The Bad Astronomer writes “A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New submitter lxrocks writes “Tax authorities in the U.S., Britain, and Australia have announced they are working with a gigantic cache of leaked data that may be the beginnings of one of the largest tax investigations in history. The secret records are believed to include those obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that lay bare the individuals behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore and other offshore hideaways. The IRS said, ‘There is nothing illegal about holding assets through offshore entities; however, such offshore arrangements are often used to avoid or evade tax liabilities on income represented by the principal or on the income generated by the underlying assets. In addition, advisors may be subject to civil penalties or criminal prosecution for promoting such arrangements as a means to avoid or evade tax liability or circumvent information reporting requirements.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Department of Energy and the Alaskan Government are speeding up development of oil sands and methane hydrates.
Many environmentalists are protesting the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline because it would help facilitate the delivery of oil from Canada’s oil sands and, they argue, increase carbon dioxide emissions. They may have more reason to worry about what’s happening in Alaska. The state’s Department of Natural Resources is teaming up with the U.S. Department of Energy to speed up production of natural gas from a resource—methane hydrate deposits–that’s far larger than the oil sands in Canada, and could in theory lead to far greater greenhouse gas emissions.
A massive explosion took place around 8:50pm ET at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas. The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but the plant was on fire beforehand. The casualty reports are tentative and expected to rise, but two people are dead and over 150 are injured. Firefighters responding to the initial fire are unaccounted for. Over a thousand residents have been evacuated from their homes. Officials are worried about the volatility of another tank at the plant, but also about the potential damage from exposure to anhydrous ammonia. The blast was heard in Dallas, 75 miles away. “There are lots of houses that are leveled within a two-block radius. A lot of other homes are damaged as well outside that radius.” A brief YouTube video shows the explosion of the plant.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What’s a hands-on science museum to do when it has a midlife crisis? The same as anybody else: it moves to a new, fancier home. [Read more]
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What’s a hands-on science museum to do when it has a midlife crisis? The same as anybody else: it moves to a new, fancier home. [Read more]
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Massive distributed denial of service attacks on Spamhaus this week focused widespread attention on the huge security threats posed by millions of poorly configured Internet Domain Name System servers.
Computerworld News
The standard crop of 3D printers are all well and good, but what about those times when you need to print something really, really big? Gigabot’s hoping to fill in that gaping void with a build envelope of 24 x 24 x 24 inches — 30 times the volume of a standard consumer device, by its calculations. The device is a beast, naturally — and metal one, at that. It’s so big, in fact, that it can support a full-sized laptop sitting atop an attached arm.
The project is the brainchild of re:3D, an Austin-based startup, which has turned to Kickstarter to help bring the Gigabot into the world — and from the looks of it, the company should hit its $ 40,000 goal, no problem. You can pick one of these up for a $ 2,500 pledge, which gets you everything thing you need to build one at home. Video of the printer in action after the break.
Gallery: Gigabot 3D printer hands-on
Filed under: Peripherals
Source: Kickstarter
Securing critical infrastructure needs to go far beyond the measures in President Obama’s recent executive order.
Yesterday, the president’s cybersecurity coördinator, Michael Daniel, appeared in San Francisco at the world’s largest security conference, RSA, to explain how the president’s cybersecurity executive order—intended to help U.S. critical infrastructure to withstand computer attacks—will operate. The order, announced by President Obama earlier this month, will create voluntary security standards for power utilities and other infrastructure companies and allow them to receive classified government information about security threats.
jones_supa writes “Unigine announced a new GPU benchmark known as Valley Benchmark. From the same developers who created Heaven Benchmark, the Valley Benchmark is a non-synthetic benchmark that is powered by the Unigine Engine, a real-time 3D engine that supports the latest rendering features. The Valley Benchmark includes massive area of 64 square kilometers of very detailed terrain that includes forest, mountains, green expanses, rocky slopes and flowers. The area can be freely explored by means of walking or flying. All major operating systems are supported.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nerval’s Lobster writes “Back in April 2010, the Library of Congress agreed to archive four years’ worth of public Tweets. Even by the standards of the nation’s most famous research library, the goal was an ambitious one. The librarians needed to build a sustainable system for receiving and preserving an enormous number of Tweets, then organize that dataset by date. At the time, Twitter also agreed to provide future public Tweets to the Library under the same terms, meaning any system would need the ability to scale up to epic size. The resulting archive is around 300 TB in size. But there’s still a huge challenge: the Library needs to make that huge dataset accessible to researchers in a way they can actually use. Right now, even a single query of the 2006-2010 archive takes as many as 24 hours to execute, which limits researchers’ ability to do work in a timely way.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader writes “A huge security hole has been discovered in recent Samsung devices including phones like the Galaxy S2 and S3. It is possible for every user to obtain root due to a custom faulty memory device created by Samsung.” The problem affects phones with the Exynos System-on-Chip.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
History has shown us again and again that great things can be born out of very trying times. It happened in the 19th century, after the Great Fire of Chicago destroyed huge swaths of the city in October 1871 — a hugely destructive event which had the silver lining of prompting a massive new age of innovation and rebuilding in the city.
