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Submission + - Einstein and Schrödinger didn't believe in quantum indeterminism

Submitted by StartsWithABang on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @01:27PM

StartsWithABang writes: When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics — about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality — it’s one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there’s some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what’s visible that actually is deterministic. After all, a cat can’t simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks can it? That’s one of the problems that both Einstein and Schrödinger wrestled with during their lives. An investigation of that story, their work on that front, and their friendship that ensued as both pursued that same end is thoroughly investigated here by physicist Paul Halpern.

Submission + - MP3 Backend of Firefox and Thunderbird Found Vulnerable (mozilla.org)

Submitted by jones_supa on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @07:30AM

jones_supa writes: A critical vulnerability has been found in the MPEG-1 Layer III playback backend of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. Security researcher Aki Helin reported a use-after-free scenario when playing certain audio files on the web using the Fluendo MP3 plugin for GStreamer on Linux. This is due to a flaw in handling certain MP3 files by the plugin and its interaction with Mozilla code. A maliciously crafted MP3 file can lead to a potentially exploitable crash. Linux is the only affected platform, so Windows and OS X users are safe from this particular vulnerability.

Submission + - Yes, Virginia, Black Holes Exist!

Submitted by StartsWithABang on Saturday February 01, 2014 @04:19AM

StartsWithABang writes: "And so what these three papers, in tandem, have done, is demonstrate that there is no firewall and that the resolution to the firewall paradox is that the first assumption, that Hawking radiation is in a pure state, is the one that’s flawed.

You won’t read about this in the popular write-ups because it doesn’t have a catchy headline, it’s complex, and it’s not work by someone that’s already very famous for other work. But it’s right. Hawking radiation is not in a pure state, and without that pure state, there’s no firewall, and no paradox.

There is still an incredible amount to learn and understand about black holes, event horizons, and the behavior of quantum systems in strongly curved spacetime, to be sure, and there’s lots of very interesting research ahead. These findings arguably raise more questions than they answer, although at least we know that black holes won’t fry you when you fall in; it will still be death by spaghettification, not by incineration!"

Listen to what the best science has to say, not just to the most prominent scientist who says things.

Submission + - World's First Geothermal Energy System Created By Drilling into Earth's Mantle (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123 on Friday January 31, 2014 @05:21PM

Lucas123 writes: The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) announced it broke through to the Mantle and created a superheated steam pipe capable of producing power at the nearby Krafla Power Plant in Northern Iceland. The system was operational for several months until a malfunctioning valve forced its closure. The IDDP, however, plans to either reopen its first magma-based geothermal bore hole — IDDP-1 — or drill another one at Reykjanes. While the IDDP-1 is not the first bore hole to reach the planet's magma, it is the first time an operation has been able to harness the mantle's heat to produce a steam pipe that could power a plant.

Submission + - Cooperation with GCHQ well beyond what is legally required .. (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25, 2013 @04:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone "well beyond" what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.

GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissable in court.

GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.

Submission + - NSA hacked Email Account of Mexican President

Submitted by rtoz on Sunday October 20, 2013 @11:26AM

rtoz writes: The National Security Agency (NSA ) of United States hacked into the Mexican president’s public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking and the political system. The news is likely to hurt ties between the US and Mexico.

This operation, dubbed “Flatliquid,” is described in a document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Meanwhile U.S President Barack Obama’s administration is urging the Supreme Court not to take up the first case it has received on controversial National Security Agency cybersnooping.

Submission + - Germany :Remote-Control Model Plane Attack 'Foiled' (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @02:20PM

garymortimer writes: Two aeronautics students planned to use remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives to carry out terrorist attacks in Germany, according to prosecutors.

German authorities are holding two men of Tunisian origin who they say are facing possible charges for the “preparation of a serious, state-threatening act of violence”.

Prosecutors say the men are suspected of “procuring information and objects to commit Islamic extremist explosive attacks with remote-controlled model airplanes,” prosecutors added.

Police investigating the terror plot on Tuesday launched a series of raids in Stuttgart and Munich in southern Germany and Saxony in the east. They also carried out one raid in Belgium. No-one was arrested.

The suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year and authorities had recently detected “an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft”, according to an unnamed security source quoted by a German news agency.

Submission + - Unlikely Planets Found in Violent Star Clusters (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @01:13PM

astroengine writes: When it comes to forming planets, Mother Nature isn’t very picky. Despite horrific conditions inside densely packed open clusters, stars apparently have no problem forming and hanging on to an orbital brood. That’s the conclusion from a new study that used data collected by NASA’s now-dormant Kepler space telescope to hunt for planets in a one-billion-year old open cluster called NGC 6811, a collection of about 70 stars located about 3,400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Submission + - Aging of our Nuclear Power Plants is not so Graceful (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick on Sunday June 23, 2013 @12:12PM

Lasrick writes: This is a very thoughtful article on nuclear power plant aging: how operators use early retirement of plants to extract concessions from rate-payers and a discussion on how California's "forward-looking planning process" has probably mitigated disruption from the closing of San Onofre. This is a good read about nuclear energy.

Submission + - DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political (tumblr.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @05:00PM

An anonymous reader writes: The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.

Submission + - Billionaires Secretly Fund Vast Climate Denial Network 4

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday February 16, 2013 @08:50PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Suzanne Goldenberg reports that conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, helping build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives. "We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust. Ball's organization assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes with a guarantee of complete anonymity for donors who wished to remain hidden. The money flowed to Washington think tanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore. "The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing," says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records. "These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable.""

Submission + - Crowdsourced coders take on immunology Big Data (nature.com)

Submitted by ewenc on Friday February 08, 2013 @07:20AM

ewenc writes: Mercenary computer coders are helping scientists cope with the deluge of data pouring out of research labs. A contest to write software to analyse immune-system genes garnered more than 100 entries, including many that vastly outperformed existing programs. The US$6,000 contest was launched by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, both in Boston, Massachusetts. TopCoder.com, a community of more than 400,000 coders who compete in programming competitions, hosted the contest. The results are described in a letter published this week in Nature Biotechnology.

Submission + - Facebook tries to takeover the world with a redirection bug (news.com.au)

Submitted by johnsnails on Friday February 08, 2013 @04:58AM

johnsnails writes: Some of the biggest news sites in the world disappeared today when Facebook took over the internet with a redirection bug.

Visitors to sites such as The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network, NBC News and News.com.au were immediately transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading their intended site.

Submission + - Moving Linux Console to the Userspace (phoronix.com) 2

Submitted by jones_supa on Friday February 08, 2013 @04:07AM

jones_supa writes: David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

Submission + - Fox News: US Solar Energy Investment Less than Germany because US has Less Sun (slate.com)

Submitted by Andy Prough on Friday February 08, 2013 @02:03AM

Andy Prough writes: Apparently those wise folks at Fox have figured out America's reluctance to invest as much money in solar energy as Germany — the Germans simply have more sun! Well, as Will Oremus from Slate points out, according to the US Dept. of Energy's Solar Resource map comparison of the US and Germany, nothing could be farther from the truth — Germany receives as much sunlight as the least lit US state — Alaska.

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