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Submission + - This Tiny Camera Could Take Real Time 3D Images From Inside the Heart and Blood (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: Technology seems to be making life a whole lot easier for the likes of doctors and scientists, alike. Now surgeons can benefit from 3D images showing the insides of human arteries and veins from more than one direction. All thanks to a 1.5mm snapper that can boast up to 60 frames each second. The man behind this piece of technology, Professor F. Levent Degertekin, designed this with the purpose of putting a bigger picture of the internals of blood vessels on view for doctors. For this reason, he attached a tiny 20MHz ultrasonic transducer at the end of a piece of wire.

Submission + - The Surprising Origin Of The Big Bang Theory (wgbhnews.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Public radio's WGBH News reports, "Between the announcement this week that scientists have detected primordial gravitation waves and FOX's reboot of Carl Sagan's groundbreaking series, "Cosmos", the Big Bang theory is enjoying its biggest moment since it banged the observable universe into existence 13.8 billion years ago. While the Big Bang is as old as the universe itself, our concept of it is still strikingly new — less than 100 years old. And if you dig into its origins, you come across a curious fact. ... The Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Roman Catholic priest. It wasn't just any priest. It was Monseigneur George Lemaître, a brilliant Belgian who entered the priesthood following his service as an artillery officer in the Belgian army during World War I. He was also an accomplished astronomer and a talented mathematician and physician. After earning his graduate degree in astronomy from the University of Cambridge in England, he came to Boston and spent a year at the Harvard College Observatory before earning his doctorate at MIT. ... At a conference in the 1930s, where Lemaître presented his theory, Einstein reportedly remarked, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.""

Submission + - Another State Legislature Targets Tesla

Submitted by nightcats
nightcats writes: New York joins the growing list of state legislatures aiming to shut down or at least restrict Tesla's business model:

The bill, which would restrict Tesla's ability to sell cars directly to consumers, moved out of the Assembly Codes Committee on Wednesday, one of several necessary steps on its way to a full vote.

Most of this legislation is driven by lobbying from traditional auto dealers working aggressively to protect their business model against an innovative but threatening incursion. Those dealers claim to have the full support of the Cuomo administration. For those keeping score, NY joins Texas and New Jersey in its efforts to keep product that is good for the environment as far away from consumers as possible.

Submission + - Today's wearables are an overhyped fad, but wait a few years (citeworld.com)

Submitted by mattydread23
mattydread23 writes: Today's wearables are either ridiculous (Google Glass) or appeal to a niche audience (fitness trackers), but will never change the lives of billions like the PC or smartphone. But once electronics get cheap enough to sew them into clothing, maybe they'll finally take off.

Submission + - Symantec Fires CEO Steve Bennett (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Symantec on Thursday announced that CEO Steve Bennett was terminated by the security company and has been replaced by Michael Brown as interim president and CEO. Bennett, who also resigned from Symantec's board of directors, took the top position at Symantec in July 2012, after former president and CEO Enrique Salem was pushed out by the Board of Directors.

In April 2013, Bennett, told attendees at its own Vision Conference, that the company was changing, and acknowledged that Symantec “lacked strategy” when it came to dealing with acquisitions. His plan was to move the company forward slowly, but consistently and make Symantec easier to do business with. That strategy, or at least the execution of it, hasn't impressed the board of directors, it seems.

Submission + - NASA launches third annual "codeathon" with a new costal flooding challenge

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA announced its third annual International Space Apps Challenge, that calls for software and hardware developers to to build mobile applications, software, hardware, data visualization and platform solutions that could help improve life on Earth and contribute to space exploration missions, is adding a new challenge focused on coastal flooding. The reason for this challenge is to help people understand the dangers of inundation. “Solutions developed through this challenge could have many potential impacts,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA. "This includes helping coastal businesses determine whether they are currently at risk from coastal inundation, and whether they will be impacted in the future by sea level rise and coastal erosion."

Submission + - Firefox 29 Beta Arrives With Mozilla's Major User Interface Overhaul Australis

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following the release of Firefox 28 just two days ago, Mozilla today updated its Firefox Beta channel to version 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This is a massive release: Firefox Sync has been revamped and is now powered by Firefox Accounts, there’s a new customization mode, and a href="http://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups-interactive/australis-interactive-mockups/windows8.html">the major user interface overhaul Australis has finally arrived. Release notes are here: Desktop and Android.