TechCrunch
Facebook was already taking in 300 million photos a day, and that rate is about to dramatically increase. It’s now ushering users onto its background uploads feature Photo Sync with a big banner at the top of its mobile apps’ news feed. Just two taps and your last 20 photos plus every one you take in the future are auto-uploaded to a private album from which you can share and Facebook can mine metadata.
TechCrunch
With Black Friday just a week away and the nagging feeling that we need to get our holiday shopping done, how much online buying will be done at work?
Computerworld News
another random user writes with news of a vulnerability in the Skype password reset tool “All you need to do is register a new account using that email address, and even though that address is already used (and the registration process does tell you this) you can still complete the new account process and then sign in using that account Info (original post in Russian)” concealment adds a link to another article with an update that Skype disabled the password reset page as a temporary fix.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft is sounding very bullish about the Sisyphean challenge facing it in the smartphone space: to transform Windows Phone from an also-ran into a serious, top-three smartphone contender — pointing to lessons learned from the Xbox launch on how to be an underdog and still end up as market leader. It also reckons it has “a huge catalyst” for selling Windows Phones — in the form of Windows 8.
TechCrunch
Western Digital today announced it will begin shipping new lines of 3.5-in hard disk drives that are hermetically sealed with helium gas inside. The result: Cooler, higher capacity drives that use less power.
Computerworld News
New submitter disconj writes “Over at Wired, Ethan Gilsdorf interviews Jon Peterson, author of the new book Playing at the World. Gilsdorf calls it ‘a must read,’ though he cautions it ‘is not intended for a general audience. It’s a book for geeks, about geeks.’ It is apparently an insanely-detailed history of role-playing games and wargames, including everything from Prussian kriegsspiel up to Dungeons & Dragons and the beginning of computer RPGs (but none of that heathen stuff after 1980). Peterson says in the interview that he wanted to write a history of these games ‘worthy of the future they are creating.’ He apparently spent five years on the project, including unearthing a huge trove of previously-unknown historical documents.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First time accepted submitter ZombieBraintrust writes “Pumice, the lightweight stone used to smooth skin, is usually found in beauty salons, but on Thursday sailors from New Zealand’s Royal Navy found nearly 10,000 square miles of the lava rock bobbing on the surface of the South Pacific Ocean.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This week exclusively for CNET Members, our friends at Matrix Audio are offering their ONE Universal Bluetooth Pocket Friendly speaker for only $ 40 with free shipping! At 50 percent off, it’s time you took the dive into cord-free listening.
[Read more]
CNET News
gbrumfiel writes “Billionaire Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner has spontaneously awarded $ 3 million prizes to nine prominent theoretical physicists. The new Fundamental Physics Prize dwarfs awards like the Nobel, which this year is estimated to be worth some $ 1.2 million (and that’s before it’s split by up to three winners). It’s so much money that some theorists fear it could distort the field. Milner says that his only purpose for the new prize was to promote the field, which he studied in the 1980s: ‘The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,’ he told Nature.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The NY Times reports that Apple has internally discussed an investment into Twitter to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. From the article:
“There is no guarantee that the two companies, which are not in negotiations at the moment, will come to an agreement. But the earlier talks are a sign that they may form a stronger partnership amid intensifying competition from the likes of Google and Facebook. Apple has not made many friends in social media. Its relationship with Facebook, for example, has been strained since a deal to build Facebook features into Ping, Apple’s music-centric social network, fell apart. Facebook is also aligned with Microsoft, which owns a small stake in it. And Google, an Apple rival in the phone market, has been pushing its own social network, Google Plus. ‘Apple doesn’t have to own a social network,’ Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at a recent technology conference. ‘But does Apple need to be social? Yes.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rocket Internet, the secretive incubator vehicle and some-time clone factory piloted by the billionaire Samwer Brothers out of Berlin, is all of a sudden becoming more open about its activities. Local blog Deutsche Startups has noticed that instead of a pretty dull home page, Rocket’s site has now been spruced up immensely.
