points of sale (in whatever form), you agree not to try to dissuade or inhibit your customers from using PayPal; and, if you enable your customers to pay you with PayPal, you agree to treat PayPal’s payment mark at least at par with other payment methods offered."

Reading the full text of the update reveals the following fees are increasing:
  Standard transaction fee
  International currency exchange fees
  In-store transaction fees
  Micro-payment fees
  Cross-border transaction fees

Submission + - Meet URL, the USB Porn-Sniffing Dog

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss. Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The US Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."

Submission + - When is 'Unnecessary' Code Necessary? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Catching himself terminating statements with semicolons out of habit when none were needed, Rick Wicklin asks: Do you write unnecessary code? And while Wicklin tries to skip certain unnecessary statements, there are others that he finds, well, necessary. "Sometimes I include optional statements in my programs for clarity, readability, or to practice defensive programming," he explains. Wicklin's post is geared towards SAS programming, but the question of when to include technically-unnecessary code — e.g., variable declarations, superfluous punctuation, block constructs for single statements, values for optional parameters that are the defaults, debugging/validation statements, non-critical error handling, explicitly destroying objects that would otherwise be deleted on exit, labeled NEXT statements, full qualification of objects/methods, unneeded code from templates — is a language-agnostic one. So when-and-why do you find it necessary to include 'unnecessary' code in your programs? And are you tolerant of co-workers' unnecessary code choices, or do you sometimes go all Tabs-vs-Spaces (YouTube) on them?

Submission + - How One Dev Broke Node, and Thousands of Projects in 11 Lines of JavaScript (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koçulu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies. Koçulu yanked his source code because, we're told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name. According to Koçulu, Kik's briefs told him to take down the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM's admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. "This situation made me realize that NPM is someone’s private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People," Koçulu blogged. Unfortunately, one of those dependencies was left-pad. It pads out the lefthand-side of strings with zeroes or spaces. And thousands of projects including Node and Babel relied on it. With left-pad removed from NPM, these applications and widely used bits of open-source infrastructure were unable to obtain the dependency, and thus fell over.

Submission + - Samsung Ships 15.38TB SSD With Up To 1,200MBps Performance (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Samsung announced it is now shipping the world's highest capacity 2.5-in SSD, the 15.38TB PM1633a. The new SSD uses a 12Gbps SAS interface and is being marketed for use in enterprise-class storage systems where IT managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch drive. The PM1633a sports random read/write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS, respectively. It delivers sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,200MBps, the company said. The SSD can sustain one full drive write (15.38TB) per day, every day over its life, which Samsung claims is two to ten times more data than typical SATA SSDs based on planar MLC and TLC NAND flash technologies. The SSD is based on Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND (3D NAND) technology, which also uses 3-bit MLC flash.

Submission + - Even the Dumbest Ransomware Is Almost Unremovable on Smart TVs (softpedia.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apparently even the easiest-to-remove ransomware is painfully hard to uninstall from smart TVs, if they're running on the AndroidOS platform, and almost all are. This didn't happen in a real-world scenario (yet), and was only a PoC test by Symantec. The researcher managed to remove the ransomware just because he enabled the Android ADB tool beforehand, knowing he would infect the TV with the ransomware.

"Without this option enabled, and if I was less experienced user, I’d probably still be locked out of my smart TV, making it a large and expensive paper weight," said the researcher.

Via: Softpedia

Submission + - Did we just find a Dyson Sphere being built? (slate.com)

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: Note, as always, the answer to a headline question is usually "no". But Phil Plait just wrote a very interesting article about a star that is extremely variable. We generally look for cyclical minute (1%) variations in star light to detect planets. But we found one that has a variable variation in starlight of over 20%. We don't have a very good explanation for this and some people are proposing it is caused by a civilization building a Dyson Sphere around the star.

Submission + - When do you take a pay cut to have a better career opportunity?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am currently working for a software company that rakes in a lot of money and has an EBIT that puts other companies to shame. The company is great, good benefits, lots of vacation time, very good salary. However the problem is that their architecture is already established, change is often slow moving, and most of the decisions are made by architects as oppose to developers. I find my job somewhat mundane and I am loosing interest.

I recently was offered another job, with a small company, that doesn't have the capital/revenue stream to provide all the perks that my current employer has. Needless to say this small company wants someone to take their system into the modern age, which means re-design/new architecture, implementation, maintenance, team lead, etc.... thus, more experience to add to my resume. These are things that I won't be able to do easily in my current job.

My concern is that it appears this company has really high expectations, and since I had to take a small pay cut to get this position it leaves a but of uneasiness in my stomach for future promotions/advancements. However I believe in their product, their vision/goals, the people and the future of the company.

I feel excited but also scared as its a bit of a gamble. Has anyone else experienced the same thing?

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