Submission + - A New Killer Virus in China? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In June 2012, three men removing slag from a derelict copper mine in southwestern China fell ill with severe pneumonia and died. Six months later, researchers went spelunking in the mine—an artificial cave hewn from a hillside—in search of pathogens. After taking anal swabs from bats, rats, and musk shrews living in the cave, the team has discovered what it says is a new virus that may have felled the workers.

Submission + - How did Bill Nye become the Science Guy? (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Whether he's debating creationists, taking selfies with President Obama, or "Dancing with the Stars," Bill Nye the Science Guy is no stranger to the spotlight. But what about the man behind the public persona? How did Bill Nye become the Science Guy? Bill Nye has made his debut on the PBS series, The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers, to reveal the story of how he rose from being a young comedian from Seattle to becoming a science icon. In his profile, Bill Nye talks about his early days impersonating Steve Martin, why bow-ties are important in the lab (and with the ladies), and how Carl Sagan's advice helped to shape his hit television show.
Google

Gmail Goes HTTPS Only For All Connections 141

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the nsa-already-has-the-private-key dept.
Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "Perhaps no company has been as vocal with its feelings about the revelations about the NSA's collection methods as Google has, and the company has been making a series of changes to its infrastructure in recent months to make it more difficult for adversaries to snoop on users' sessions. The biggest of those changes landed Thursday when the company switched its Gmail service to HTTPS only, enforcing SSL encryption on all Gmail connections. The change is a significant one, especially given the fact that Google also has encrypted all of the links between its data centers. Those two modifications mean that Gmail messages are encrypted from the time they leave a user's machine to the time they leave Google's infrastructure. This makes life much more difficult for anyone—including the NSA–who is trying to snoop on those Gmail sessions." GMail also does TLS for SMTP, but regrettably Talk (what's left of it) does not do TLS for XMPP server-to-server connections, effectively forcing XMPP server admins to lower their security if they want to federate with Google.

Submission + - Airborne Iron May Have Helped Cause Past Ice Ages (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have found that iron-rich dust floating on the wind fell into the sea at multiple times during Earth's history, sparking various ice ages. The iron nourished marine organisms that suck carbon dioxide from the air. Over time, so much of this greenhouse gas disappeared from the atmosphere that the planet began to cool--in some cases, causing an ice age.

Submission + - Human Nose Can Detect a Trillion Smells (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A rose, a fresh cup of coffee, a wood fire. These are only three of the roughly 1 trillion scents that the human nose and brain are capable of distinguishing from each other, according to a new study. Researchers had previously estimated that humans could sense only about 10,000 odors but the number had never been explicitly tested before.
Education

CEO Says One Laptop Per Child Project Has Achieved Its Goals 54

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the extended-mission-doing-ok dept.
waderoush (1271548) writes "A blog post at OLPC News last week went viral with the claim that the nine-year-old One Laptop Per Child project is dead. Media outlets quickly controverted the assertion, but the response from the OLPC Association itself was brief, saying that its mission is 'far from over' and citing ongoing projects to distribute laptops in Central America. In a more lengthy Q&A this week, OLPC chairman and CEO Rodrigo Arboleda says the organization has achieved many of its goals, including demonstrating the value of the 'Constructionist' 1:1 learning philosophy originally espoused by Negroponte. With 2.5 million laptops distributed so far, the OLPC vision is 'on track to being fully realized,' Arboleda says. He sees 'commercial greed' and a 'status-quo mentality' within ministries of education and teachers' unions as the main hurdles holding back faster progress."
United States

NSA General Counsel Insists US Companies Assisted In Data Collection 103

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the he-said-she-said dept.
Related to yesterday's story about the NSA, Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with this excerpt from The Guardian: "Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called 'upstream' collection of communications moving across the Internet. ... nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had 'never heard' the term Prism. De explained: 'Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,' De said. 'Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.'"

Submission + - Missing Plane Would Have Been Found By Now If Communications Box Had $10 Upgrade (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: The missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might have been found by now if a small communications box on the plane had been configured to send out more frequent reports, according to British satellite communications firm Inmarsat.

Critics of the aerospace industry are now calling out its "outdated" accident investigation process and asking for data from the black box to be streamed in-flight to the cloud, which could be expensive, but Inmarsat's Senior VP Chris McLaughlin says that the plane could have been found by now if the communications box buried in the plane's avionics had been configured to send out more frequent reports.

"What we have at the moment would have been fine if the airlines had been mandated to provide data on all their flights. The only area where data is mandated is on the transatlantic route, which is so busy that everyone needs to know where all the other planes are," he said. "We may never know what happened to the plane because the cockpit is not mandated to be monitored in other areas, and we urge regulators to look into this."

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