Rocket is famously coy about its activities in order not to alert rivals to their next cloning project, which makes sense when you are ripping off Amazon’s design or cloning Square.
TechCrunch
T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless have inked an AWS spectrum purchase and exchange deal in multiple US markets, with the GSM carrier aiming to repurpose the airwaves for its 4G development. The agreement, which has been submitted to the FCC for approval, covers spectrum in 218 US markets – covering 60m people – and would
It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling it an “app formulary” that complements (and competes) with a traditional drug formulary (i.e., the list of approved drugs a clinician can prescribe).
TechCrunch
Have you ever wished that you could move things with the power of your mind? Yeah, that isn’t just a thing for science fiction writers anymore. An emerging technology company called BrainGate has revealed a robotic arm that can actually be controlled by brain waves. It requires the use of a sensor that contains 96
gambit3 writes with this news, carried by the BBC: “Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Contrary to reports by several security companies, the Flashback botnet is not shrinking, the Russian antivirus firm that first reported the massive infection three weeks ago claimed today.
Computerworld News
German court rules that YouTube is solely responsible for the content users upload and post, a decision that could have massive implications for the Google-owned video-sharing giant.
[Read more]
CNET News
Currently, the federal government is poised to level the playing field for healthtech startups. An unprecedented wave of innovative healthtech startups has been developing over the last few years. You can see them at conferences such as Health 2.0, TechCrunch Disrupt, TEDMED and demo day events that Blueprint Health, Healthbox, Rock Health and Startup Health host. Nonetheless, the health sector may be the single most challenging arena for startups.
Nothing would result in population health improvement (and decrease healthcare costs) more than having greater involvement/engagement by individuals in the healthcare process. The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), which is part of Health & Human Services could catalyze an unprecedented wave of innovation with a stroke of a pen by strong inclusion of patient engagement requirements in the Meaningful Use requirements.
TechCrunch
It’s a sin I know almost too well as a blogger. It’s slow going for news on a Friday night and the pageview gods send you a reprieve in the form of a tweet.
A former Apple engineer is berating the company’s design ethic in the post-Jobs era in less than 140 characters?
Score! Suddenly one story becomes another story then another story then another story then another story.
Until it’s a crisis! ZOMG! Apple is over! The company is finished!
Interested in the actual story, I talked with former Apple TV engineer Mike Margolis about the tweet that launched a thousand blog posts.
TechCrunch
If you’re one of those worried about the battery on your expensive EV running out, look away now. Envia has unveiled a new cell that boasts a record-breaking energy density of 400Wh/kg (most currently offer between 100 and 150). It’s estimated that when commercialized, this could bring the cost of a 300-mile range EV down to as little as $ 20,000. The performance gains come from a special manganese-rich cathode and silicon-carbon nano-composite anode combination. The battery maker is also partly owned by GM, which unsurprisingly means we’re likely to see these very cells in its EVs in the future. Perhaps with the right choice of upholstery, we might see even better savings? Want to know more? Tap the fully charged press release parked just after the break.
Envia’s GM-backed battery delivers huge energy density, lower costs, headaches for competitors originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Engadget
A massive Oracle ERP project being conducted by the U.S. Air Force is still experiencing difficulties, with the Air Force deciding to toss out some completed work as part of a restructuring plan that will be announced soon.
Computerworld News
New submitter turkeyfish writes “UK scientists are reporting today in the journal Nature Geoscience that a huge bulge of freshwater is forming in the Western Arctic Ocean caused by a large gyre of freshwater. The gyre appears to indicate that the ice is becoming thin enough over the Arctic Ocean that the wind is beginning to affect the motion of water under the ice. A sudden release of this water or its emergence to the surface will greatly accelerate the melting of the remaining polar oceanic ice and likely alter oceanic circulation in the North Atlantic.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We often forget about ZTE here in the states since the company does most of its operations outside of our home turf. Still, we shouldn’t forget that the company ranks fourth in the world in terms of handset makers, largely due to its focus on budget handsets.
The first half of last year brought about a loss of three percentage points in terms of profit, and ZTE is now ready to come back guns blazing. And where else is better to stage an attack than in two of the most mobile hungry countries on the planet: China and the United States.
TechCrunch
Sky has trialled its own cable installations, the company has confirmed, experimenting with the possibility of bypassing BT in the UK and operating its own broadband network over which it would have full control. Another possibility – though only rumored at this stage – is using a huge expansion of The Cloud, a UK WiFi [...]
SlashGear
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