76488305
submission
jan_jes writes:
Scientists have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well. Unlike the fictional character, the ultrathin cloak is real. The scientists used brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas to form the 80-nanometer-thick cloak, which conformed to the arbitrary bumps and dents in the 1,300-square-micrometer sample object. The cloak, a metamaterial engineered to bend light in ways not seen in nature, was able to reflect red light as if it were bouncing off a flat mirror. Last year, a “super black” material “vantablack,” have developed by a British Company, which is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost. If it was used to make black dresses, the wearer’s head and limbs might appear to float around a dress-shaped hole.
75894475
submission
jan_jes writes:
Wikipedia have announced that they have blocked 381 user accounts for “black hat” editing after weeks of investigation. The reason to block is that the accounts were engaged in undisclosed paid advocacy—the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, in violation of Wikimedia’s Terms of Use. Every day, volunteer editors make thousands of edits to Wikipedia: they add reliable sources, introduce new topics, expand articles, add images, cover breaking news, fix inaccuracies, and resolve conflicts of interest. In addition to blocking the 381 “sockpuppet” accounts—a term that refers to multiple accounts used in misleading or deceptive ways—the editors deleted 210 articles created by these accounts.
75631397
submission
jan_jes writes:
At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, MIT researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today’s standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems. MIT researchers has already presented a system that repairs dangerous software bugs by automatically importing functionality from other, more secure applications.
75581089
submission
jan_jes writes:
Researchers have used anonymous mobile phone records for more than 15 million people to track the spread of rubella disease in Kenya and were able to quantitatively show that mobile phone data can predict seasonal disease patterns. The researchers compared the cellphone analysis with a highly detailed dataset on rubella incidence in Kenya. They matched; the cellphone movement patterns lined up with the rubella incidence figures. In both of their analyses, rubella spiked three times a year. This showed the researchers that cellphone movement can be a predictor of infectious-disease spread.
75551173
submission
jan_jes writes:
A team of scientists at the Wyss Institute last year described the development of a device to treat sepsis that works by mimicking the human spleen. The device cleanses pathogens and toxins from blood flowing through a dialysis-like circuit. Now the team has developed an improved device that works with conventional antibiotic therapies and is better positioned for near-term use in clinics. The improved design is described in the October issue of Biomaterials. This approach can be administered quickly, even without identifying the infectious agent.
75283555
submission
jan_jes writes:
MIT research study performed brain scans on 38 SAD patients, found that these scans contain clues that indicate, with about 80 percent accuracy, which SAD patients will do well in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), an intervention designed to help patients change thinking patterns. Use of the scans to predict treatment outcomes improved predictions fivefold over use of a clinician’s assessment alone. The researchers used a form of brain imaging that scans patients in a state of rest. Resting-state images can be done quickly, in about 15 minutes, and reliably, since they don’t require patients to follow instructions, so they have the potential to be used in a clinical setting as a tool that helps doctors select the best treatments for patients. The findings are reported in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
75248331
submission
jan_jes writes:
Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak (donut-shaped) fusion reactor. The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design.
75090401
submission
jan_jes writes:
A new "yolk-and-shell" nanoparticle by the researchers at MIT and Tsinghua University in China, could boost the capacity and power of lithium-ion batteries. The researchers have created an electrode made of nanoparticles with a solid shell, and a “yolk” inside that can change size again and again without affecting the shell. The new findings, which use aluminum as the key material for the lithium-ion battery’s negative electrode, or anode, are reported in the journal Nature Communications. The use of nanoparticles with an aluminum yolk and a titanium dioxide shell has proven to be “the high-rate champion among high-capacity anodes".
74724567
submission
jan_jes writes:
MIT have demonstrated their monocular SLAM supported approach that is able to achieve stronger performance against the classical frame based approach [where misclassifications occur occasionally]. The system is able to detect and robustly recognize objects in its environment using a single RGB camera. They have presented their paper at the Robotics Science and Systems conference last week. The system uses SLAM information to augment existing object-recognition algorithms. Robot with camera provide the improved object predictions in all views.
74327215
submission
jan_jes writes:
The researchers at MIT were able to make a network of flash-based servers competitive with a network of RAM-based servers by moving a little computational power off of the servers and onto the chips that control the flash drives. Each server connected to a FPGA and each FPGA, in turn, was connected to flash chips and to the two FPGAs nearest it in the server rack. As it is connected to each other, they created a very fast network that allowed any server to retrieve data from any flash drive. Finally, the FPGAs executed the algorithms that preprocessed the data stored on the flash drives. Few days before, MIT designed a new system that repairs software bugs without access to source code.
74071721
submission
jan_jes writes:
According to researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Services used by hundreds of thousands of people in the UK to protect their identity on the web are vulnerable to leaks. The study of 14 popular VPN providers found that 11 of them leaked information about the user because of a vulnerability known as ‘IPv6 leakage’. The leakage occurs because network operators are increasingly deploying a new version of the protocol used to run the Internet called IPv6. The study also examined the security of various mobile platforms when using VPNs and found that they were much more secure when using Apple’s iOS, but were still vulnerable to leakage when using Google’s Android. Similarly Russian researchers have exposed the breakthrough U.S. spying program few months back.
74046063
submission
jan_jes writes:
MIT researchers have presented a new system at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Programming Language Design and Implementation conference, that repairs the dangerous software bugs by automatically importing functionality from other, more secure applications. According to MIT, "The system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn’t require access to the source code of the applications. Instead, it analyzes the applications’ execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it’s repairing was written."
73593935
submission
jan_jes writes:
The soft robot, developed by Jaeyoun Kim from Iowa State University, can curl itself into a circle with a radius of just 200 micrometres. The tentacle was also able to grasp the egg of a fish called a capelin. Such miniature soft robots could be useful for microsurgery. The lassoing motion and low force exerted by the tentacle could be an advantage in endovascular operations, for example, where the target for surgery is reached through blood vessels. They describe their findings in this journal.
73562075
submission
jan_jes writes:
Origami is the Japanese art of paper folding created by Akira Yoshizawa, which can be used to create beautiful birds, frogs and other small sculptures.
Last Year a team of engineers from MIT and Harvard has developed an origami flat-pack Robot[youtube.com] which can fold itself and crawl away without any human intervention.
But now a Binghamton University engineer says this technique can be applied to building batteries, too. The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. This method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. The total cost of this potentially game-changing device is "Five cents".
73536747
submission
jan_jes writes:
Physicists at MIT have successfully cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) to a temperature of 500 nanokelvins — just a hair above absolute zero, and over a million times colder than interstellar space. The researchers found that the ultracold molecules were relatively long-lived and stable, resisting reactive collisions with other molecules. The molecules also exhibited very strong dipole moments — strong imbalances in electric charge within molecules that mediate magnet-like forces between molecules over large distances.
